Then it was time for my own debriefing, down the hallway, escorted by Sergeant Kendall. It was in a smaller room, without fancy chairs, and the Army, Air Force and Navy officers and CIA people there were no nonsense. The CIA guy kept glaring at me, he was still pissed about what Skippy said at breakfast. At least the coffee was fresh and hot. Whenever I took a sip of coffee, I looked the CIA guy straight in the eye. If looks could kill, I'd be dead. Fortunately, one of us had destroyed an entire Kristang battlegroup, and guess what? It wasn't him.

It started with me telling the basics of my story, from the day we departed Camp Alpha. Then they grilled me intensely for details, and not just about Skippy. I told them mind-blowing intel about the Kristang, wormholes, the Elders; everything I'd learned from the burgermeister. Then, they wanted to know the situation on Paradise, disposition of our forces across the planet, status of Ruhar, Kristang and Thuranin forces. All of which I knew little about, unfortunately. That didn't stop them from asking me the same questions over and over, until I felt like there were grill marks on my backside. It left me feeling that I was letting them down as a military officer, I should have done more to gather intel. How I could have done that, as a prisoner first of the Kristang, and then the Ruhar, and then sneaking around trying to avoid everyone, I didn't know. What I did know was what the Army expected of a colonel, and I wasn't meeting those standards.

Except for, you know, the saving the world thing.

I was going with that one.

During a bathroom break, I was washing my hands next to one of the Army intel officers, a Colonel Landry, who had treated me decently so far. I looked at him in the mirror and asked "Sir, I told you we got the fortune cookies, we heard what the Kristang were doing to our farmland and the Great Lakes, but I didn't hear much detail at my level. Why is the Federal government here in Colorado Springs?"