"Yes, ma'am. Loud and clear." Especially since the burgermeister had told me not to trust the Kristang-supplied comm gear.

She put the tablet on a table, plugged in the microphone, and looked around our little command post. It was a damned good thing we'd straightened up and cleaned the place, cleaned like scrubbed from top to bottom, not just swept dirt under the furniture. We had even moved the furniture around and used a floor cleaner polisher thing the hamsters had left in a closet. The floor polisher worked great after we played around with it for an hour, as the hamsters hadn't let any helpful instructions. Major Perkins nodded approval. "You like it here, sergeant? It's kind of isolated, these embedded observation teams."

"I do like it, ma'am. I'm a new sergeant, so being way out here means I get to make mistakes without a butterbar looking over my shoulder." As I spoke, it occurred to me that Major Perkins had been a butterbar once herself. "Uh, I wasn't-"

"Relax, sergeant." She laughed. "When I was a butterbar second lieutenant, I was perhaps the single dumbest officer in the history of the United States Army, and that's saying a lot. Course, back then I didn't know it. This place may be Bum Fuck Neptune, but enjoy it while you can, a lot of fireteam leaders would love to have this opportunity to get out on their own. And if the intel you're providing is as solid as UNEF thinks it might be, you're doing damned good. Let's get started," she pulled up a voice recording app on her tablet.

Major Perkins came back two days later, but the burgermeister didn't, so we sat cooling our heels most of the day, until a hamster kid riding an electric bicycle came looking for me, to deliver a message that the burgermeister was busy, and would like to meet me the next day. Me, and only me. Major Perkins was not happy, but she took the hint, and gave me a list of questions that I had to memorize.

That began my short career as an intelligence officer. The list of questions from UNEF didn't do any good; the burgermeister apparently had a plan of what she wanted to talk about each time we met, and she was sticking to her plan. I would meet with her twice a week, and Major Perkins, sometimes accompanied by a captain from division HQ, arrived the next day to debrief me. I felt like a kid passing notes in high school, but what could I do?

During our fourth meeting, after we got the whole tea ceremony out of the way, I posed a question to he burgermeister. ”Why me?" I demanded. "Why aren't you talking to an intelligence officer in one of our militaries? If you don't want to talk to an American, you can talk to the British, the French, the Indians or the Chinese."