As she said, this she remembered, with a well-hidden smile, the name of the incident, and hoped her analysis of the reading habits of the room they were about to enter was accurate. The colonel contemplated the number of far worse things he had baked into official reports as a lieutenant to spite his fellow junior officers and calmed himself. After a moment’s pause, he released his grasp on the door handle so the doctor could enter the conference room, his sheen of professionalism and authority rising over his anger, like rising water snuffing a flame.

Neal followed Laurie into the room, apologizing silently to the once again unflappable colonel as he passed. The room contained a long table with about five chairs along each side, and one at the end nearest the door. An extremely large flat screen was at the other end with a camera mounted above it, and flat, omni-directional microphones were arranged intermittently along the table’s length.

An air force technician sat about midway down the table at a small touch screen console, setting up the link with the meeting’s other participants at the Pentagon. The screen itself simply said “WAITING FOR PARTICIPANTS” with the kind of infinite, machine patience that sentience simply won’t allow.

Standing to one side was the colonel’s aide, who had left the control room ahead of them to make sure the conference room was set up. As Laurie took a seat, the screen came to life and a gathering meeting showed on the other end. It was full of highly decorated senior officers and a couple of more expensively dressed, if less well-decorated civilians who were busy sitting their suited selves down, arranging their papers while they arranged their thoughts.

“The link is muted,” prompted the technician as he went to leave, “the sound control is here,” he said, pointing at a small button and volume control next to the microphone in front of the colonel.

The colonel looked at the button and nodded, but did not look up from his seat at the head of the table as the technician left. The colonel’s aide went to the door and confirmed it was securely closed, per procedure, and then took one of several seats arranged around the outside of the room, leaving eight empty chairs at the large, immaculately polished conference table itself. Neal watched her sit on the outside, and was unsure whether he was happy to be at the grown-ups table, or annoyed at the triumph of hierarchy over practicality. Then he thanked the gods that he wasn’t in the military himself, and took the seat opposite Laurie, with the colonel between them at the table’s head.