The colonel spoke up. “I have been watching you, you know.” They all turned to Barrett. “Not overtly, I’ve never run a search on your name, or anything obvious like that, but I had my office start to monitor your ship, under the very reasonable auspices of it being one of the new Type 47 Destroyers which we are also looking to develop here in the US as well. I must say your name does seem to come up a lot in the ship’s bulletins, Lieutenant First Class Hunt.”

Barrett emphasized the new title John had acquired in his short but storied time on the ship, and carried on, “But that is not the point of my speaking up. If my information is correct, the HMS Dauntless is currently docked in Hawaii, so I have to ask: how the hell did you get here?”

John nodded, “The Cessna is a surprisingly capable little plane, but no, it would not get me from Hawaii me to the mainland, let alone all the way here. No, Colonel, I was selected by my captain to attend a seminar in San Diego at your Naval Academy there. I then convinced my fellow Agents during one of our Councils that I needed to have a … liaison with a female to stop some rumors that have been spreading that I am either celibate or gay. And rumors of the like have indeed begun to spread aboard the Dauntless.”

Some of the group flinched a little at the mental image of this, well, machine, sleeping with some unsuspecting lady. Ayala was not among the more squeamish in the group. It would be hard for a covert agent to describe the offhanded way with which one approaches such things as sex after a long time in the field. Because of this, Ayala was notably not one of the people in the group who had a problem with the fact the alien Agents were apparently fully functional in that department. In fact, it spoke of an alarming level of preparedness on their part.

Moving past any such conjecture on the part of his audience, John continued, “At this moment, there is a female officer who was also attending the conference in San Diego unconscious in the hotel room the navy provided me. When I return, I will report the same thing to my fellow Agents that I will tell my fellow officers aboard the HMS Dauntless: that I spent the weekend locked in my room with her, in flagrante, as it were.”