Milla began to shuffle along as Brinks continued his explanation and impromptu tutorial.

“The suit is adaptive. It’ll learn to anticipate how much strength you actually need, but until it maps your habits, you’d better just scuff your feet. Okay?”

“O…okay,” she replied.

Slowly, Milla progressed from shuffling movements to actual steps. She knew that the suit would undoubtedly prove useful, but it would be difficult to master. Watching the similarly suited men over by the shuttle, she marveled at the apparent ease of their motions.

Roberts walked over from checking the shuttle. “How is she handling the suit, Major?”

“Better than I did when I first tried one.” Brinks chuckled, patting Milla’s armor on the shoulder. “When I first wore one, I decided to see how good the system actually worked. Put my head through a two-inch scaffold and woke up in a hospital room with a concussion and a Purple Heart.”

Milla was confused how he had injured his heart—and why it would be purple—but she nodded and continued to walk painfully across the shuttle bay. The suit’s nano-fibers, combined with the lack of gravity in the large room, forced Brinks to follow closely behind her and occasionally pull her back down so the magnetic clamps on her boots could reconnect to the floor.

“Let’s get onto the shuttle. The rest of my team is packing the last of the gear now. Once that’s done, we’ll be heading out,” Brinks said, trying to get his charge safely strapped in where a null-grav leap wouldn’t wind up breaking her neck.

“Okay, I’ll be glad to sit still for a while,” Milla replied, relieved at the prospect of a chance to sit still and try to assimilate the new skills that she had to master.

Strapped into a tight-fitting bolster seat, Milla looked around the shuttle at the other occupants. She studied the men as they strapped themselves down into their own bolsters, cinching the four-inch-wide straps so tightly that they couldn’t move in any direction.

Their uniforms, she noted, varied slightly from the one that Brinks had given her. The main difference was a crumpled bundle of green cloth strapped to some of their shoulders, black cloth on others, and some with no cloth at all. Milla couldn’t fathom what purpose the bundles might serve and was baffled why some of them didn’t have any cloth at all, to say nothing of the color differences.

The first vibrations of the shuttle’s movement shook her from her observations. For a moment, she didn’t understand the casual demeanor of the flight crew. They weren’t even looking at their controls. Then she realized that the shuttle was dropping out of the shuttle bay through some massive airlock. It wasn’t until the big elevator shuddered to a halt that the flight crew turned their attention to the job at hand.

“Shuttle One to Odyssey Command, requesting clearance on deck two,” the pilot, Milla assumed, said as she flipped a bank of switches over and illuminated the projected HUD display.