Weapons of choice

"Ensign, calm down," said Halabi. "You're babbling. I imagine there's plenty that folks won't believe about what's happened to you the last few weeks. But it has, and you'll always have that. Admiral Spruance told me you were the first man on the Enterprise to have any idea of what was happening. That makes you just about one of the most interesting people in the world right now. Imagine that."

"I can't," he confessed.

"It's pre-Warhol syndrome," said Natoli. "Nobody here realizes they have a constitutional right to fifteen minutes of fame and their own cable talk show."

"It's kind of sweet, don't you think?" said Julia.

"Heads up, the boys are here."

Dan Black and Ray Spruance appeared at the same time. "Ms. Duffy," said the admiral, "Commander Black here has been telling me all about your adventures after the riot. I'm glad you're giving him back to me in one piece."

"I'm not quite finished with him, Admiral," she teased. "I might just break him yet."

"Well, please don't kick him around like you did that fellow in town. I need him to run a few errands for me. And you, Curtis, how are you finding the Clinton?"

"It's amazing, sir! They let me sit in a Raptor today. And Ms. Natoli has been teaching me to use the computer net. It's got everything on it."

"Would you like to know who played you in the movie of Midway, Admiral?" asked Rosanna. "I bet we could get that off the net."

"I'd hope it was Errol Flynn," quipped Spruance.

"Sorry," said Rosanna. "But it could have been Clint Eastwood."

"No way," said Julia. "Harrison Ford."

"That's the remake of Tora Tora Tora," Halabi said, correcting them both.

"I thought Pearl Harbor was the remake of that," said Rosanna.

"Pearl Harbor was full of Ben Affleck making kissy face," said Julia. "There's no kissy face in Tora Tora Tora, just lots of ass-whupping."

"Pearl Harbor was a cautionary tale about the impossibility of making a chick flick that guys would go see," said Rosanna.

"But Pearl Harbor Two was all right," said Julia. "It had that great butt shot of Dylan McDermott."

"Highlight of the sorriest damn movie ever made," said Rosanna.

As they reached their table, Spruance made to pull out a chair for Rosanna but found his arm stayed by a light touch from Dan Black. The junior officer shook his head sadly as if to say don't bother, and sure enough, the young woman simply plucked the seat out by herself and plopped down on it without any ceremony, never once interrupting a lively monologue on the best comparative butt shot from her favorite Oscar nominees.

"I'm beginning to regret broaching this topic," Ray Spruance confessed to Black.

"Don't worry, sir, the night's still young. There'll be plenty of other things to regret."

After that, the table quickly divided in two. Spruance talked business with Halabi and Black for the first hour, while the reporters engaged in a champagne-fueled quest to tease out of Ensign Curtis the meager and possibly nonexistent details of his dating history.

Spruance was struck by the contrast between the two civilian women, who were obviously intelligent but seemed wantonly dizzy, and Captain Halabi, who was unnaturally grave. She wouldn't allow herself to be drawn into polite chitchat until she had worked through the riot, the ongoing murder investigation, and arrangements for moving more casualties off the Clinton and Kandahar and into shore-based facilities.

The reporters, who promised not to divulge anything they heard at the table, hung on Halabi's every word while she hammered him about applying more pressure to the local police, but otherwise they seemed content to tease poor Ensign Curtis.

Spruance wasn't so naive as to think them rude. He assumed they weren't behaving out of the ordinary at all, and he was fascinated by their lack of… what? Refinement? They both seemed well traveled and sophisticated. Manners? Both obviously knew how to deal with a silver service place setting and had a relaxed way of relating to the dining room staff that he associated with the idle rich. Was it their lack of gravity, perhaps?

At one point he listened while the two women discussed another outrage yet to pass, some sort of germ bomb attack on LA, which he gathered they'd both covered as journalists. They seemed inured to the horrors they described, as though it was all passe.

Spruance stirred his coffee. What sort of a world have they come from? he wondered.

"You look pensive, Admiral."

It was the British officer. She'd caught him gathering wool.

"I'm sorry, Captain. I was just wondering about your world. About how different it is from ours."

Halabi leaned back to give the question its due.

"I guess you look at us," she said, "you look at me and people like Julia and Rosanna and Colonel Jones, and you can see some hard changes coming. All I can do is remind you that change was ordained, whether we came or not."