I was impressed. Almost exactly the same procedure as when you go to Ordnance for a replacement set of stern exhaust tubes.

She looked up and favored us with a lovely smile. “Your crews will be ready in a moment. Would you have a seat, gentlemen?”

We had a seat gentlemen.

After a while, she got up to take something out of a file cabinet set in the wall. As she came back to her desk, I noticed she was pregnant—only about the third or fourth month—and, naturally, I gave a little, satisfied nod. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the kid make the same kind of nod. We looked at each other and chuckled. “It’s a rough, rough war,” he said.

“Where are you from anyway?” I asked. “That doesn’t sound like a Third District accent to me.”

“It isn’t. I was born in Scandinavia—Eleventh Military District. My home town is Goteborg, Sweden. But after I got my—my promotion, naturally I didn’t care to see the folks any more. So I requested a transfer to the Third, and from now on, until I hit a scrambler, this is where I’ll be spending my furloughs and Earth-side hospitalizations.”

I’d heard that a lot of the younger sling-shotters felt that way. Personally, I never had a chance to find out how I’d feel about visiting the old folks at home. My father was knocked off in the suicidal attempt to retake Neptune way back when I was still in high school learning elementary combat, and my mother was Admiral Raguzzi’s staff secretary when the flagship Thermopylae took a direct hit two years later in the famous defense of Ganymede. That was before the Breeding Regulations, of course, and women were still serving in administrative positions on the fighting perimeters.