"Never thought I'd be piloting a dirigible, of all things," she muttered to herself, feeling a rush of excitement. It would be her first command in the Guard, period, unless you counted a harbor tug. If I get it, she thought. That hadn't been decided yet.
The younger man-his name was Alex Stoddard, a fourth cousin once removed of the Chief's wife-looked up from examining the blueprints.
"If you don't mind me asking, Lieutenant Cofflin, what did you think you'd be piloting?" he said.
"F-16s," she said. "I was going to go to Colorado Springs, the year the Event happened." At his blank look, she went on: "The Air Force Academy, in Colorado. Up in the twentieth."
"Oh," he nodded, polite but somehow… not indifferent. Just as if I was talking about flying to the moon. Real, but not really real.
It was amazing what an effect it had-exactly how old you'd been at the Event. Even a couple of years, and the outlook was entirely different.
I was on the cusp, she thought. Eighteen. Not quite an adult but not a kid either. Alex had been sixteen on that memorable day; not a little kid, she judged, but unambiguously a kid. He had grown up in a world where steam engines were high tech, and schooners and flintlocks everyday realities. He probably didn't get that occasional feeling of alienation, as if a glass wall had dropped between him and the world.
Vicki ran a hand over her close-cropped reddish-brown hair and turned her attention back to the drawings. The frame of the airship was made up of two long strips that curled from bow to stern, crisscrossing each other in an endless series of elongated diamonds like a stretched-out geodesic dome. Inside that framework was a series of strengthening rings, each braced with spokes reaching in to a central metal hub.