Temporary Duty

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“Thar ’tis, I reckon,” John Peters said, his West Virginia accent thicker and further back in the woods than normal. A point of light, brighter than the sliver of waning moon, moved slowly across the sky. It was big enough for a person of normal eyesight to see that it was an object longer than it was wide.

Kevin Todd followed Peters’s gaze. “I still can’t quite believe it,” he breathed. “TDY to outer space. Peters, you’ve got a gift for timing.”

The spaceship—a real alien spaceship with real live aliens aboard, right out of the vids—had appeared in the sky last February, and a delegation from it had dropped in on USS Barack H. Obama, Jr. on station in the eastern Med. Barry-O had been at flight ops at the time, and according to scuttlebutt a fine, exciting, and memorable time had been had by all. The net had been full of it—first contact with nonhuman intelligence, opportunity for the human race, all of that—but lately the coverage had tapered off, talking heads mentioning briefly that negotiations weren’t going well, in mournful tones between the disaster clips.

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