This wasn’t going exactly the way I’d pictured it.
“Sir?”
He looked up.
“I was wondering . . . well, I thought, maybe we would get some kind of . . . I mean, well, we blew up the Malefic, and . . .”
I trailed off. Definitely not going the way I’d pictured it.
He sighed. It was a long sigh, weary and worldly-wise. The kind of sigh you could picture God heaving after six days of hard work and looking forward to some serious cosmic R&R, only to be handed a report by an angel concerning a problem with someone eating an apple.
Then he called, “Send the rest of them in.”
Everyone walked into his office, shuffling around to make room.
He looked us over. I found myself very aware that he was sitting down, while we were standing. It felt the other way around. It felt like he was looming over us.
Josef, Jo and Jakon all looked pleased with themselves. J/O had a grin spread like peanut butter over his face. The only one who didn’t look absolutely thrilled was Jai.
“Well,” said the Old Man. “Joey seems to be of the opinion that you six ought to get some kind of medal, or at least some kind of formal recognition for the stellar work that you did. Does anyone here share his opinion?”
“Yes, sir,” said J/O. “Did he tell you how I beat Scarabus in the sword fight? We rocked.”
The others murmured agreement or just nodded.
The Old Man nodded. Then he looked at Jai. “Well?” he said.
“I think we did accomplish a remarkable thing, sir.”
The Old Man’s eye glittered.
“Oh you do, do you?” he asked.
Then he took a deep breath, and he began.
He told us what he thought of a team who couldn’t even accomplish a simple training mission without a disaster. He told us that everything we had accomplished had been due to plain dumb luck. That we’d broken every rule in the book and a few they had never thought to put into any book of rules or book of just plain common sense. He said that if there were any justice in any of the myriad worlds we would all have been rendered down and put in bottles. That we had been overconfident, foolish, ignorant. That we’d taken idiot chances. He said that we should never have gotten into the trouble we’d gotten into. That, having gotten into it, we should have come home immediately. . . .
It went on like that for a while.
He didn’t raise his voice during any of this. He didn’t have to.
I’d walked in twenty feet high, and by the time he had finished I felt mouse height. A crippled, stoop-shouldered mouse. The runt of the litter.
When he finished, the silence was thick enough to fill an ocean, with enough left over for a few great lakes and an inland sea. He looked from one of us to the next in silence. We concentrated very hard on not looking at him—or one another.
And then he said, “Still, as teams go, I think you six may have potential. Well done. Dismissed.”
And we shuffled out of there, not meeting one another’s eyes.
We stood in the parade ground, all in a clump. The sun was halfway up the sky, and a chilly wind blew across Base Town. The perpetually floating city was drifting over a dense forest that looked like it went on for leagues and probably did. We passed by a clearing, and a creature resembling an overgrown rhinoceros with two side-by-side horns looked up at us.
I think we were in shock.
Hue was twisting slowly in the air about thirty feet up. When he noticed us, he drifted down until he was floating a foot above my right shoulder.
Someone had to say something, but no one wanted to be the first.
Finally, Josef shook his head. “What happened in there?” he asked.