Promotion

2048 September 15 13:00 UT
Test Year 20, Day 319, 6:00 CST/14:00 MST
Tau

Will administered loyalty oaths for a total of a hundred and ninety-five cadets. The swearing-in respected all the rules of the US military circa 2034, with the exception that the cadets were out of uniform. Athena handled the logistics of identity authentication, its semi-intelligent subroutines functioning smoothly despite only having a hundred terabytes of memory.

Delbert had been assigned the rank of Major, US Army. The rest of his people were assembled into lower ranks. Their legal status did not significantly change their duties: after all, their orders were pretty much to work with the Techer government as before. But Delbert and the surviving cadets had been serving as cadets for longer than most soldiers’ entire careers. They deserved this. Of course, now the Techers were accepting military aid from the United States. But this merely made for some bad political jokes.

Far more important were the benefits of the twenty months of messages the Gamble had sent before it passed out of the beam of the Screamer dish four years before. The last of that material had arrived 231 days ago, but the full content was only now being appreciated. As they got a better measure of the equipment Will would be likely to have, the Watchers had increased the bandwidth of the signal, and most of the information had come close to the end. 2034 news and technology saturated Tau with ideas of what had become ‘the old country’. As fashion resurged, new games and cultural trends were tried and then abandoned for the next bit of information from the Group, Will no longer worried about some of the children – young adults, really – being hostile to strangers.