Chapter 15: The age of a cadet
Kara Thrace, Caroline LaRoche, Tiana Mong and Indira Mekhi - the female pilots of the squadron - started to shuck their suit jackets. "How do you open that thing?" Kara asked her curiously. "It's got no zippers."
Tamsin grinned. She touched a spot on the left shoulder and a seam appeared down the back. "I do that." "You don't wear anything underneath?" Tiana asked.
"Why should I?" She asked. "It only gets in the way." She didn't seem in the least bit shy. Kara swapped glances with the other pilots.
Reece opened an invisible seam in her black bag and pulled out underwear and a shirt. The shirt was a long-sleeved light brown affair with a black square printed on each shoulder and a patch on each arm of a red cross on a white background. Her trousers were black, neatly cut and had socks as part of the garment instead of separately. Her boots were tight-laced and also black. "Black's a big colour for you, huh?" LaRoche asked.
"There's several colours in the Fleet," she said. "Black's one of the most common. Among other things, it's the colour of the day-to-day wear of the medical service. My dress uniform, which is white, is gathering dust in my gear locker and is about as comfortable as a threshing machine." She fished out a jacket that was black with silver square shoulder pins and a different patch on the arms - two green snakes wrapped around a brown staff on a grey background.
"You're not a diplomat," Kara said dangerously.
"It's a small colony with a minor military presence. Less than one officer in two hundred is trained in diplomacy these days and almost all of them end up in politics. We only had four officers who'd taken the courses at the Academy and I'm the only one who's actually capable of being diplomatic."
"So you're a doctor?" Indira asked. "What kind?"
"Combat surgeon." She took the holster off the suit and slapped it onto her belt - literally. It stuck without any visible attachment. "This was supposed to be a nice quiet assignment."
"Aren't you a bit young for that?" Tiana asked suspiciously. She was forty-five and had been taken off the flight line due to advancing age until Commander Adama had called for extra pilots. "No, but thanks for the compliment." She somehow turned her rigid helmet into something that folded down to the size of her hand and packed it all away. Elapsed time, sixty seconds. "I better get moving."
The four pilots stared after her. None of them had even gotten their flight boots off.
"I want one of those suits," Indira remarked.
"She looks too young to be a doctor," Tiana said. "She's half my age, if that."
"Doctors don't usually train as cadets, do they?" Caroline said. "I mean, she said she went through officer's training."
"Add that to medical school - she'd have to be at least thirty, wouldn't she?" Indira said.
Kara just frowned and kept changing. "I still want to know how they broke our frequencies."
Author's note: More chapters coming very soon, I promise