Glancing around at the assembled Expendables, as they insisted on calling themselves, Lyn noticed that Ham was picking at his teeth with the pin from a fragmentation grenade.

’I’m not even going to ask where he left the grenade.’ she thought.

Rising up from her chair at the head of the briefing table, she smoothed her blouse and began, “I want you all to know how happy we are with your training. You particularly Ham. Learning to spell ‘f r i e n d’ in only two weeks was very impressive, though learning not to shoot your new friends was even more so.”

“Now it’s time for us to part ways. You leave on the Scout tonight. It will take two jumps and a week of insystem travel to reach the target. Use those weeks for more training. I just want to say I’ll miss you. But I can’t lie that well, so let’s leave it at ‘dismissed’.”

Harpoon sits in the back most row of the cheap metal fold out chairs and at the end of Lyns speech leans over to Vera very slowly and wispers.

“Eye had seex weeth her.”

“Shut-up you pig.” Is Vera’s disgusted reply as Harpoon chuckles to himself.