She’d had the most difficulty deciding who was going to command the team. All three of the company’s sergeants had wanted to do it, but none of them could just disappear from the base without being missed fairly quickly. Finally, Rembrandt took the bit in her teeth. “The major isn’t any part of this mission, and the captain’s not himself right now,” she told them. “I’m next in rank, so it’s my job to make the decisions.”
That was before Sushi had stormed into her office, demanding to be put on the team. Her original instinct had been to leave him off the team, despite the fact that it was his idea to send the expedition out to begin with.
“Look, I can’t bring you along,” she told him. “You’re a city boy. You’d slow us down way too much in the kind of country we’ll be traveling in. Besides, we need you to monitor the alien signals so you can tell us about any changes in them. That means you have to stay behind and stay in touch via communicator.”
Sushi wasn’t budging. “Have you forgotten that the communicator’s on the fritz?” he pointed out. “We can’t pick up signals from more than a couple of miles beyond the perimeter, let alone where we’re going to be. Now that I’ve figured out what frequency the aliens are using, I can monitor it with a handheld unit, which is what I’ve been working on the last couple of days. I’ve got it down to three kilos in weight, and it’s no bigger than a shoebox.”
After he showed her the new unit, Rembrandt was convinced, and she added him to the team. But this meant she’d have to cut somebody else to keep the team to a manageable size. That was going to be tricky; all the members had useful skills, although only Qual seemed really indispensable. Cutting either Garbo or Brick probably meant she’d have to drop the other, and she couldn’t afford to lose both. So that left Mahatma and Double-X as the possible choices.