Book 5: Chapter 50: The Big Guy
Howard
June 2344
Jabberwocky
Bridget managed to get herself ensconced in the Research Division, which was a not-completely-incorrect translation of the dragon name for the table-and-scroll group. She wasn’t one of the senior scribes, thank the universe. That apparently always involved de-feathering, and neither one of us was willing to stand still for that. But Bridget had displayed just enough reading skill to make the librarians think she’d be useful as an assistant and gofer. Maybe the scribes wrote down their latte orders or something.
In any case, she was taking every opportunity to ask questions and pick up more of the written vocabulary. And fetching food and tuev.
And speaking of tuev, Ursula seemed to have the kind of sense of humor that people sometimes killed you for, because she apparently thought it would be just a rip-snorting rib-splittingly funny thing to transfer me to Supply and Logistics, where I was assigned to—wait for it—brewing and providing tuev to the army. Yeah, funny girl.
It was only a cover story, of course, so I didn’t really mind, but the thought of her chortling around the campfire about how she’d pulled one over on the noob made my teeth grind. I resolved that if I could ever get her assigned to keel control, it would be a good day.
But meanwhile, Bridget had gotten a whole lot more info on Alexander, although much of it was contradictory. We were sitting in our apartment in Trantor during a dragon sleep period, and she was updating me.
“The unofficial word is that Alexander is from the western continent—”