02/16/21 Snippet, GHOSTS ON AN ALIEN WIND.

Snippet out of order.

We only got grounded once, which was actually pretty good for somebody going through emergency qual training. He didn’t quite see it that way, though. “I’m doing it wrong!” he muttered at himself. “What am I missing?”

“Well, it’s nice you’re not blaming me,” I said while stretching (the ‘I’ve spent an hour in this chair’ kind, not the ‘hey look at me’ kind). “What, you expected to pick it all up in one go?”

“Not really,” admitted Syad. “Okay, that’s a lie. I did. I’m usually good at picking things up quickly,” he said with a surprising lack of arrogance, “and this technique you’re trying to teach me — I should be able to get it! It’s obvious how it’s supposed to go. But I keep missing the mark.”

“Yeah, that’s the Amalgamation for you.” I started working the controls — well, the hand controls. There was a bunch of stuff that you could do with your feet, but that was legit hard for humans to learn. I wasn’t sure if I knew them all myself. It didn’t matter, anyway: we were still locked out until somebody had learned her lesson about obeying all local traffic laws. “They did things differently than we did. Better, honestly. It’s hard to pick some of the subtle stuff up. The best you can do is keep quiet and listen. Sometimes you end up hearing what you need to learn.” I shrugged. “And sometimes you don’t.”