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tone that signaled

tone that signaled a disconnected line, then hung up absently, staring blindly at his desk blotter in the quiet of the night as he tried to make sense out of the conversation. It was impossible, of course, but the longer he played it back, the more excited he felt. He knew Dick Aston, and he'd encountered enough weirdnesses dealing with purely terrestrial affairs to leave him with a wide-open mind about this. Aston would never have made that call unless he knew something—and if he knew anything at all, he was one up on anyone else on the damned planet.
The commander turned to his regular phone and punched more buttons. The bell at the other end rang several times before a sleepy voice answered.
"Jayne? Mordecai." He grinned at her reply. "Yes, of course I know what time it is . . . I'm going to tell you, if . . . Look, just listen, will you? Thanks. Now, have you ever had an EEG?" His grin grew even broader at the short, pungent reply. "Well, neither have I, but I think it's time we repaired that oversight. Get hold of the base hospital and set us up for this morning, will you?" The silence at the other end was deafening.
"It's important, Jayne," he said softly. "Don't ask me why, because I can't tell you. Just set it up—early, Jayne." He listened again, nodding to himself. "Fine. Handle it any way you want." He paused again, then chuckled. "Jayne, if you think you're pissed, I can hardly wait to hear Admiral McLain's reaction when I wake him up!" The sudden silence which greeted that remark from the other end of the line told him that it had set her brain as furiously to work as he'd expected. "Gotta run now, Jayne," he ended brightly. "Bye."
He hung up and drew a deep breath, then flipped through his rolodex to double-check the number for the admiral's quarters. Then he began punching buttons again, wondering how he was going to convince CINCLANT that his senior intelligence officer hadn't lost his mind.

Ludmilla gave Aston a disgusted look as he stepped into the isolation area of McKee's sickbay. The big Emory S. Land-class depot ships were designed to provide support—including hospital facilities—to a squadron of up to nine nuclear submarines, and their sickbays were scaled accordingly. For all that, McKee's sickbay was a spartan place, and Ludmilla looked thoroughly disgruntled as she sat on the edge