Hee hee hee.

"My dinosaur-riding childhood fantasies mostly revolved around T-Rexes. Flying I could get by pestering someone."

"Eh, I feel like it's not really flying if somebody has to do it for you. Different if it's a critter."

"I think it helped that my sister lets me read her mind whenever, so I got her perspective of it too."

"That'd be different, I guess."

"Yeah. And my brief high school boyfriend had wings. Making out in midair is fun."

"I'll take your word on that at least for now."

"Probably for the best."

"Yep. But if I like boys I'll have just about my pick of vicious space genius. Gender ratio!"

"Gender ratio! Gender ratio was pretty balanced for me growing up, which was fine by me. I think my closest social circle was 2:1 girls to boys, this despite the fact that I'm straight."

"I think I'm the only girl in Tactical right now unless there's one in the latest shipful I haven't seen. Another one graduated a while ago."

"I wonder why the gender ratio is so imbalanced."

"They filter for aggression! I'm borderline too nice!"

"Oh, lovely. That...suggests several different problems with their way of thinking."

"I mean, I get your point, but I get their point too on that one. They're training kids, not adults, because they want the perfect army because the shit that's going to go down has to go down right, against a perfectly coordinated technologically superior foe. You could train a nice calm reasonable adult to be good at strategy, but if you want an army full of people who breathe it, you need to dunk 'em in it from a nice early age and then you have to motivate your tiny launchies to learn the shit, which means motivating them to play the games like they matter. And the best way to do that on any kind of scale is to pick the launchies who want to smash the other little fucker's face in, and channel that. They find very smart five- and six-year-olds, but still."

"I also meant that in my experience girls are naturally just as aggressive as boys are."

"E, sometimes, sure, witness me, but not as usably. They could have maybe come up with a program designed more for girl style but they didn't. Because 'they' are themselves military and male-dominated."

"So what kind of name is Mazer Rackham anyway?"

"I think he was Maori."

"...I know nothing about the Maori so I'm just going to shut up and try not to be too much of an ethnocentric white girl, then."

Snort. "I don't know if it's a traditional Maori name, maybe his parents named him after some brand of car that was popular in New Zealand, how should I know, but yeah."

"At least you have the space military excuse."

"It's handy! I'm in trouble if I reveal that I'm not very good at lightspeed physics, though!"

"That shouldn't be too hard around me, I know zip about lightspeed physics."

"Good, that should keep you from pop quizzing me on ship acceleration and temporal shit."