A few cars cruise by but otherwise its a ghost town. Nobody out, no coffee shops drawing traffic, no muffin barns attracting carbo-seeking hordes.

This is an office community. People will do their thing at home until they teleport themselves here perhaps to go out to lunch. In the afternoons they'll pack themselves back into their cars and punch out, zooming home.

We drive in mostly silence, that one thing to be said still remaining between us.

Then she makes the move.

At first I don't know what the hell she's doing, drifting out of her lane into what would be oncoming traffic if there were any. Such a move would be suicidal at any time other than the wee hours of the morning and we're certainly pushing that. At first, I think that perhaps she's simply gotten distracted and is missing the fact that we are rushing into harm's way.

Then I realize -- the forthcoming turn cuts out about four lights and ten minutes of backtracking. The city fathers long ago decided that there would be one way to the base and one way off, both of which would be in the same direction of travel. To enforce this they added a long strip of concrete to discourage those who might think that turning left was the logical course of action.

The turn is still there for people headed in the opposite direction. Those and the crazy few who bastardize things such as this.

Its a tense moment, not just because we are gambling heavily but because its a power ploy. She knows I'm powerless to say anything to her and is going to demonstrate it in a very real manner.

I suppose this reasserts the authority she temporarily lost the night before. Such barbarism.

And we both know it. I fight the urge to proclaim her madness as this only feeds into this ploy. Her glee with both the manicness of the move and the untenable position t puts me in grows with each moment, culminating in the swerving, honking sheer sweat-panic of the driver coming the opposite direction, faced down by a madwoman.

"There!" she exclaims as we pull up to the guard gate. My hands release their unconscious white-knuckle grip on the door handle. The MP gives me a look that says that I am somehow responsible for the melee he caught the tail end of.

As we drive along the base she asks casually "what is better, a programmer or a plugin mechanic?"

"A programmer of course," I reply, naturally taking the side of my old profession and happy for something to break the silence. "A plugin mechanic only debugs code, checks cross-platform compatibility. A programmer writes the code on both sides of the mechanic."

I glance over and see some sort of change within her. That's when I realize that her husband must be a plugin mechanic, that she's been measuring her decision on marrying him, figuring out whether she'd made the right life decisions.

"Not that being a mechanic is any small thing..." I can see that my point has already been made, though. There will be no spinning my way out of this. I can hope only that she fades back into the obscurity from which she came.

"Well, here we are" she says, pulling into the lot. The big 'cruiser looms on the tarmac bigger than ever, a fleet of guys hanging off it with welders and paint, tear-assing last minute jobs before liftoff.

"Thanks," I reply, and there's this awful instant where I can read her mind again. I almost naturally fall into the morning dropoff routine, give her a peck and realize she's decided whether that would be okay or not.

I rub her shoulder instead and bolt outside, shucking my duffel over my shoulder as I beeline for the gangway.