<div class="floatleft">(http://elliquiy.com/elluiki/images/f/fa/Mars_test.jpg)</div><table class="bbc_table"><tbody><tr><td><strong>Character name:</strong></td><td>Wing Commander Louise Cotter</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Location:</strong> </td><td>Mission Commander's Office</td></tr><tr><td><strong>With:</strong> </td><td> Laura Hicks, Stefan Versatile</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Doing:</strong> </td><td>Getting down to business</td></tr></tbody></table><br/><hr/><br/>I managed a smile. "Stefan, what I saw today was good. I think people will adapt well to life here. It's the new frontier, a whole new world. There are no natives to fight, but then the whole damn planet is fighting us. Mars, god of war!" I chuckled. "Humanity works best when we are threatened, don't you agree, Stefan?"<br/><br/>I glanced at Laura. "So, what I think we should do is give it a couple of days. Let the kinks work themselves out, and then see if we need to make changes. Everyone has the Mars clock software in their implants, and it should automatically have started itself up. So the extra 37 minutes are a non-issue, and we still have the same 24 hour clock that everyone is used to." The Martian day was 37 minutes and 22 seconds longer than the Earth day, and the boffins at MarsCorp had come up with an ingenious fix. Make each second fractionally longer, and keep the same number of seconds in a day. It worked like a charm. People would ask the time and be told it by their implants in exactly the format they expected, and many of them would forget that the dat was half an hour longer, because it wasn't showing up anywhere.<br/><br/>Some bright spark had termed it "Creative temporal accounting" and likened it to taking all the fractions of pennies off transactions.<br/><br/>"There is one change I should like to implement with immediate effect though..." I told Stafan. "The military command structure is confusing. We have captains who are outranked by lieutenants, we have chiefs, sergeants, corporals, lance corporals, PFCs, and goodness knows what else! I want to rationalise. Use the US Army rank structure. So I'm a Lt Colonel, Hicks is a Major, and so on. We all have our NATO equivalent grade, I'm OF4, Hicks is now OF3 and so on. We simply use the equivalent US army rank from now on."<br/><br/>I smiled at them both. "Does that work for the two of you?"<br/><br/>I didn't see as they would either of them object. It made life simpler after all. And the US Military Command back on Earth wouldn't complain either.<br/><br/>"Okay, what else?"