March Forth (The Woodford Chronicles Book 1) Read Online Free PDF

together.
    When his sister turned eighteen, she changed her mind about joining the navy.  It was too late, though; Steven had already enlisted.
    He didn’t really mind.  Boot camp was obviously no picnic, and he would have liked a little more time to relax, but the Navy made him feel as if he were actually doing something with his life.  He had no intention of making a career out of it, at first.  He figured he would just put in his four years and get college paid for, end of story.
    In his third year in the Navy, he had been working as a meteorologist in Virginia.  Basically, he looked at a computer screen all day, identifying weather patterns that might affect ships at sea.  It was a mellow assignment with relatively easy work, which suited him fine. 
    One day, though, he noticed something odd.  The Doppler Lidar, which measured the frequency of backscattered light from a laser in order to measure temperature and wind speed, was giving some very strange readings in a certain section of the Pacific Ocean.  He checked all of the other available equipment readings for that area, and found nothing odd.  Something was interfering with the Lidar, though; he had never before seen readings like that.  He reported it to his commanding officer, who told him he’d get the equipment checked.
    Not long after that, Steven received notice that he was being reassigned.  There were no further details given; he was simply given an official letter that said to report to an office that he had never before been to the following morning.  He had never heard of such a quick and mysterious reassignment, but he had learned not to question orders rather early on in his military career.  Also, he figured even if he hated the new assignment, he had less than a year left in the navy.  It would go by quickly.
    So, he reported to that mysterious office not far from where he had been doing his meteorology work, and he waited.  He waited for the better part of an hour, alone, until two men – they looked like Captains to him, though the insignias they wore were somehow slightly different than any he had seen before – entered the office through a previously unnoticed back door.  There were no formal introductions, nor did the men offer any further explanation.   The officer on the right instructed Steven to sit at the only desk in the room, gave him a written test, and told him he had an hour to complete it.  After that, there was another test; after that, another.
    The tests themselves shed no light on his situation.  The first seemed like a combination of an IQ test and a psychological exam.  The second (which the officer on the left gave him, with an allotted time of one hour to complete) was a test of his meteorological knowledge, but some of the questions were almost nonsensical.  They seemed to focus largely on light refraction and sound waves, which was fine, but they asked about possibilities that did not exist, readings that could not exist.  He remembered the strange lidar readings, and answered to the best of his ability, thinking all the while that he was being set up for something unpleasant.  Anxiety began to permeate the very core of his being; try as he might, he could not still his twitching limbs.  He tried to focus on the tests themselves without worrying about the reasons behind them or the consequences they could bring him.
    The third test, however, was simply laughable.  The officer on the right (whom Steven had begun to think of as Captain Righty, as opposed to his partner, Captain Lefty) gave him the test and said, “forty minutes.”  He flipped it open.
    The first section showed pictures of strange symbols, the likes of which he had never seen, and asked him to describe what they might mean.  In the second section, he was asked to solve equations which featured more completely alien symbols.  After staring at each question in disbelief, Steven would write down a number, or even another equation;