“That’s my little secret,” he replied with a smile. “Why don’t you try your food?”
She looked at him a moment longer, suspicion in her eyes. He could tell she didn’t believe him about the wine, which made it all the more fun to see the surprise in her face when she took another sip.
She reached down, and hesitantly cut into the mushroom. He followed suit, careful to watch her face as she took a bite.
“Oh, Goddess,” she said. “This is almost melting in my mouth. Where did you get these? They don’t taste like they’ve been in storage at all, but I know you didn’t buy them at on Transit Three. And we’re a long way from Gnoscanny.”
Now she had surprised him.
“You’ve had Gnoscan mushrooms before?” he asked. “Not many people have.”
She nodded and turned away for a second. Then she turned back to him and took a generous gulp of her wine. It didn’t hit her as hard this time, but she flushed and stayed silent for a moment.
“I can see how a person could get addicted to this stuff,” she said slowly. “It really has a way of making you feel better about things. I used to have Gnoscan mushrooms all the time. I grew them myself.”
“Really?” he asked, startled. “It takes a pretty sophisticated biosphere set up to grow them. No offense, but I have trouble seeing how you could afford something like that on a waitress’ income.”
She shook her head and laughed, but this time the sound came out bitter.
“They grow wild on Hector Prime,” she said, her face growing wistful. “I used to live there. I had my own bar, actually. Of course, it’s gone now.”
He nodded his head slowly, remembering. Hector Prime’s surface had been destroyed by Imperials several months after the cease-fire. They’d claimed it had been an intelligence error, a mistake of planet-wide magnitude. Millions had died, including the cream of the Imperial academic community specializing in biology.
“You’re Saurellian, aren’t you?” she asked. “I haven’t met many of your kind, but I think I recognized the facial features. Or kind of recognize them. It’s hard to tell with your scar, but the coloring is right.”
“Yes,” he replied, not quire sure where she was going with this. “I’m Saurellian. I remember when your planet was destroyed. I’m so sorry—did you lose family?”
“No,” she said slowly. “But I lost friends. And employees. I just happened to be off planet, meeting with a supplier on one of the moons. It was a fluke. Two hours earlier or two hours later and I would have been dead. Tell me something?”
He nodded, wishing he hadn’t asked. There was pain written all over her lovely face, and it hurt in him a way he never would have thought possible.
“Why didn’t your government do anything?” she asked, her voice anguished. “We were in the neutral zone. We were supposed to be protected. Why didn’t you do anything when they broke the truce and killed us?”
“We couldn’t,” he said slowly. “We had to pretend to believe their excuses, otherwise the war would have started again. We couldn’t afford to let that happen. Too many people had died already.”
“They killed our planet because they heard you had a secret base there, or at least that’s what I heard,”
she said softly. “Well, one of the things I heard. Can you tell me if it was true?”
He closed his eyes, and shook his head. Damn Nicolai. It had been wrong to hide their resources among a neutral civilian population—it broke all the rules of war. But Nicolai had insisted that following those rules was no way to win, and he’d been right. The war with the Imperials had almost destroyed them. He sighed, and then opened his eyes.
“There was no base—” he started to say, but the pain in her face was so open, so raw, that he couldn’t finish. He took another drink of the wine, but now it tasted more like water to him. Foul water, the kind that couldn’t quench a man’s thirst.
“I can neither confirm nor deny that we had a base there,” he said slowly. “But I’m very sorry for your loss.”
“You prick,” she whispered. She stood up slowly from the table. “You killed all of them, you and your f**king war. We were neutral—the entire planet was a damn ecological preserve. The people who died were students and teachers! What gave you the right to do that to us?”
He shook his head slowly, not knowing what to say. It wasn’t the time for an argument on the importance of checking Imperial power, or the fact that the Imperial rebels had asked his people for help long before the war started.
“I know we have a deal,” she hissed. “I know I have to f**k you. I’ll do it here and now if you want.
But I’ll be damned if I’ll eat with you. Enjoy your wine alone.”
She turned and stalked out of galley with a dignity so frail it pained him to watch her.
Chapter Five
Giselle sat on her bunk, legs curled up to her chest, hugging herself. Damn him, why did he have to make her think of Hector Prime? She’d put it out of her head for months, almost a year. Why did he have to bring it all back?
She knew in her heart that whatever his flaws, he probably wasn’t personally responsible for the Saurellians’ decision to breach Hector Prime’s neutrality. But that didn’t make it any easier to deal with the memory of her lost friends and dreams.
Men and their wars. They were to blame for all of this, and he was one of them. His scar hadn’t come from natural causes; that was no birthmark. He’d gotten it fighting, and even if he’d never set foot on Hector Prime, he’d caused destruction somewhere else.
It was always the women and the children who paid for men’s wars.
She sat and sniffled for a while, allowing herself to wallow and feel sorry for herself. It wasn’t like she did it that often. When she’d lost her home and her business, she’d immediately gone out and gotten a job. And when a better opportunity came along to go to Transit Three, she’d taken that. She knew how to work, how to take care of herself. She’d done it before and she’d do it again. But just once, it would be nice to lay back and mourn all she’d lost.
Even now he was probably watching her. Even though the light was off, it was a good bet that there were infrared lenses on the spy cameras he had everywhere. Defiantly, she raised one finger in a universally hostile gesture and waved it up at him, letting him know just what she thought of him and his fellow Saurellians.