Page 4 of Warrior’s Mate

"Only if you're planning something foolish."

He decided not to smile, though the decision required more effort than it should have.

By midmorning, they were outside. The exchange sat at the center of a broad commercial district, but Wasaytu changed character quickly beyond it. Within ten minutes, formal transport lanes narrowed between grain fields. Another five and they were walking beneath orchard trees heavy with early-season fruit.

Kaiven had grown up in a coastal settlement far north of here. His family's land had been salt grass and windbreak orchards, not the terraced abundance of Wasaytu. Still, the smell of warm soil and irrigation water hit something old in him.

The familiar scent carried an old, immediate sense of home. Kaiven ignored the pull of it. He had been back on Farseek less than two days and would leave again within a week.

That was the shape of his life: deploy, return, repair equipment, eat too much of his sister's cooking, listen to his father complain that military boots ruined household floors, then deploy again. Farseek waited between assignments with the patience of something he had never imagined could be taken from him.

Ahead of him, Maelis stepped off the lane and waved a grain crawler forward.

"Keep left at the split," she told the operator through her wrist comm. "The east lane looks wider, but the irrigation gate won't clear your rear axle."

Kaiven checked the digital map. The east lane did look wider.

"How do you know?"

"Because Bren Talis sheared an axle there last season and complained about it for three months."

"That's your infrastructure database?"

"Part of it."

"One farmer's temper?"

"You'd be amazed what can be learned by listening to people who actually use things."

The crawler took the west lane and passed cleanly. Kaiven looked down at the official route file on his wrist display and flagged the discrepancy. Maelis noticed.

"You really are changing it."

"Did you think I was pretending?"

"I thought you might schedule a committee."

"I don't hate civilians enough to create unnecessary committees."

She laughed. The sound surprised him. It was lower than he expected, warm and unguarded. For an instant she looked less like the woman prepared to duel with him over road capacity and more like someone he might have noticed across a crowded festival yard.

Then she caught him looking. Her laughter faded, though not completely.

"Careful, Captain. That almost sounded human."

"Uatu, technically."

"Much worse."

He did smile then. A message vibrated against his wrist. Kaiven glanced at it. The smile vanished.

COMM PRIORITY UPDATE: OFF-WORLD TRAFFIC DELAYS. NONCRITICAL TRANSMISSIONS MAY EXPERIENCE ROUTING LAG.

There was nothing remarkable in the wording. Network congestion happened whenever major Brigade operations shifted between systems. Still, he read it twice.

"Problem?" Maelis asked.

"Probably not."