Page 15 of Ward

“Yeah,” she said, gently, as though she’d heard the rest of it anyway. “I know.”

He ate the half down to its last bite, and left that one on the plate.

It was the hardest bite he had never eaten, and he was at the door before he admitted it.

Behind him the hall smelled like a full house at first light, and he had eaten his breakfast in a warm room with his walls braced against nothing at all, and he left angrier than he’d arrived, chiefly at himself.

The third day he requisitioned replicated nutrition packs, field standard, and ate them in his quarters like a man under siege, which he was aware was the correct description and disliked intensely.

The packs tasted like nothing. That had always been their virtue: nothing was neutral, safe, and could be eaten for years without owing anyone so much as a glance.

He had done so, in fact — whole postings, whole seasons of his life, fueled on nothing and proud of the discipline.

It had never once felt like deprivation.

It took thirty-nine hours to break him.

He logged the number with after-action honesty: thirty-nine hours.

Then he was standing in the dining hall at the seventh bell, tray at the corner table, eating charred roots that tasted like someone’s whole deliberate afternoon.

The supply officer behind the pass did not look up, and did not gloat, and said only, as she passed his table on a refill run, “Welcome back. Eric.”

He did not correct her.

He told himself, spooning braise with metronome discipline, that the correction was what she wanted — that the name was bait, and a reaction was the hook, and denying her the reaction was therefore the counter.

It was excellent tactical logic except for being a lie, and he knew the exact moment the lie began: two light, precise syllables laid flat like a knife in no hurry.

It was not because he had started to like the way she said it.

He filed that sentence where he filed everything he declined to examine. The drawer was getting full.

Meanwhile, Earth got louder.

The negotiations had been complicated when he arrived; by the second week of the window they were fraying.

Aldric stood the venue wall through session after session and watched the damage spread in real time, and the professional half of him — the half that was not embroiled in a land war with a flatbread — catalogued all of it with growing coldness.

The injunction fight had been won before his arrival: the samples secured in station cryo, the counsel back at the table, the oversight committee’s legal reach checked at the atmosphere.

But Hargrove had adapted after losing.

He stopped trying to impound the compound and started trying to impound the story. The feeds ran him daily now. Committee hearings, staged with flags. A widening vocabulary — foreign influence had become foreign capture, and the scientists are eager to please had become the question no one will answer: who do the station personnel actually work for?

Station personnel. Aldric read the shift the way he’d read a tree line moving.

“He’s targeting the staff now,” he said, in the delegation’s morning briefing, second week. “Not the principals. Note the phrasing in yesterday’s feed — he named the station’s roster count. He’s had someone pull employment manifests. Assessment: he’s done building a case against Vorjan House. Vorjan House doesn’t vote. He’s building a case against the humans who work with us, because they have addresses, and families, and faces the feeds can run.”

Across the table, Falkin — present in his capacity as advance negotiator, and insufferably rested — looked at him with an expression two decades of friendship should have made easy to parse.

It took Aldric a moment: approval, and beneath it, concern about where the assessment had come from.

“You’ve been tracking the feeds closely,” Falkin said, neutrally.

“It’s my function here.”

“Mm,” said Falkin, who knew precisely which corners of Aldric’s function involved memorizing the employment protections of station catering staff, and mercifully said nothing further in front of the delegation.