“Go ahead,” I say tiredly. “Ask whatever you want.”
She smiles slightly. Then she grabs two pieces of pie, puts some kind of cream on top, and brings them to the table. She keeps one for herself and gives the other to me.
I’m not ready for it. I still have half an omelet to go.
“They say you and Rosealma are working on a project together,” she says.
I shrug. “I asked her to review information from our friend’s death.”
“It’s more than that,” the owner says. “She’s searching for a replacement at the clinic. She wants to leave.”
This news both startles me and doesn’t surprise me at all. Of course, Squishy hasn’t told me that. She is taking care of her business here, which is none of my concern. Until our discussion a few hours before, she thought she was leaving with me.
She thought she wasn’t going to come back.
“She’s not coming with me.” I finally finish the omelet. I set the plate to one side, but I don’t take the pie, not yet. I want the food to settle. Instead, I grab the coffee.
“Good,” the owner says. “Because we can’t spare her.”
“I would suppose doctors are hard to find here,” I say.
“That’s not why,” she says. “We got by before; we could get by again.”
“Then I don’t understand,” I say.
“The families here are former military,” she says. “Vallevu isn’t a natural community. We were given this land and the money to build on it.”
I freeze. I don’t want to be anywhere connected to the military. “After the Colonnade Wars?” I ask, trying to pinpoint this in time.
She shakes her head. “We haven’t been here that long.”
I wait, but she doesn’t say any more. Instead she picks at her own piece of pie.
“How long?” I ask.
“Technically,” she says, “I’m not allowed to talk about that.”
I sigh.
“But,” she adds, “I was twenty-five when I came here. I’m fifty now.”
She gives me an odd smile, as if she’s begging me to understand something I’m only gelling glimmers of.
“Are you one of the founders?” I ask.
“Not quite,” she says. “A few people have been here longer than me. Maybe by five years or so.”
“And Squ—Rosealma?”
“She was invited, but she never came. Until a few years ago.”
After she left the Dignity Vessel. The glimmer of understanding is finally beginning.
I start, “So the people who retired here—”
“Actually, no one retired here,” the owner says. “This was a base at first.”
“A base,” I repeat. The housing doesn’t look like base housing. It’s too nice for that. “The Empire dropped quite a bit of money here.”
Some nervousness must echo through my voice, because she smiles. “Relax,” she says. “The base closed long ago.”
“But this is still imperial property,” I say.
She shakes her head. “Abandoned and purchased legally by the families who live here.”
“Who are former military.” I wrap my hands around my cup. The coffee is now cold. “I suppose I have enough information to figure this out, but I’m dense. I don’t know your name—”
She starts to tell me, but I wave her off.
“—and I don’t want to know. I can’t tell anyone if you broke confidentiality, and aside from your employees, we’re the only ones in the place. So tell me what I’m missing.”
She gets up and takes the cup out of my hand. She pours out the remaining coffee. For a moment, I think she’s subtly telling me to leave. Then she grabs the coffeepot and pours me a refill.
She brings the cup back to the table.
“You don’t know the history of Naha, do you?” she asks.
“I don’t know the history of a lot of things,” I say. I don’t know the history of any planets. I can barely handle the history of the sector, and then only vaguely. I need some details so that I know which ships should be where, when, and who was piloting them. But if the information didn’t affect surrounding space, it didn’t interest me.
“We used to have a military base in orbit,” she says. “It was classified, so it doesn’t surprise me that you didn’t know. It was also hard to miss, since it was so large.”
“And the families lived on the planet?” I ask. I know enough about military history to know that’s strange.
“It was a science base. People used to speculate that they were making weapons up there.”
“Were they?” I ask.
She gives me that odd smile again. “That’s classified.”
“I thought we dealt with that,” I say.
“The kind of classified that could get me, a former military worker who lived on that base, in trouble.”
“Oh,” I say. She is trying to tell me what she can without getting herself in too much trouble. I have to pay more attention. She’s giving me the information in an order that won’t get her in trouble but that will make her meaning clear.
If I’m quick enough to catch on.
“So,” I say after a moment, “people believed they were making weapons.”
She nods.
“And it was military scientists who worked up there,” I say.
She nods again.
“While their families were down here, for safety’s sake.”
“At first,” she says.
“And then?” I ask.
“What do you know about hazardous duty pay?” she asks.
I hate elliptical conversations. They’re the opposite of what I believe. I believe in being blunt and honest and straightforward. This conversation is going to give me a headache before the night is through.
“I know that hazardous duty pay is a great deal more than regular pay,” I say tentatively.
“With bonuses should the soldier die in the line of that hazardous duty.”
I blink.
“It sometimes takes years to declare someone dead,” she adds.
I’m frowning now. I have to put this together with—what? If you have a dead body, then it shouldn’t be hard to declare someone dead.
But if you don’t …
I let out a small breath. On the Business, all those years ago, Squishy said to me, Why do you think I like finding things that are lost? Because I’ve accidentally lost so many things.
Things? Karl had asked her. He was in that conversation, as were Jypé and Junior. And me. Such ironies.
And she answered him. Ships, people, materiel. You name it, I lost it trying to make it invisible to sensors.
People. She said people.
It sometimes takes years to declare someone dead.
Particularly if they’ve been lost.
“Rosealma was assigned to that military base, wasn’t she?” I ask.
“Until her tour was up,” the owner says.
I let out a breath. Squishy worked on stealth tech in orbit around this planet. And somehow, this community was tied to it all.
“Then she left,” I say.
“She didn’t have family,” the owner says.
“Did you?” I ask.
Her eyes narrow. She shakes her head. “I was given a medical discharge. I’m no longer combat worthy.”
“May I ask why?” I ask.
“I’m afraid of the dark,” she says softly.
My gaze meets hers. She knows why I’m here. She knows what happened, maybe not to Karl, but to Jypé and Junior. She knows about the stealth tech.
“You’re one of Rosealma’s good friends,” I say.
She nods. “You’ve upset her.”
“I’m sorry for that,” I say.
“You asked about the children,” she says.