“How can it be over?” Ilucci protested. “We just got here.”
Razka’s vertical eyelids blinked twice in quick succession as he replied, “Captain’s orders. Back to the ship.”
Ilucci’s shoulders sagged in defeat. He heaved a tired sigh and wore his disgust openly on his scruffy face. “All right, boys,” he said. “You heard the senior chief. Back to the boat.”
As they left the bar, the Deltan woman waved at Ilucci and flashed him a pitying grin as consolation for the night that might have been. He returned her smile and fell into step beside Razka as they left the bar and hit the sidewalks of Stars Landing on their way back to the station’s core.
“I hate officers,” Ilucci muttered.
Razka glanced at Ilucci with gentle surprise. “I’m surprised to hear you say that, Master Chief. After all, the officers say such nice things about you.”
“Really?”
“No,” Razka said, and quickened his pace to leave Ilucci behind. Watching the reptilian scout’s back, Ilucci kept his next complaint to himself. I hate Saurians.
Diego Reyes stood up as Manón led his ex-wife to his table. He honestly wasn’t sure which of the two women looked more stunning to him. Manón was a member of an alien race that radiated gentle heat and possessed a delicate and preternatural beauty, at least by human standards. Jeanne, by contrast, was an athletic woman of intelligence, grace, and confidence—the exact same qualities that had attracted him to his current clandestine lover, Rana.
The radiant hostess and club proprietor lingered half a step behind Jeanne as Reyes circled the table to pull out her chair for her. Jeanne appeared to be in no hurry to sit down.
“Hola, Diego,” she said, staring at his eyes. “You can relax, I didn’t come to make a scene.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” he said, struggling to remain cordial. Her ability to read his surface thoughts had always bothered him. Though he knew that she couldn’t help it, every time it happened it felt like an invasion of his privacy. Blocking her from his thoughts was difficult and required a great deal of concentration—either to flood his mind with random mental noise or to quiet his surface thoughts altogether. Of the two, achieving peace was the more difficult option, so instead he found his thoughts agitated and muddled whenever he had to spend time with her.
After a few awkward seconds, he motioned to the chair. “Please, sit down.”
Jeanne continued to eye him with suspicion as she settled into her seat. Reyes gently helped nudge it forward under her as she made herself comfortable at their table. They were located a few tables from the stage, where a quartet featuring Lieutenant Commander T’Prynn on piano was playing mellow, sophisticated jazz for the club’s dinner guests. Jeanne turned her attention to the musicians while Reyes returned to his own seat. As soon as he was comfortable, Manón handed him a wine list and stepped away with a knowing smirk.
“Thank you for having dinner with me,” he said.
Jeanne tapped an index finger on the table. “Well, I seem to have the time, so I figured, why not?” Narrowing her eyes, she added, “My transport was supposed to leave an hour ago, but it seems we’ve been delayed by the station’s control center.”
“I guess I’m just a lucky man,” Reyes said as he read the wine list and cluttered his inner monologue with the names and years of one vintage after another. “I had a bottle of the ’56 Camigliano last month; it was excellent.”
Not yielding to his clumsy imitation of charm, she asked, “I don’t suppose you had anything to do with delaying our departure, did you?”
“Not in the mood for a Brunello tonight, huh?” He could see that she wasn’t going to let him off the hook. “Fine, you caught me. I wanted to make sure I had time to talk to you before you left. Doesn’t mean we can’t have a nice dinner.”
She shook her head as she unfolded her linen napkin into her lap. “Still can’t come at a problem straight, can you? There always has to be a secret, or a twist, or a bit of deception.”
Smoothing his own napkin into his lap, he asked, “If I had asked you to come to my office, would you have shown up?”
“Of course not,” Jeanne said with a venomous smile. “I’d have told you to go to hell. But at least that way we’d both have the pride of knowing we’d been up-front about it.”
“Touché,” Reyes said.
Manón returned to the table at that moment, clearly taking the emotional temperature of the former spouses before she said, “Can I offer you something from the bar before you order?”
Taking the initiative, Reyes said, “Bring us a bottle of that good Vulcan syrah, would you?”
“The ’59 Saylok?” Manón asked for clarification.
“That’s the one, thanks,” Reyes confirmed. Manón nodded and left to procure the wine. The commodore looked at his dinner companion and said, “Where were we?”
Feigning a difficult search of her memories, she said, “Let’s see…I was calling you a duplicitous, overly secretive jerk…and you were ordering wine.”
“It’s just like we’re married again,” he said with a sarcastic grin. A server in a black-and-white uniform appeared from the shadows, filled their water glasses, and vanished without a word.
Jeanne watched the server depart, then she asked Reyes, “Why don’t you tell me what we’re really doing here?”
“You’re an esper,” he said. “Don’t you know?”
She swallowed a bitter chortle and wrinkled her grin into a grimace. “It doesn’t take a telepath to guess this is about the protectorate treaty for my colony.”
“Things are moving fast out here, Jeanne,” Reyes said. “The Klingons have already set up shop on your happy little planet. And unless you let us give Gamma Tauri IV official status as a Federation territory, we won’t be able to do a damn thing when the Klingons walk all over you.”
“At least I know why the Klingons are there,” she said. “Conquest is what they do. But if you want me to trust Starfleet, try telling me the truth.”
“Everything I’ve told you is the truth,” Reyes insisted.
She traced the rim of her water glass with a fingertip. “It’s part of the truth, not all of it. Why is the Federation so interested in Gamma Tauri? There are lots of UFP colonies that need your support more than mine does. Cygnet’s been asking for help finishing its spacedock for almost a year, but you’ve had your S.C.E. team digging ditches around New Boulder for a month.”
“I prioritize based on need,” Reyes said. “The president of Cygnet XIV assured me just last week that her people can finish their own spacedock. Your colony is trying to get a high-yield crop planted on one of the hottest M-class planets in the sector, and you’re already behind schedule.” He picked up his menu. “The seafood is very good here, by the way.”
She stewed for a few seconds while he filled his mind with the appetizer list. Lifting her own menu, she asked, “Have you ever met a subject you didn’t change?”
“Sure I have,” he said. “I recommend the fried Vulcan mollusks. You’ll love the pepper-aioli dip they come with.”
Manón returned to the table with their bottle of wine. She showed the label to Reyes, who nodded his approval. While she worked at uncorking the bottle, Jeanne peeked over the top of her menu at Reyes. “I know there’s something you’re not telling me,” she said, as if that would be news to him.
“Of course there’s something I’m not telling you,” Reyes shot back. “I’m a flag officer running a starbase in a frontier sector. I have three starships and more than three thousand people under my command. There are probably a couple hundred things I’m not telling you.”
Conversation paused as Manón filled his glass a couple of centimeters deep with dark red wine. He placed his fingertips on the base of the broad tulip glass and jogged it in a small circle, swirling the wine inside the glass to aerate it. Then he lifted the glass, inhaled the wine’s sweet, almost floral bouquet, and sampled a mouthful. Complex yet subtle, it was light enough to mesh with seafood but strong enough to be paired with meat. He swallowed, then said to the ravishing hostess, “Excellent, thank you.”