“Let’s see what they’ve got, first.” She reached over the edge of the bed and pulled the menu from a nearby table. “What are our odds?”
This was an old joke between them, the question of how likely it would be that each of them would find something they liked on the room service menu. Multispecies menus meant well, but they were always hit or miss. “Seventy-thirty,” he said. “Your favor.”
“How come?”
He pointed at the menu. “Because they’ve got a whole section dedicated to roe.”
“Ooh, so they do.”
He let his eyes slide down her body as she perused the selection of fish eggs. He saw something peeking up over her hip—the edge of a scar, thick and milky white. He hadn’t noticed it earlier, but then, he’d been a little distracted. “This one’s new.”
“What?” She craned her neck up to look. “Oh, that. Yeah.” She went back to the menu.
Ashby sighed, a familiar weight growing in his stomach. Pei had many scars—corded stripes across her back, healed bullet holes on her legs and chest, a warped patch leftover from the business end of a pulse rifle. Her body was a tapestry of violence. Ashby had no illusions about the risks a cargo runner faced, but somehow her neat clothes, her polished gray ship, her quick wit and smooth voice made it all seem very civilized. It wasn’t until he saw physical proof that someone had hurt her that he remembered how dangerous her life was. The life he couldn’t share.
“Should I ask?” Ashby said, running his finger over the dull flesh. The way she was reclining prevented him from seeing the extent of it, but it trailed all the way to her back, widening as it went. “Shit, Pei, this is huge.”
Pei laid the menu across her chest and looked at him. “Do you really want to know?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not going to tell you if it’s going to make you worry more.”
“Who said I was worried?”
She stroked the creases between his eyebrows with a fingertip. “You’re sweet, but you’re a terrible liar.” She rolled over, bringing her face to his. “There was an… incident at a drop site.”
“An incident.”
Her second pair of eyelids fluttered, and her cheeks went pale yellow with flecks of red. The intricacies of her color language were something Ashby would never be able to learn, but he was familiar enough with it to distinguish emotions. This one, for example, was somewhere between exasperated and embarrassed. “It’s going to sound so much worse than it actually was.”
Ashby drummed his fingers against her hip, waiting.
“Oh, fine. We got jumped by a small—very small, I might add—Rosk strike team. They were after the base, not us, but we got a little mixed up in it. Long, messy story short, I ended up on top of one of their heads—”
“You what?” Rosk soldiers were built for combat right down to their genes. Three times the size of an average Human. A fast, raging mass of legs and spikes and keratin plating. Given the opportunity, he didn’t think he could prevent himself from running away from a charging Rosk soldier, let alone climb up on her head.
“I told you this was going to sound bad. Anyway, the second-to-last thing she ever did was buck me off into a stack of crates. As I went crashing down, she took the opportunity to grab me in her mouth. I’ve got good protective gear, but Rosk jaws—” She shook her head. “What you see there on my hip is the result of one of her mandibles slicing through. But it ended up working out well for me, actually. Being in her mouth gave me a nice, soft place to shoot.”
Ashby swallowed. “So you…?”
“No, that wasn’t enough to kill her. My pilot’s second shot was, though.” She cocked her head, second eyelids sliding in sideways. “You’re bothered.”
“It’s hard not to be.”
“Ashby.” She reached out to touch his cheek. “You shouldn’t ask.”
He pressed his palm against the small of her back, pulling her in close. “I really want this war to be over.”
“You know most of this”—she took his hand and guided it over her scars—“happened in GC space. This one’s from an Akarak who tried to board my ship. This one’s from a smuggler who didn’t want me to call the authorities on his phony bots. And this one’s from a genetweak headcase who was just having a bad day. Nobody protects me when I’m in uncontested space. Nobody but me. With military work, I get escorts when I’m out in the open, and armed guards when I’m unloading down planetside. In a lot of ways, military work is safer. Pays better, too. And it’s not as if they send me into heavy combat. Soon as I drop my goods, I turn right around and come back home.”
“Do… incidents happen often?”
“No.” She studied his face. “Are you more bothered that I was attacked, or that I shot someone?”
Ashby was quiet for a moment. “The former. I don’t care about you shooting that Rosk.”
She stretched out a leg and hooked it around one of his. “That’s an odd thing for an Exodan to say.” Pei, like everybody else in the GC, knew that Exodans were pacifists. Before they had left Earth for the open, the refugees had known that the only way they were going to survive was to band together. As far as they were concerned, their species’ bloody, war-torn history ended with them.
“I don’t know if I can explain this,” Ashby said. “I wish war didn’t happen, but I don’t judge other species for taking part in it. What you’re doing out there, I mean, I can’t find fault in what you do. The Rosk are killing innocent people in territories that don’t belong to them, and they won’t be reasoned with. I hate saying it, but in this case, I think violence is the only option.”
Pei’s cheeks went a somber orange. “It is. I’m only on the edges of it, and from what I’ve seen… trust me, Ashby, this is a war that needs to be fought.” She exhaled in thought. “Do you think badly of me for—I don’t know, for accepting business from soldiers?”
“No. You’re not a mercenary. All you do is get supplies to people. There’s no fault in that.”
“What about me shooting the Rosk, though? The one that had me in her mouth? You know that’s not the first time I’ve had to… defend myself.”
“I know. But you’re a good woman. The things you have to do don’t change that. And your species—you know how to end a war. Truly end it. It doesn’t get in your blood. You do what needs doing and leave it at that.”
“Not always,” Pei said. “We have as many dark patches in our history as any.”
“Maybe, but not like us. Humans can’t handle war. Everything I know about our history shows that it brings out the worst in us. We’re just not… mature enough for it, or something. Once we start, we can’t stop. And I’ve felt that in me, you know, that inclination toward acting out in anger. Nothing like what you’ve seen. I don’t pretend to know what war is like. But Humans, we’ve got something dangerous in us. We almost destroyed ourselves because of it.”
Pei ran her long fingers around his coiled hair. “But you didn’t. And you learned from it. You’re trying to evolve. I think the rest of the galaxy underestimates what that says about you.” She paused. “Well, about the Exodans, at least,” she said, her cheeks a sly green. “The Solans’ motives are a bit more questionable.”
He laughed. “Not that you’re biased or anything.”
“It’s your fault if I am.” She propped herself up on the pillow. “Don’t change the subject. You haven’t finished your original thought.”
“Which one?”
“What it is that actually bothers you.”
“Ah, right.” He sighed. Who was he to talk to her about war? What did he know about it at all, aside from news feeds and reference files? War was nothing more than a story to him, something that happened to people he didn’t know in places he’d never been to. It felt insulting to tell her how he felt about it.