dull. Elena could not blame her crewmates for seeking out something—anything—that was new. Had she been a different sort of person she might have enjoyed this place with her friends, instead of wishing herself away from them, wandering her starship’s wide, empty halls.
She slipped a finger behind her ear to query her comm for the time: 2350. Too early and too late. At midnight the city’s power grid would be shut down for almost a full hour as the nearby neutron star swept the planet with an electromagnetic pulse. She would never make it to the spaceport in time, and she doubted the dispatcher would take kindly to her loitering until the lights came back on. Her eyes swept the crowd again, and she wondered if the dispatcher was open to bribes.
She had almost resolved to head for the spaceport and plead her case when she heard a step behind her. She closed her eyes, mustered a polite smile, and turned.
He was taller than she was, with straw-yellow hair and an indisputably nice smile, and he bore a heart-wrenching resemblance to Danny. Damn Jessica—what had she been thinking, sending this one over? She wasn’t usually so oblivious.
“Can I help you with the drinks?” the man asked.
He had a nice voice, a little dark and grainy, with that broad accent they spoke with here. He was handsome, friendly, not entirely pie-eyed—and he left her cold. As she looked at him, thinking of what to say, she realized she was done pretending to have fun.
The regret in the smile she gave him was genuine. “You’re very kind,” she said, willing all the flip sarcasm out of her voice. “Actually, you can take them back to the table for me. I’m afraid I’m not staying.”
This news took a moment to penetrate. “You sure?” he said, still genial, still easygoing. “Your friend, there, she seems to think you could use some fun and games. Doesn’t have to, you know, be anything.”
He was nice, this one. Under different circumstances, with more time … he would still look like Danny. “My friend,” she told him, “has a good heart and a deaf ear. If you think of it, please tell her to enjoy herself without being concerned for me.”
He flashed her that smile again. “If you change your mind …” he offered, then moved away, and she turned back to the bar to settle the tab. She was struggling to remember how much one was supposed to tip in Novanadyr when a voice came from the corner of the bar.
“You were very kind to him,” said the man in the PSI uniform.
He had not moved since they had arrived, seated comfortably on his own, nursing something served in a small, smoke-colored glass. He was dressed in black from head to toe, clothes fitted and well-worn, black hair pulled back from his face into a tight, short braid—the uniform worn by PSI in all six sectors. An anomaly in the crowd of tourists and natives.
“He was polite,” she replied. “There was no reason not to be.”
She wondered, as she had when she had first spotted him, if he was an impostor. Real PSI soldiers were rarely seen on colonies, living primarily in nomadic tribes, many of them spending their entire lives—birth to death—on massive generation ships that isolated themselves from Central Gov. Central maintained authority over colony worlds, supporting local government while regulating interstellar trade and rule of law, but PSI as a people kept mostly to themselves, appearing only to deliver supplies to colonies in need … or, as was rumored, at least, to steal necessities from a passing freighter.
On a wealthy colony like Volhynia, PSI would be seen as anachronistic, even threatening; a PSI soldier at a local bar would be an attraction. Or, more likely, a wasp to be provoked. But if he was an impostor, she would have expected him to be making the most of it: courting attention, and drinking a good deal more than what the bartender had poured into that tiny glass.
She waited, wondering if he would say something else, then finished paying for the drinks. When he spoke again, she almost jumped.
“May I offer you some advice?” he asked.
His pronunciation was clipped and exotic, his speech mannered and slightly slow, as if he was translating in his head before he spoke. Most PSI were reputed to be multilingual, and some joined as children, or even young adults. She would have no way of guessing on which colony this one may have started his life.
“All right,” she said.
“You should not keep company with children.”
He was staring straight ahead, not looking at her. He had an angular profile punctuated by a substantial, aquiline nose and a neatly trimmed mustache. A masculine face, and yet his lips were full, almost feminine. His eyes were wide and deep set, and in the dim light of the bar looked jet-black; but they caught light from all around, giving him an expression of intelligence and good humor. She could not, if asked, have honestly called him handsome; but there was something in his bearing, something immediate and physical that she suspected made people watch him even when he did not move.
“Are you offering me an alternative?”
At that he smiled, although he still did not look at her. “I take my own advice.”
The amusement in his eyes was not cruel, but she still found herself annoyed. “Do I seem so young, then?” she asked him.
“My dear lady, you are young.”
He had a nice voice, almost impossibly deep, with a hint of music. She wondered if he sang. “I’m not that young.”
He took pity on her at that, and turned to meet her eyes. His direct gaze was sharper, and she realized that whatever he was drinking had not intoxicated him at all. “What age are you?” he asked her curiously.
“Thirty-two.”
He gave a brief, dismissive snort. “When you were born,” he said, “I was well into my twenties, and I had seen more horrors than you will all of your life.” He turned away again.
By her estimation, she had seen enough horror for anyone, but he would have no way of knowing. “So if I am so young,” she deduced, “then surely I’m in the right crowd. Me and all these boys.”
“Possibly,” he allowed. “But these boys can do nothing for you.”
“That’s not what they think.”
He scoffed again, still good-humored. “These boys believe that because they know the mechanics, they know how to make love to a woman. They are wrong.”
She thought for a moment, an old memory surfacing. “My cousin Peter used to say something about young men,” she remembered. “‘Too busy loving themselves to effectively fuck anybody else.’”
At that he put down his glass and let out a loud bark of laughter. She could not help but smile herself. “He tends to be crass,” she said, half-apologetic.
“Observant, though,” he said, favoring her with a genuine smile. She saw him focus, as if he had not really looked at her before. “Tell me, dear lady,” he asked her, curious. “Why are you here?”
Those dark eyes of his, in addition to sharpness, held a genuine warmth that pleased her more than she would have expected. “I thought we’d established that,” she tried, but he shook his head.
“You
