Local Star, Aimee Ogden [ebook reader that looks like a book txt] 📗

Triz wondered if they’d sentence him to cryo until the hearings started. Practically a death sentence for a man who, rumor said, had bioengineered away his need for sleep. She shifted from foot to foot. “As long as this is the beginning of the end for the Ceebees.” She craned her neck as though she could see through the Arcade’s ceiling into Justice. “There’s something wrong with them. I mean, they think they’re entitled to wipe entire worlds and terraform them for their own use . . . Something about what they do to themselves must mess them up in the head. I can’t understand why anyone would want to mod their perfectly good body that way.”

When Triz turned to the others, Lanniq was grimacing down at his own boots. Casne’s mouth opened, then closed, then opened again, then opened for a splash of the spicewine she’d had stashed under her arm. When she spoke, the wine roughened her voice. “Triz, you had your eyes done three years ago to fix your myopia. And what about Nantha's reassignment?”

“That’s not the same thing at all!” Triz protested. “Ceebees are more machine than human.”

“Are you saying you think that anyone with mods—” Casne closed her eyes for a moment, then shook her head. “No. Let’s not. We’re here to celebrate, not fight.”

Lanniq cleared his throat. The crowds had begun to flow back in the directions of the eateries and bars and tea rooms. “I’m going to go save our table. You all coming?”

“I definitely am,” Saabe sighed. “The artigrav on this Hab is too shitting high, I need to sit down again.”

Triz peeled off from the group as they squeezed through the doorway of the bar. “I’ll get another bottle,” she said. Obviously, she’d ruffled feathers, but maybe she could smooth them down again if she poured enough spicewine on.

“You sure?” Casne plucked at her sleeve. “Is Quelian paying you so much you can afford to keep three Fleeties in booze all night?”

“I said another bottle, not all night.” Triz laughed, and Casne let her break free with a lopsided grin. She looked around; the steward was nowhere to be seen, but a small crowd packed in around the door to Edillo’s storage rooms. Triz edged forward and wedged herself in between a pair of bodies. “Excuse me,” she mumbled, as the Fleet officer she’d bumped turned to face her.

It was Kalo, because of course it was Kalo. He was embedded in among a knot of Fleet folk, with a few civilian hangers-on mixed into the mess. When he saw her squeezed in next to him, his face folded into an embarrassed smirk, and he raised a glass of something smoky-green. Shitting stars. Not for the first time, she wished he wasn’t so easy to look at. Wavy black hair, sleepy dark eyes, and crooked front teeth, just so he didn’t look quite too pretty to be real. “Make yourself at home. What’re you drinking?”

“Poison, with any luck.”

His gaze flicked to Casne and her other Fleet friends in the corner, then back to Triz. “To your health, then.” He slugged the smoky-green drink and turned into the crowd of Fleeties and civilians packed around him.

Triz managed to flag down the steward and swapped a fob-scan for a bottle of Simek green wine: decidedly a lesser vintage than the first round. The steward got an earful of Triz’s disapproval, mostly because she was annoyed Kalo had somehow scored actual drinking glasses while she was stuck drinking from the bottle like a slob. She slouched back toward the cushioned corner with her second-rate prize tucked inside her elbow.

If the reduction in beverage quality disappointed anyone, they didn’t mention it. Whatever awkwardness Triz had woken on the Arcade washed away under a sticky-sweet green tide. By the time the bottle had run dry, Triz was laughing herself sick over Saabe’s story about how e had tried to smuggle Roian leather out of a planetary Arcology only to discover e had bought a living, oozing, two-foot-long Roian hideslug.

“I’m wiped,” said Casne in Triz’s ear, once she could breathe normally instead of whooping for air. “I’m ready to head back to your place. How much longer do you want to stay?”

Triz leaned into Casne, turning a private word into a kiss on the back of her neck. “My place? Oh, are you not heading back to the quadhome?” That got her a rude noise in response, and she hid a smile against her sleeve. “Then let’s get out of here.”

They bid goodnight to Lanniq, and Saabe, who wore a knowing grin of eir own, and stumbled out of the still-packed bar and onto the Arcade. Triz still had a half-bottle of green wine in one hand, but no one waited at the door to scold her for breaking flammable liquid regulations tonight. The air out here was cooler and fresher, and Triz gulped down a welcome breath in the hope it would sober her up a bit. She wanted to remember this tomorrow and the next day—and the next and the next. Casne slung an arm around her neck, and her brandy-scented sigh roll hot and wet down the side of Triz’s cheek, and Triz thought sobriety might not be all it was cracked up to be.

“Captain Casne Vivik Veling?”

Heads cracked together, Triz’s temple to Casne’s chin, as they turned to take in whatever sycophant wanted a photosnap or an autograph. A pair of uniforms stood side-by-side under the Arcade’s bright lights. “Some other time,” Triz said, but when she went to tug on Casne’s arm, it had gone stiff inside her sleeve.

“Officers.” Casne sounded cool and formal in a way she never did with Lanniq and Saabe, who were officers too, after all. Triz looked at these two again and noticed their uniforms, though cut to Fleet standard, were a pale brown color rather than the casual gray Casne wore. “How can I help you?”

The taller of the two, with a female-denotation epaulet