“Turns out they want me for two reasons.” Alex tried leaning back in his chair, but like every hotel chair he’d ever sat in, it was just a little too small. This one was plush, comfortable even, though the seat wasn’t wide or long enough and the back didn’t come up to where one could reasonably expect to recline. It wasn’t like there was a way to steal these or something - you couldn’t throw it out a window to your mates on a space station. He adjusted his posture again, sitting up and stabbing a fork into his salmon. “For what Gladwell had his fit about, and because I’m the only person with any experience on the artifact.”
Carbon was a quarter of the way through her obnoxiously large ribeye already. “The only one they can expect to be able to control without causing problems.”
“Yeah. That’s... Probably how they’re looking at it.” It didn’t sound as good when she put it that way.
“And you felt as though the Admiral was being honest about this?” She talked around a piece of steak, eyebrows arched as she glanced up at him.
“I know I’m not always the best judge of character, but she seems far more earnest about the whole thing. I guess it feels like they’re just keeping me on retainer more than anything? Not for any particular skill or capability I’ve shown, just because I’ve lucked into a couple of experiences outside the scope of human experience until now.” Alex paused to separate a piece of skin from the rest of the fish and scooted it over to the edge of his plate. “Not gonna lie, that is making me feel a lot less accomplished in life.”
“It was only your capability that allowed you to ‘luck’ into those experiences.” She said, giving him an affectionate nudge under the table. “Was it luck that allowed you to use the Eohm’s own sense of morality to prevent them from firing on the Kshlav’o almost long enough to jump? Or how you used the sensors to blind incoming missiles?”
Alex stopped a forkful of salmon halfway to his mouth and looked at her, head tilted to the side. “How’d you know I did that?”
Carbon smirked at him and waggled her antenna. “Well, was it luck?”
Of course she’d seen it. “No, it wasn’t. Frying missiles with scanners is an old trick, hard to defend against but also hard to pull off. And using the Eohm against each other was an educated guess. We were lucky it worked.”
“So it is our luck that did all these things, and not just your luck?” She was incredibly amused by this line of thought, idly stroking Alex’s ankle with her toes as she continued, “I just say that because I believe I have had some amount of fortune as well...”
“M-maybe it was just your luck carrying me the whole time.” He stammered there, once, not expecting what he was perceiving as a compliment, a blush on his cheeks as he recalled that what she was doing under the table has a somewhat more intimate connotation to the Tsla’o.
There was no hiding the glee in her response to that. “It is possible. Between my bountiful luck and your skills, we made it out of that situation alive and well.”
“Please, your knowledge of the systems onboard was critical to getting us back.” He gestured with his fork, tines coated in a creamy tuscan sauce, and very much nearly composed again. “Even if they were standard Human waverider drives, even with the very detailed repair guides, I don’t think I could have pulled off a fix like that.”
“So you agree it was just skill and not luck?”
Alex started to say something, catching his immediate response mid-syllabyl. He sat up, realizing he’d been argued into a corner by someone who was inhaling a steak at an alarming rate and hadn’t even slowed down to do it. “Ahah, I see. Fine, yes! I agree.”
“I knew you would come around on that.” She beamed, another bit of ribeye disappearing into her slender muzzle. “How is your... ah, salmon? Yes?”
“It’s good but I’m regretting my choice.” It was actually the best he’d ever had. But sitting arms length away from a steak that looked like it could be used to advertise beef and smelled even better, sort of dampened that.
“Would you like to try it?” She asked, the razor sharp steak knife poised and ready to cut.
He took a deep breath and pondered that question for about a half a second. “Actually, I would.”
She offered up a bite, and he couldn’t help but wonder if this was normal behavior for Tsla’o or if she’d picked it up from Humans. Carbon had mentioned that she’d seen Human couples before while getting the drives installed on the Kshlav’o. Presumably it would change her behavior in this relationship, but how much? There must not be any sort of deep seated taboo about sharing food or utensils... These thoughts didn’t stop him from going for it, though.
Alex hadn’t thought about it in awhile, but she had fed him while he was stuck on the mediboard with broken limbs, and that was when their relationship was somewhat cooler and more professional. There were a lot of variables on just this one interaction, a fork held over a table. Carbon had only occasionally used a fork, for that matter. Trying to suss out Tsla’o culture with just her as a sample size was going to be impossible unless she wrote the reports for him.
One thing was certain, he’d chosen wrong as far as dinner was concerned. “Damn that’s a good steak.”
“Is it? We do not have livestock that produce pieces of meat like this, I have no point of reference.” She pondered another very rare bite stuck on the tines, turning it slowly. “The... fat striations are unusual. Though I am finding it is very easy to become accustomed to.”
“The chef here is excellent. I can barely tell that’s vatmade.” He went back to the salmon, likely also vatmade given the distance to the nearest ocean they live in could currently be measured in astronomical units. Yes, there were plenty of ways to ship things like that, but running food fabrication onboard was the most efficient way for larger ships and stations to stay stocked.
“The menu said these were true meats.” She took another bite like that wasn’t a big deal.
“Are you- what. No.” Alex reached for the data pad they had ordered room service with and scrolled through it until he found the ribeye and hit the little asterisk to pop up more information. “All foods served in Gardien de Phare are naturally grown on Earth unless otherwise noted. Huh.”
“You seem bothered by that?”
He scrolled down to the salmon, which specifically stated that it was wild line caught. Where did he even start? “Not bothered, I think. Just- I do feel a little shocked. I’m from there and I’ve never had actual, used-to-be-living beef or fish before. Vegetables every now and then, maybe on a holiday. It’s kind of expensive to buy the real stuff. But otherwise almost everything came from the deck’s fabricator or hydroponics.”
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Carbon was silent when he finished speaking, hands resting on the table that she was staring through, brow furrowed in contemplation. “Was... it a problem for you? For your family?”
“What, vatmeat? Nah, it’s fine. Having had several kinds of fabbed fish and now this, I can actually say that with some amount of authority.” He laughed, though the joke didn’t gain any traction with Carbon. “The main difference is variation. You don’t get a lot of it from-”
“You said it was expensive, was that ever an issue? Did you ever...” She looked up at him and hesitated, her body tensed. Like she couldn’t figure out how to finish that question without breaking some taboo he actually wasn’t aware of.
“Was food ever an issue?” It wasn’t a particularly long jump to figure out where she was going.
“Yes.”
“No, we just didn’t buy the expensive stuff. Particularly when it came to produce. You can’t tell a hydro potato from a ground potato. I can’t anyway.” He pushed his fork through a little mound of rice pilaf, separating the grains from the bits of onion and celery. All of it likely the real deal. “We had a dispenser too, but mom and dad both liked cooking so it didn’t get a lot of use. Mostly just made coffee. And juice that tasted a little like coffee.”
Carbon relaxed and laughed softly at that last joke. “I am- I am glad, Alex. Thank you.”
“Of course. You know if you have any questions like that, that you are not sure how to ask, I’m not going to be upset about you asking.” Despite the best fish he’d ever had now being fine at best, he continued eating it. “Consider me an open book.”
“I should have. You have never given me a reason to believe you are not.” Her tone was still subdued, her previous pace through the steak before her dialed down to nothing now as she rolled a carrot along the crisp white china plate, lost in thought.
“Something going on over there?”
“I have... Nnh, my momentary concern about your childhood has reminded me of why I am here in the first place.”
Alex sifted through the things he thought that ‘here’ could pertain to. Eating dinner? No, too narrow a focus. Same with being in his room again. The station? It could have something to do with what happened on the Kshlav’o, but that didn’t feel quite right as well. Why she was on- oh, yes. “About the disaster on Schon?”
She nodded and slid the plate away from herself. “Have you heard much about it? I saw what Ed had shown you, but I did not want to see more.”
“Then you saw almost all I know. That little incident wasn’t long before launch and there were a lot of sync-data changes for the drives coming in, for obvious reasons.” He set his fork down and wiped his mouth, stopping while she did. “Mostly just kept my head in that. I didn’t need to know more, what I was doing wasn’t just exploration anymore. I felt the weight of it.”
Carbon picked up her glass of water, real crystal based on the sounds it made when the room service had set the table, and looked into it for a moment before putting it back. When she looked back at him there was terrible guilt in her expression, bright blue eyes darting away after a moment. “Due to my station, I am more well versed about the situation on Schon than most. Those of us outside the ashfall want for less and less. For those inside, the situation does not change. Rationing is tight, everything is very scarce. I have seen the videos, read the reports. Endless night, city-wide shields humming and cracking constantly.”
“That sounds distressing.” Alex didn’t feel like eating anymore, either.
“And I sit here in these luxurious quarters, dining on rarified foods from my boyfriend’s homeworld - my alien boyfriend! Not a single thought given to my people living in that nightmare.” Anger colored her words now as she held herself in contempt of her own race.
“Hang on. You didn’t make the decisions that landed you here.” He bristled at the tone she got when talking about her alien boyfriend, though Alex knew it wasn’t directed at him. “You didn’t ask for diplomatic quarters, they were issued to us. And since we’re living under the watchful eye of the Diplomatic Security Services now, we have one place to order from.”
“I did not.” She was still mad at herself, and seemed to be set on staying that way. “I am still enjoying them.”
“What are you supposed to do, call down to the restaurant that doesn’t even list prices on it’s menu for some hard tack and dish water?”
She gave him a puzzled glance, hard tack being a bit too obscure for her. “No.”
“Maybe we can just take a trip back to Schon and you can fly down there real quick and offload a couple of cities.” Despite how casually he said it, that comment was way sharper than he wanted it to be. But she was angry at someone he’d come to care deeply about, and that wouldn’t stand.
“You- Wh-” Carbon leaned forward and hissed something in Tsla he didn’t even manage to catch part of, ears all the way back and eyes narrow as she glared at him, a surprising number of sharp little teeth on display.
Goodness, did that feel like a threat. At least she wasn’t mad at herself anymore. “Did you give up on them?”
“No.” Dark blue lips settled back down, teeth put away though her posture didn’t change. “I would never.”
“I know you wouldn’t. I haven’t even known you for a year, and I know that you are that kind of tenacious.” He let out a sigh, Carbon’s offensive posture easing back further as he spoke. “You did what you set out to do. We came back with six habitation-viable planets, ten more that are resource rich, and dozens of mineable asteroid fields. All of that data has already been sent to your government. Would more be nice? Sure. But don’t get mad at yourself for not being able to fix this instantly. I know you just got me to say it wasn’t luck, but it was luck. We almost died bad, several times. We were real close to not coming back. But we did. We saw things that shouldn’t exist along the way. So you can embark on another facet of helping your people soon. I know you will. But for now, you need to decompress.”
Carbon fiddled with her fingers, avoiding eye contact but clearly back to actually thinking.
Alex had said some things in that little speech that he’d been... avoiding. Now, loose from the hole he had crammed them into, they wandered his thoughts freely. He was her boyfriend, yes, but he was the new interest. He didn’t really have anything useful to add to the whole ‘get the Tsla’o off their wrecked planet’ thing she had going on for the last couple of years, aside from some emotional support.
He was an experienced pilot, though. He was even familiar with the main tenet of flying in ash: don’t. Every surface it came in contact with would end up abraded, it would choke every sort of engine that wasn’t fully sealed, and had a tendency to cake on thrusters when they got hot enough to melt it back into lava.
How would you even load up a ship in that environment? Certainly their cities hadn’t been built with this as a potential problem in mind. You’d have to fly on instruments all the way down, who knows what sort of navigation systems and landing areas were left. Ships would have to set down outside the shielded areas and walk people through the ashfall. It’d be everywhere in the hold. There'd have to be maintenance done after every trip to make sure the next one didn’t end in a crater.
She interrupted his pondering of the difficulties they were facing with a quiet statement. “I am sorry I called you that.”
“I didn’t understand enough of it, what did you say?” He didn’t have his tablet on hand to run it through the translator even if he had, and he got the feeling it wouldn’t have been in there anyway.
Carbon made a negative little noise and shook her head.
Yikes. “Well, apology accepted as long as you promise to tell me someday.”
“Someday, if you ask again.” The glance she gave him, brief as it was, said she would prefer it if he did not ask again.
“Alright.” Alex gave her a shrug, not wanting to argue about something like that. “I love you, and I do that knowing you’re not a miracle worker. I wish you did too.”
There was a particular sadness in her eyes as she looked back up, meeting his gaze for a moment before standing and walking over to his bed. Carbon laid down with her hands folded over her sternum, staring at the ceiling in silence, motionless save for her jaw working as she struggled with whatever she didn’t yet want to speak.
Alex cleaned up the table. Put the food away in the little fridge, all the silverware and napkins returned to the cart that he rolled back into the hall. He dimmed the lights and sat next to her on the bed, patting her shoulder gently. “I don’t know if it’ll be okay. I know you’ll do everything you can.”
She rolled over and hugged herself to his back, squeezing him hard. “But what if it is not enough?”