Kalan made his way back to the cutter and did his best to put his many frustrations under wraps. For all his suspicions about Cera’s possible status as some kind of spy or agent, she had actually done the things he asked her to do. Even if she really was an agent, the fact that she hadn’t made his life harder in the last few days made him feel a deeper level of gratitude and even a touch of mild affection that probably wouldn’t have existed under normal circumstances. At the very least, she hadn’t done anything he knew about to deserve catching leftover angst from him as she, in theory, started her new life. He found her in the galley, eating some of the almost-food and playing some kind of card game he didn’t immediately recognize on a holographic display. He watched for a moment, a little awed that she would and could willingly choke down that slop.

“I really don’t know how you eat that stuff,” he observed.

Cera shouted in surprise. Or rather, she tried to shout but only managed to spray a mouthful of food over the table. She whirled in her seat and glared at him. There was a red flush in her cheeks, but Kalan couldn’t tell if it was embarrassment or anger. He supposed it was probably a bit of both. She seized a napkin in a fist and angrily rubbed at her mouth. When that little operation was over, she fixed him with a glare that could have burned a hole through titanium armor.

“Will you please, in the name of every last damn god, learn to make some noise when you walk!”

Kalan did his best to suppress a smile. “I’m pretty sure we’re well past the point in my life when I can unlearn those things.”

“You could try.”

Kalan nodded. “Yes, I could, but you’d be surprised how often a quiet entrance is better than a loud one.”

She lifted an eyebrow at him. “Oh really? Like sneaking up on some might-be intelligence agent to see if they’re doing something nefarious?”

“Nefarious?”

“It means,” Cera started.

“I know what it means, Cera. I’m just wondering where you picked that word up. Most people don’t throw it around in casual conversation.”

“That’s not important,” she said in a rush.

Kalan arched an eyebrow at her almost panicked expression and shook his head. “I guess it isn’t. Let’s get this mess cleaned up. Then, we’ll get you sorted out on the station.”

Cera looked a little mournfully at the ruined meal in front of her. “It’s really not that bad.”

“It really is,” said Kalan. “If there’s time, I’ll point you to a restaurant or two you should try before you leave.”

She gave him an arch smile. “Are you asking me out to dinner?”

“Not this time. Give it a couple of years. If we bump into each other again and you really aren’t some kind of plant, we’ll talk about it.”

“Years? That’s a long time to wait for dinner.”

“Maybe, but neither of us is really in a dinner date kind of place at that moment. Wouldn’t you agree?”

An unhappy expression crossed Cera’s face, but she nodded.

“Stupid logic,” she muttered.

The pair took a few minutes to clean up the mess in the galley. Then, Kalan led her through the outer ring to where guests registered with the station. As they waited in line, he gauged her nervousness. She was doing a fair job of controlling it, but the longer they stood there in line, the more she fidgeted. That won’t do, thought Kalan.

“What kind of food do you like?” Kalan asked.

“What?” asked Cera in a distracted voice.

“I asked what kind of food you like. You know, in case we ever have the dinner date.”

Cera’s focus was entirely on him after that. She nervously pushed a few loose strands of hair behind and ear and stammered for a few seconds.

“I, um, that is, I like, uh, pasta,” she said, although the last word came out more like a question than a statement.

Kalan just nodded along like she was making perfect sense. “It’s a good choice. The ingredients are pretty easy to source, which means you can get good pasta almost everywhere. Red sauce is a bit more hit-and-miss, though.”

Cera blinked a few times. “It is?”

“Well, you need tomatoes for that, and the best sauce is made from fresh tomatoes. You can’t grow them everywhere, and they just aren’t the same after they’ve been in stasis cargo containers. Bananas are like that too. Apples, on the other hand, hold up really well.”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

“I didn’t know that. I wonder what makes the difference.”

“It shouldn’t make a difference, at least if scientists are telling the tale, but any chef will tell you otherwise.”

Once her mind was off the fact that she was on the run from her own government and preparing to change her identity, Cera seemed to calm down a bit. She started grilling Kalan about what foods she should avoid after they’d been transported. With his rather extensive background in shipping foodstuffs, he was a wellspring of information for her. When they got to the counter, she just handed over her identity card. The man behind the counter scanned it, looked up sharply at her, looked at the exceedingly calm Kalan, and then shrugged. The man gave her a professional smile.

“Welcome to Cobalt 7, miss,” he said and handed back her identification.

Kalan came and went through the ring so often that the man just scanned the ID and immediately handed it back. The pair took a transport to the central portion of the station. Kalan was struck by how this visit was a kind of dark inversion of the process he’d gone through with Fresia. Instead of helping create an identity by setting up a bank account, Cera closed hers out and converted it all to hard currency. Kalan asked her how much she had, which got an affronted look until he explained that he needed to know so he could negotiate a price for her new identity. While she seemed a little grudging about telling him, she gave him an answer. Next, Kalan took her to see Monsell. Kalan didn’t recognize the guards, but Monsell screamed at them not to be stupid when they tried to turn Kalan and Cera away.

“Rinn, you better have a really good reason for being here,” said Monsell.

Kalan frowned. “Did something happen?”

“Yeah, a guy showed up here a week or so back asking questions about you. Put two of my guys out of commission.”

Kalan did his best to keep his cool.

“Let me guess. Middle age, dark hair, well-preserved, about so high,” said Kalan, holding his hand at Banjin Colle’s approximate height.

“Yeah, that’s him. Friend of yours?”

“No,” said Kalan in a voice so cold that everyone around him shivered a little. “No, he is not a friend of mine. He’s not a friend of yours, either, if you ever see him again. He works for the Zeren Authority in the very officially unofficial part of their government.”

“Damn it. Intelligence agent?”

“Something like that.”

“That’s good to know. Well, why are you here?”

“If someone wanted to get a new identity, a good one, what would that run them?”

Monsell looked from Kalan to Cera, who was standing very still and doing her very best to not be memorable. Monsell reached up and rubbed his temples.

“You know, Kalan, for a guy who walks the straight and narrow the way you do, you’ve been spending a lot of time in my part of the world recently. Is she another one of your charity cases?”

“Not exactly. I would appreciate it if you didn’t gouge her too badly, though.”

“Fine, fine, no excessive gouging. How good an ID are we talking about here? Is this a book a room and get into a casino kind of good, or a cross borders and establish citizenship kind of good.”

“The latter,” said Kalan.

“That’s not cheap. Very not cheap. Very, very not cheap if you want it fast. The book a room kind of ID is easy because of the way the systems are set up. You only need to fool local databases. Nobody bothers with checking those IDs against the governmental databases unless someone in law enforcement specifically asks them to do it. It’s time-intensive, power-intensive, and it locks up enough of already limited communication bandwidth that most places don’t want to bother with it. As long as you don’t cause trouble, nobody checks. The other kind, that takes serious work. Systems have to be hacked. Records have to be forged, and forged in a way that doesn’t make you look suspicious. It’s an art. And art is pricey, even at the annoying acquaintance I’d rather not make angry rate.”

Kalan nodded along. He’d guessed at some of those things. “So, how much to get it fast?”

Monsell gave them a number and Cera went pale. It was most of what she’d managed to save over years of service in the Zeren Navy. Kalan didn’t blink.

“That’s fine. What do you need from us?”

“I’ll send you to the right person. They’re going to ask her,” said Monsell, pointing at Cera, “a lot of questions, take some scans for biometrics, and then they’ll assemble an identity that will let her do anything that a citizen might need to do.”

“How long to finish?”

“Assuming there isn’t anything too odd, a day.”

Kalan suppressed a sigh and nodded. “Understood.”

“They’ll want half of the money upfront. Hard currency.”

“We can do that. What about your end?”

“They’ll settle up with me when the job is done.”

“Fair enough. Where are we going?’

Monsell gave them directions and assured Kalan that the forger would be ready for them by the time they arrived. As they were walking away, Kalan hesitated.

“Monsell.”

“What is it now, Rinn?”

“There are probably going to be a lot of people coming through here looking for me, and probably for her. The kinds of people who will be knocking on the door of anyone who has any association with me. The kinds of people who ask questions while sawing off your fingers. This might be a good time to take that long vacation to an undisclosed location you’ve been talking about.”

Monsell was silent for a long moment, then he nodded.

“There is that mountain on that planet I’ve been meaning to visit,” said Monsell cryptically. “I appreciate the travel advice.”

“You’re welcome,” said Kalan.

Once they were well away from Monsell, Cera gave Kalan a look. “He’s a criminal, right? The bad, dangerous kind?”

Kalan nodded. “Oh yes, he is definitely that.”

“But you warned him.”

“I did.”

“Why?”

Kalan gave that question some real thought before he answered. “As bad as he might be at times, he’s not even close to being the worst criminal or even the worst person I’ve ever met. He has rules that he follows. Rules that he makes his people follow. They might not be rules that you or I would want to live by, but they do keep the balance between the criminal and non-criminal elements relatively stable. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than it could be. So, we tolerate each other. And, he didn’t have to help you. He could have just said no, or lied and said he didn’t know where to send you. That warranted some consideration.”

“It’s going to cost nearly my entire life savings. I’m not sure how grateful I’m feeling.”

Kalan snorted a little to himself. This part was exactly like it had been with Fresia. There was no point in getting Cera a new identity if she couldn’t even afford to get herself off of the station.

“What?” demanded Cera.

“It looks like it’s your lucky day. Come on, I need to make a stop somewhere.”

“Where?”

“A bank,” said Kalan, shaking his head.