The bartender risked returning. “Anything else I can get for you, Colonel?” he asked, giving the bar top in front of her his friendliest smile while he said it.
“Club soda,” she said, then taking a guess, “Chief ?”
“Jay gee,” he said, risking a look up from the bar and into her eyes for a second, then looking back down. “Commandant doesn’t like enlisted working in here. Says it’s bad for morale.”
“Whose? Theirs or ours?” Tanaka asked, taking a pull off the soda water the bartender had poured while he spoke. It had just a hint of artificial lime flavoring that tasted like fancy soap.
“The commandant didn’t share his thoughts on that with me,” the bartender said, and started to move away.
“Still,” Tanaka said. It slowed him. Pulled him back. “Pouring drinks is a shit detail for a lieutenant. Even a junior grade. Probably not what you imagined doing when you were killing yourself to get through the academy.”
The bartender locked eyes with her now. He wasn’t bad looking. Dark hair and eyes. The hint of a dimple in his chin. He had to know who she was. What her rank and status meant. But he stared at her for a moment, trying very hard not to show any fear before he spoke. “No, Colonel, it’s not. But I’m an officer in the Laconian Navy. I serve at the pleasure of the high consul.” He managed to get some playfulness into his tone, even if it was a little forced.
Tanaka felt a familiar warmth and tug in her belly. She didn’t trust it. She was angry, she was frustrated, and the whatever-the-hell-it-was in the ring space had thrown her farther off true than she wanted to admit. She’d spent her career teaching herself how to cultivate and protect her secret lives. Taking risks when she wasn’t fully in command of herself was not on the list of good ideas.
And yet.
“You heard about San Esteban?” she asked before he could step away. “Hell of a thing. Whole system wiped out, just like that.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“That’s related to my work. My mission. No details, of course. But . . . I don’t know. We’re here, and then we’re gone. No warning. No second chances. It could happen here, and you and me and everyone on this station would be . . .” She shrugged.
“You think that’s going to happen?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But if I were you, I wouldn’t invest my tip money in long-term bonds. You know, just in case.”
He smiled, and there was fear in it. A different kind of fear. Young men didn’t like feeling mortal. It made them want to prove they were alive.
“Do you have a name, Lieutenant?”
“Randall,” he replied. “Lieutenant Kim Randall. Sir.”
He had to be forty years her junior. And the difference in their ranks was a yawning chasm that he’d be lucky to cross in a lifetime. An affair with someone of a lower rank was still a violation of the Laconian Military Code, and now that she had Omega status, literally everyone in the military outside of Fleet Admiral Trejo was a lower rank than her. But her status also put her effectively outside the law. Which took away some of what made it worth doing.
She was hungry, though. Not for sex, though that was how she was going to fix it. For control. For the sense that she wasn’t vulnerable. That she was able to exert her will over a hostile universe in the form of this boy’s body.
“So, Lieutenant Randall,” she said. “Even though my ship is docked, they gave me a room here on the station.”
“Did they?” Kim moved away, wiping down the bar top as he went.
“They did,” Tanaka said. “Would you like to see it?”
Kim froze, then turned back to look at her. He looked her up and down once, as though really seeing her for the first time. Making sure he’d understood her offer, and gauging his interest. And then Kim’s gaze landed on her ruin of a cheek for a moment, and he gave a barely perceptible flinch. It felt like a slap. She even felt her ruined cheek get warm.
A rush of emotions and reactions welled up in her, as unfamiliar as a bus filled with random strangers. Insecurity, shame, sorrow, embarrassment. She could put names to each of them, and the names were all ones she’d suffered under before. But these were different. The sting of embarrassment was like feeling it for the first time. The sorrow was a flavor of sorrow she’d never generated before. The shame was a different nuance of shame. She knew the feelings, genus and species, but they belonged to someone else. Some crowd of others who had sunk invisible wires into her heart.