“Fine. Let’s begin with the mountain Runams,” Maive said, then poked Krax in the arm. “This part isyou.”
He rolled his eyes, but complied, of course. “After your visit to their base, we received a communication from their leader, Anlara,” Krax explained. “She and her people are not as isolated as they appear. As it turns out, she was a guild member herself, once. I’d make a joke about you two knowing each other, but I want to get through this with my teeth intact.”
“He can learn,” I muttered, then waved a hand. “Go on.”
“Anlara retired from the guild before you joined it, from what I understand,” Krax said. “But she still had channels, and when she met you, she recognized that she was looking at a fellow mercenary.”
“Aretiredmercenary,” Maive added.
“Yes. She found that interesting,” Krax said. “So she reached out to the guild and told them what was happening here. What you’d said to her.”
“Did that happen to be the same day,” I said slowly and with a grimace, “that I sent them my last message?”
“Yes.” He paused. “Before that, the guild had a theory about you.”
“I know the theory.” I closed my eyes briefly. “Thejunversyrup. They thought I’d gone into trade.”
“The merchant operation made sense from the outside. A retired Level Ten sets up on a remote planet with a rare biological resource? It reads as a smart business decision.” Krax looked at me. “Then we got your message, followed soon by Anlara’s.”
Maive turned to look at me.
“What message?” she asked.
“A communication,” I said. “To the guild. Clarifying the misunderstanding.”
“What kind of clarification?”
Krax found this exchangeveryinteresting. “That he had no financial interest in thejunversyrup,” Krax told her with a little too much glee. “He also included a lengthy, moving statement about how important the villagers were to him, that he would fight to the death for them.” He smiled wider. “That he had fallen in love with a woman. I assume that’s you, ma’am.”
“I should hope so.” Maive’s head turned toward me, one brow raised. “You told the guild this?”
“In the course of the explanation, yes.” I pinned Krax with a hard look. “I hate you, by the way.”
Krax just shrugged. “The lady asked. I answered.”
Meanwhile, Maive had done the mental calculations. “You told the entire mercenary guild that you loved me, before you toldmeyou loved me.”
“There was an unfortunate sequence of events.” I crossed my arms. “I won’t apologize. Emotions are new for me.”
She looked at me for a long moment. I had the clear sense that this conversation would have a second half that was going to happen in private, and I had earned every word of it.
I circled my hand in the air. “Get on with it, newbie.”
Krax was only too happy to comply. “So the guild receives an emotional personal communication from a retired Rank V, saying he’s in love with a Runam village leader on an outer-quadrant planet, denying he’s doing any kind of business out here. Then, that same day, we receive a separate query from Anlara, aboutyou, both backing up your claim that you’re not a merchant and your…affectionfor these people.” He spread his hands. “Two retired mercenaries. Same topic. Same day. That has not happened before. No one could remember anything close to it. People got curious.”
“People got curious,” I repeated, and let out a snort.
“Several of us were between assignments.”
“And?”
He looked faintly uncomfortable. “We took a vote.”
I regarded him. The guild did not vote on things. The guild had contracts and rates and a hierarchy that had functioned on those principles for longer than I’d been alive. “A vote.”
“Informal.”
“To come out here with a warship and fifty mercenaries?”
