Page 29 of Ward

The morning the feeds ran her kitchen, Tisha was proofing the day’s bread, and Dot found out first, which meant the station knew by second bell.

It was a Hargrove segment.

They were all Hargrove segments now, but this one had production values: a graphic of Libra Station cut open like an anatomy lesson, a stern voice asking who these people really work for.

Then — between a bio-lab tech and a docking coordinator — her own dining hall, lifted off someone’s public feed from the dock chief’s birthday.

Cake. Candles. Forty beings of a dozen species singing, and her behind the pass, laughing, name-tagged by some staffer who’d pulled the station’s public roster.

TISHA — STATION CHEF

And the stern voice said: “They’re not just working with them. They’re feeding them. Ask yourself what that tells you about where the loyalty sits.”

She watched it once, on Dot’s tablet, in the flour-hung quiet of the bakery corner, with Renn reading over her shoulder on two levels at once.

Professional offense came first, embarrassingly.

It was a good frame. The cake had come out beautifully, the hall looked like the warmest room in near-Earth space. Everyone in the shot was luminous with the joy of somebody else’s birthday — and this man had aired it as evidence.

He’d taken the single best thing she knew how to make, a room where everybody ate, and held it up with tongs, like contamination.

The second reaction settled more slowly, quieter and lower. She’d grown up on bases. She knew what it meant when somebody with a megaphone started reading names.

“They spelled the kitchen right,” she said, finally, handing the tablet back. “That’s something.”

“Tish.”

“Bread’s on schedule. Marisol’s crew took the early freight, so we’re short greens again — Renn, comm the Andovi.” She was already moving, because moving was the answer; moving had always been the answer. “And nobody touches my service. We’re not changing one thing.”

“Admin memo says heightened posture,” Dot said. “Says consider modified operations.”

“This is modified. I’m considering it while operating.” She tied her apron strings with a snap. “Walls change, honey. Dinner doesn’t.”

The staff meeting she held at the third bell lasted ninety seconds and consisted mostly of that sentence.

But she ran her sweeps a little tighter afterward, all morning, exits and friendlies.

She caught herself checking the corner table’s clean sightlines with a new and unfamiliar arithmetic.

At the seventh bell, the big grey-blue shape settled into the corner with a tray as if the last month hadn’t happened, as if the plate hadn’t happened, and something in her shoulders dropped half an inch.

He was back at the seventh bell.

The wire had worked; the scout had come in as far as the corner table.

She sent out the roots doubled and didn’t look at him eat them.

The Bridge crew came in late in the dinner service, and Marsh came in mean.

She’d been watching that table for a week the way you watch milk on heat. Refit contractors, up from Earth-side on rotation, most of them fine — tired men, good tippers in gossip, converts to the burger.

But Marsh had come up sunburned and mean, souring as the feeds got louder, and tonight the feeds had run her kitchen, and he had clearly spent the afternoon somewhere with a screen and a grievance and the kind of friends who watered both.

She’d clocked the table going wrong through the first half of the service, the way you clock a pot about to boil over. The crew had come in without their usual noise.

Marsh sat at the end of them with his food untouched, running his thumb over the edge of his tray, saying short things that made the others look at their plates, and twice she’d seen him turn to watch the Charro honeymooners with an expression that had nothing to do with dessert.

She’d flagged Renn with a glance — the glance that meant eyes up — and Renn had drifted his prep to the near end of the line, and she’d decided that if the table hadn’t settled by the time their mains were down, she’d go over herself with the water pitcher and the voice.