Page 6 of Ward

His analysis was sound: the hall was defensible, the food materially superior to replicated packs, and a guard maintained his body as he maintained his blade.

The fact that the braise had had authority again last night was not a factor.

The fact that the flatbread arrived warm at the seventh bell precisely was not a factor. He left one bite of it unfinished every night since, on principle, and if some small dishonorable part of him had begun to regard that bite the way a man regards a tithe — the cost of pretending, paid nightly — he declined to examine it.

On the fifth night, the chef spoke to him directly for the first time, and he handled it, in his own later assessment, badly.

He had reached the front of the line. She was working the pass herself — she rotated through every station in that kitchen like a commander walking posts — and when his tray came up she looked at him, not the way the station looked at a Dalgurian but the way she looked at every being in the queue, which was to say: briefly, warmly, and with total attention.

“Special tonight, or the usual?”

“I wasn’t aware I had a usual.”

“Braise, roots doubled, flatbread.” She was already plating it, hands moving on their own authority. “Four nights running. That’s a usual. It’s fine, it’s a good usual, some beings take years to find one.” She set the tray on the pass, and added, before he could formulate a response consistent with cordial distance: “The special’s a fish thing. You’d hate it. Tomorrow’s you’d like.”

Then she was on to the Paxian behind him, and Aldric carried his usual to the corner table with the unsettling knowledge that he had been under systematic observation for four days by the one being on the station he had failed to notice observing him.

He reviewed the exchange twice that night, at the level of professional humiliation. He had been surveilled — schedule, preferences, probable objections — by a civilian, in an apron, who had then briefed him on his own pattern of life with a serving spoon in her hand.

Falkin would have laughed until he required medical attention. The correct response was to vary his routine. He did not, on the grounds that changing it would confirm the pattern existed. If some quieter consideration attended the decision, it went unlogged.

The sixth night, she had been right. He did like it.

He was at the corner table on the sixth night, halfway through the roots, when the agency came for him.

He felt it arrive before he saw it. That was the indignity of the thing: even at the last notch, Re-lee entered a room the way sunrise enters a valley, administrative delight pouring ahead of her through the doorway. The Paxian family smiled without knowing why. So did the dock crew. Half the hall turned toward the door with the pleasant confusion of beings experiencing someone else’s wonderful day.

Aldric put down his fork and thought, with real feeling: no.

“Guard Aldric!” Re-lee crossed the hall like a parade of one, pink and radiant, antennae up, a tablet clasped to her chest as if it contained a birth announcement. Which, he supposed grimly, from her perspective it did. “And — oh, wonderful, wonderful — Chef Tisha, don’t go anywhere, this concerns you!”

Behind the serving line, a woman looked up from the pass.

He had catalogued her already, of course. He catalogued everyone.

Station chef: human, brown-skinned, compact, quick, hair tied up off her neck for service; ran her kitchen the way good sergeants ran supply lines, and ran the room too — he’d watched her do it, that unconscious sweep every ninety seconds, exits and entrances, the eyes of someone raised around perimeter fencing.

Competent. Loud without volume.

The staff orbited her the way cold men orbit a stove.

She'd already clocked him.

To his annoyance.

She came around the line now, wiping her hands on her apron, eyebrows up, entirely unalarmed. “Re-lee. If this is about the catering for the reception, I already⁠—”

“It is not about catering!” Re-lee arrived at the midpoint between the corner table and the serving line, equidistant, ceremonial, beaming, and Aldric understood one full second before she said it — felt the ambush the way he felt a room change — and had exactly enough time to think, with distant professional respect, that no hostile force had ever maneuvered him this cleanly.

“By the authority of the Intergalactic Dating Agency,” Re-lee announced, to him, to the chef, to the entire dining hall at the seventh bell, “I am delighted — delighted — to confirm your match. Guard Aldric of Vorjan House. Chef Tisha of Libra Station.” Her antennae quivered with joy. “The compatibility threshold was exceeded. Substantially, if I may say. I processed the file myself and I cried.”

The hall went quiet the way halls do — a wave of it, spreading out from the word match, fork by lowered fork.

Substantially.

The word lodged somewhere under Aldric’s sternum and stuck there, a round he would be digging out for days.

Everyone knew the agency’s conservative thresholds, the way they knew tide tables and transit fares; a standard confirmation said threshold met and stopped there.