Page 34 of Mongrels United
Her gaze cut away from him, telling him he was right. “Eat,” she added, her tone firm. “I’ll wait until you see just one of me.”
“I see you just fine, right now,” he assured her. But he ate more, because she was right.
While he ate, she took forkfuls of the cake, sipped her coffee and looked around the bar with puzzled curiosity. The second time her gaze moved to the tank, he said, “It’s a zero gee field. For dancers who want to float.”
Her mouth opened in a silent ‘oh’ and she examined the tank again. “One can’t dance in zero gee.”
“Kailash’s topmen do,” Nash said. Which surprised even him. The scotch was still messing with his judgement.
Grady tilted her head. In the harsh overhead lights, the top of her head glowed with golden highlights. It complimented her brown eyes. “You’ve seen them play.” She seemed pleased by that.
He got back to eating.
So did she.
He finished the bowl of stew, which he didn’t think he would be able to do. He even ate the roll, which was warm and soft in the middle. By then, Grady had parked a cup of coffee in front of him, in a mug twice as big as hers.
“You didn’t print cream and sugar,” he pointed out.
“You strike me as the type who won’t touch either.” She tilted her head, the tilt making it a question.
He eyed the remains of her cake. “That looks pretty good, though.” The words came out straight and clear and he didn’t have to work to make them that way. The sobersol had kicked in.
She glanced at her plate. Then at him. Her smile was broad. Delighted. “Youlike chocolate!” she accused him. “Alot,” she added, copying the tone he had used.
“If you tellanyone,” he replied, “I’ll kill you.”
Grady laughed. She got to her feet and headed back to the printer. She came back to the table with the high slice of cake, still smiling. “Your secret is safe,” she assured him, and pushed it in front of him.
Nash scowled. She was teasing.
Teasing.
Nevertheless, he’d heard the solemn vow in her tone. She would never tell anyone, not because of the stupid promise of violence if she did, but simply because he didn’t want her to.
He ate the cake in a dozen enormous bites, while trying to look as though he wasn’t enjoying it as much as he was.
“Did you know that the first few hundred years on theEndurance,chocolate was an endangered species?” Grady said, her mug in her hand. “The printed chocolate wasn’t the same—they had different food files back then, because the organic coders hadn’t got around to rebuilding them. So the good chocolate only came from real bushes, which the Palatine farm had enormous difficulty growing, until they figured out how to build a sustainable enclosed environment around plants.”
Nash sucked the last of the chocolate and cherry syrup off the fork. “Lucky us, huh?” He just managed to avoid belching as he pushed the plate away. The calories would help, he told himself. And the sugar would spike his metabolism, and counter the depressive effects of the alcohol. He studied Grady. “I guess knowing the ship’s history would be useful, in your job.”
“Make that essential,” Grady replied. “But it’s depressing, knowing all that history. The breakthroughs, the improvements they made, back then, were almost weekly. We haven’t had a significant advance in any field for far too long.” She stared into her mug. “It’s almost as though we expended all our creative energy on replating the ship and now we have to coast until we can…I don’t know. Refuel?” She scowled and drank her coffee.
Nash’s heart gave a little jump. He put it down to the sobersol’s ruthless cleaning and kickstarting of his systems, and settled his back against the padded back of the bench. “Okay, I am as sober as I will get without sleeping it off. You were going to tell me something about my father.”
Grady considered him, her gaze steady. She was measuring him, he guessed. “It’s not good news, Nash.”
He drew in a breath. Let it out. “Figures. Okay, surprise me, if you can.”
A tiny frown marred the smooth flesh between her brows. He realized he’d said too much, and incited her curiosity. Or her pity. He mentally cursed. The sobersol couldn’t clean out his self-control. That was still under the influence. “Just tell me what you know.” His voice was too harsh, but it was better than sounding pathetic.
Grady shifted into Chief of Staff mode. He watched her do it. She had been the Chief of Staff when she walked in here, but somewhere between that blurred moment and this one, she had put aside the administrator. Now she put the mask back on. Her shoulders straightened. Not dramatically, but they shifted to a squared off posture. She returned the mug to the table.
One hand laid flat on the smooth, black surface of the table. “For one thing, the lab we reached out to have confirmed that the tablets you gave us are Bellish. That’s just their first definitive statement. They’re digging deeper into the chemical structure, which they agreed was slightly different from the old version. In the next couple of days, we’ll know what the differences mean in terms of effects upon users.”
Nash shrugged. “I didn’t doubt it was Bellish. Rim was too scared for it to be anything else.”
“He might have made a mistake. He was drawing from memories nearly twenty years old,” Grady pointed out.
