They sat together in the mess hall. Tasia listened to the rowdy trainees making jokes about the phlegmlike consistency of the supposed vegetables, but she found them quite tasty. Roamers didn’t have prissy taste buds, and they knew that nutritious food was more important than flavorful delicacies.

“So what’s your story, Brindle?” she asked, raising her eyes to his open and undeceitful face. “You don’t fit in with the rest of those kleebs.”

He looked troubled. “I suppose it takes another misfit to notice that but, yeah, I’m different from them. Those guys signed up on a dare because they heard King Frederick’s call, and now most of them regret doing it. Me, I always knew I was going to join the EDF, ever since I was a kid.”

“Not one for extravagant ambitions, I see,” Tasia said.

“Hey, I was an Eddie brat. My parents were in the military, and I grew up in army stations on Antarctica, the Gobi. We were even stationed on Mars for two years. Seemed perfectly natural to me.” Robb quickly ate his rations. “I never really thought about another alternative. Always knew what I would do.”

He pushed his tray aside and leaned closer. “Turnabout time. What are you doing here? Roamers don’t exactly line up to join the military. I’m sorry about how the others treat you, you know. They’ve got to have someone to haze until they find a real enemy, I suppose.”

She shrugged. “From what I’ve seen, that type of behavior’s often a symptom of particularly small penis size.”

Robb chuckled. After the joke had passed, Tasia found herself spilling the story about Ross and the Blue Sky Mine and how she had run away to join the Eddies. He looked sympathetic, and then thrilled to hear a direct account of an encounter with the mysterious enemy aliens. He was also fascinated to hear her sketchy descriptions of Roamer life, which was a mystery to most people. Robb finished his cup of bitter coffee, saw that hers was empty too, and snagged it on his way to the refill dispenser. He brought back a full cup for her and set it in front of her hands, though she had not asked for it.

“It must be difficult for you Roamers to live without a home, when the whole galaxy is just waiting to be settled, so many Hansa worlds up for grabs. I’m surprised you keep living in your ships like gypsies.”

“It’s not like that,” Tasia said. “We prefer to depend on our own resources and abilities and not get too coddled like those morons in the decompression exercise today. They wouldn’t survive ten minutes of a regular day’s work on a Roamer colony.”

“Neither would I, probably,” Robb said.