Istara paused, apparently reevaluating their first impression. Pleased with the effect, Tennal left to get cups of coffee and did a round of the room, dropping more Surit-related stories at every opportunity. Surit himself was discussing something with two mechanics at his workstation, and occasionally glanced suspiciously at Tennal whenever a pair of rankers turned to look at him.

Tennal considered that a good morning’s work. He plowed through more pilot-training modules, leveling up from a bathtub in a small vacuum to maybe a dinghy in very generous gravity. Istara was witheringly scornful of his efforts to memorize the right terms, but the point wasn’t to make him a pilot, Tennal reminded himself. The point was to give him more than a kindergartener’s understanding of ship navigation so he could tell the real pilots what his senses were telling him.

And besides, his scraping of knowledge just needed to carry him through this mission. Then he’d be gone.

He absently read the temperature of the room as he worked. Istara and Basavi had definitely been friends for years; they talked and thought like people who had lived in each other’s pockets. The rest of the unit wasn’t quite as tight-knit, but they all had a working familiarity with each other. Tennal and Surit were the unknown quantities.

Basavi and Istara disappeared at lunchtime. For once Tennal didn’t get to play the outsider, because Surit scooped him up on the way to the canteen like this was natural, sat them both over trays in the officer section, and gave him a long stare with a crease between his eyebrows.

“What did you do,” Surit said.

“Absolutely nothing,” Tennal said virtuously. “What are we talking about?”

“Half the unit started being polite to me this morning for no reason,” Surit said. “I saw you talking to the rankers.”

“I was fetching coffee,” Tennal said, neglecting to mention that Surit was now responsible, in the eyes of the more credulous half of Retrieval Two, for three heroic rescues and a shoot-out with freight smugglers. “I’m very dedicated to the comfort and well-being of my unit.”

Tennal was rewarded for his public spirit by his comms shift with Basavi.

A comms shift was much less headache-inducing than pilot training, and Basavi didn’t really need the help. When she wasn’t paying attention, Tennal surreptitiously went looking for the public Archer Link channels.

A surprising number of the station’s public channels were restricted or throttled. Tennal thought back to when Governor Oma had called his aunt. He vaguely remembered her referencing an attempted coup. He wondered if that was related.

But that was none of his business. The governor had her own public channel, and Tennal still had codes for some basic anonymization services from his misspent year with the gambling rings, so he could do just enough obfuscation to let his message blend into the flow of outbound traffic.