“I had two leftover scouts in the corner,” Tennal said. He added softly, in Surit’s ear, “Take them down, Surit.”

Surit looked up at the game board and half of Oma’s trusted aides watching him. Behind him, Tennal smiled at Fari and took him aside, not quite flirting, but not quite not. Nobody’s eyes followed Tennal. Everyone was waiting to see what Surit would do with Tennal’s abandoned game. Tennal had created a vortex of attention and then neatly—so neatly—slipped out of it and replaced himself with Surit. And now Tennal was holding a quiet conversation with the person he’d wanted to interrogate, in a bubble of privacy so complete, he might as well be on another station. Surit doubted he’d planned it. Tennal just took whatever step seemed most likely to work.

But Surit was good at games that had rules.

Surit located his scouts. He looked up at the faces watching him and said, “My apologies, officers. Is it my turn?”

It was a long time before the campaign wound up and Surit carefully withdrew Tennal’s rebuilt forces to a modest victory. The other players were drunk, which had made it a neat set of predictable outcomes. Real war didn’t go like this, of course. This was just a lot of computational rules you could memorize. Surit wondered, sometimes, if he’d been born in a period with real wars or rebellions, if he would have had any talent at that. Then he remembered Marit, who had been so good at it that hundreds of people had died, and his thoughts stopped.

The party was winding down. Tennal emerged from the shadows and pulled him out of the group, his hand loosely around Surit’s wrist.

Outside the restaurant, in the mouth of a service corridor, Tennal let go of his wrist and leaned against the wall. “I thought they’d go for that. I’m a genius.”

Surit didn’t immediately answer. The line of Tennal’s throat was outlined in crimson and blue light thrown from a sign opposite. Surit knew his own tendencies, which had nothing to do with gender and everything to do with people who were lightning strikes on dead land. He didn’t say, Are you?

He said, “How did you guess I played battle sim well enough to keep the attention off you?”

“Ninety-six percent in your exams, and every officer learns it,” Tennal said smugly. “You have the right kind of mind. Was I wrong?”

“All right,” Surit said, giving in. “You got yourself a private conversation with Captain Fari. What did you learn?”

Tennal raised a finger. “The remnants you found in chaotic space are currently in—totally legal—archival storage. They’ve been temporarily neutralized. There’s a paper trail and everything, Fari thinks. Of course, he didn’t know why I was asking, but if they are in the station archives, then Oma isn’t using them.”