“Hey.” She gave him an affectionate slap.

It was moments like that, the ease they had between them, that gave him hope for the future. Over the last year they’d regained so much of what they used to have. They met when their schedules matched, talked, sometimes viewed dramas together; several times they’d been to concerts. Not quite like the old times. They hadn’t become lovers again. Yet. But the relationship, whatever it was, had been too much for Xante. “I can’t compete with this,” he’d told Dellian as he moved out of their quarters.

“With what?” a depressed Dellian had challenged.

Xante gave him a simple shrug. “Hope. That you’ll get back together with her. That the pair of you will fly on to Sanctuary after the final battle, and live happily ever after. Crap like that, you’re never here anymore.”

“I am!”

“Not in your head, you’re not. You spend all your head time thinking of her.”

“I tried an electrical discharge,” Dellian now explained to Yirella. “But I panicked and put too much power into it. Fried every chunk of technology in there.”

“Okay, well, the idea was sound.”

“Yeah? So—”

“No, I’m not giving you any clues.”

Dellian managed a weak smile and put his arm around her. “But it is solvable? We can get to the negative energy loop chamber?”

“Probably.” She laughed.

They wandered along to one of their favorite groves, where the trunks of the older trees grew upward in an identical shallow curvature as they followed the camber of the toroid’s rotational gravity, as if they’d all bowed to the same wind. He always found walking underneath them to be slightly disconcerting. Orchids and trailing moss swamped the boughs above, with bright-plumed birds zipping about. On the edge of the grove was a small waterfall emptying into a pond filled with ancient gold and black koi fish. A marble table was perched beside it, inside the ribs of a radial pergola draped with sweet flowering jasmine.

When they sat down, remotes started to unpack their meal and lay it out for them. Dellian sipped some of the wine they poured and scanned the small slice of star field he could see through the shaggy vegetation. Juloss was always visible just above the lip of the geodesic, while the various free-flying subsidiary stations slipped in and out of view, tracing short arcs.

“Is that the Morgan?” he asked, as one of the battleship assembly stations appeared.

She barely glanced up from the plate of seared scallops the remote had put down in front of her. “No, the McAuley. You can’t see the Morgan from here.”

“It’s nearly finished.”

“I know.”