Warwick snorted. “All manner of contraband, sure. You know Liars. They don’t really believe in laws. But there are no bombs, no manifestos, no secret invasion plans, no dark prophecies.” She waved her hand. “But we’re still looking, so, go. I have work to do.”

“Thanks, chief. I bet it’s just, you know, Liar things. Some weird alien emotional weather.” She wanted to put Warwick’s mind at ease, but she could hardly do that definitively without revealing her possession of potentially system-changing technology to a TNA officer, and she didn’t feel that guilty. “We’ll get armed up, pop over to Ganymede to drop off our refugee, and then see what we can do about Glauketas.”

“Don’t die. I’d be devastated to lose all my new weapons.”

Chapter Ten

“A bar is a bar is a bar,” Elena muttered, stepping into the Spinward Lounge. This was supposed to be an expedition for street food, but the sudden craving for a drink, and even more importantly, for quiet and isolation, seized her and wouldn’t let go.

“They had bars in Shakespeare’s day, and your day, and ours,” Shall agreed in her earpiece.

The Spinward Lounge was dim, an open space filled with tables and chairs and little arched nooks and crannies holding booths and couches; some of the nooks were screened off with curtains. The lounge was sparsely occupied, and that was very appealing. The station corridors were crowded with people, some so physically modified Elena only knew they were human because she’d been told Liars were the only aliens, and there weren’t any of those on the station at the moment. She’d known people who were transgender, non-binary, genderqueer, agender, and more in her time, but the accepted range of human variation had clearly continued expanding.

She’d hugged the station walls, staying out of the bustling flow, cursing herself for her cowardice, until she finally decided she was no more confused than a citizen of 1700s Italy would have been if they’d gone into, say, a twenty-second century San Francisco sex club. Of course she was overwhelmed. She’d expected to finish out her days, best-case scenario, on a colony world populated by her crewmates and infants birthed from incubators. This profusion of people, and the overall strangeness of the situation, against the backdrop of her ongoing anxiety, was simply too much for her.

She wanted to retreat to her cabin on the White Raven, but she refused to be defeated. She was going back into space, and soon, and might not return here; she might not even survive. She intended to partake in a little of the works of modern humanity before she flitted back into the void. She’d never expected to see a bar again, after all, and once upon a time, she’d loved them.

She was glad it was a quiet and nearly empty bar, though.