Despite the fact that the restaurant was popular, they were still bleeding money. Her retirement fund would stretch only so far, and her most recent calculations—despite the multitude of times that she’d checked and rechecked them, over and over again—gave them a little under a hundred sleep units in which to become profitable.

If they didn’t do that, she didn’t know what would happen.

But the critic—one Lolola Montaigne d’Arcy deBurgh—could make them. As a representative of the Culture, an interstellar publication carried on one of the biggest viddie channels, her favorable review—if it went so far as to bestow a Nikkelin Orb on the restaurant—would bring beings from off-station, come specifically to eat at the Last Chance, come to taste Dabry’s cooking and savor Milly’s desserts and experience the atmosphere that they had somehow, magically, created out of condemned hold space due to be jettisoned.

That had still been pricey enough. In space, everything cost, everything came from somewhere, whether it was snagged from passing meteors and comet dust or trapped sunlight or—most expensive of all—brought up from some planet’s gravity well.

Three worms of light collided, recoiled, twined around one another before moving on.

Planets, she thought, were odd things.

She had only been on three in her lifetime, and each had unnerved her. The first, the world Miniver, the birthplace of the Holy Hive Mind’s creators, had been cold and everything was flat and wide and gravity pulled at her all the time, with no escape, ever, and everything had seemed so disgustingly organic all the time, like a ship so dirty that mold was growing in it.

After the tests and training, she’d stayed inside buildings whenever she could, finding comfort in low-ceilinged, windowless rooms, although even there gravity ached at her when she tried to rest or sleep. She hadn’t learned the trick yet of resting limbs so the circulation wasn’t cut off, and kept finding them fallen asleep, strange and tingling and painful, as though they had been more attached to the world than she was. She’d left as soon as she was possibly able.

The second world, Tarraquil, had been more comfortable. Or perhaps it was simply that she had been two decades older by then, and more phlegmatic about everything in general, whether it was new or not. She had been persuaded by a lover—and there, too, might have been one of the reasons she remembered it so much more fondly—a tall, gregarious woman who had been raised on that planet and wanted Niko to meet her family.

The third had been the world where Rourke’s Leap was, and she did not think of that planet if she could avoid it.