Back in her office she took down her book. Skullduggery and Sacred Space Vessels: A Life Among Space Pirates. She fingered the spine. A man had died in the writing of this, had escaped the pirates half flayed but alive, gasped out these details of the pirates and their wandering havens. The book had been read across the Known Universe a few years earlier. When she’d heard of it, she had a hard copy printed here on-station.

She flipped it open to the first chapter and started to read it anew, but she knew the words by heart, and finally she set it down and went to bed and restless dreams.

5

Despite Niko’s fears, nothing else happened in the next few hours. The servobots finished cleaning the front room, and Niko printed out the new menu Dabry had constructed, trying to avoid mentally calculating just how slim some of the profit margins were. Everything was fine. Skidoo sat in her cubicle, taking calls and making reservations.

News that the critic might be coming had driven traffic up considerably; Skidoo was coyly taking reservations for everything except the period when they knew Lolola would be there, nonetheless managing each time to imply that the person making the reservation might be able to glimpse the critic. Whenever Niko passed through the kitchen, everyone was in place, their focus laser-beam tight.

Everything was fine.

Up to a certain point, which was when Lolola Montaigne d’Arcy deBurgh was due to arrive in less than an hour and the very large party that Skidoo had apparently not canceled arrived.

The first Niko knew of it was when one of the waitstaff came rushing back to her office. “We don’t have enough chairs,” she gasped.

“What?”

Niko had never seen Jakka lose her calm, even under heavy fire. But right now the Dlin’s scarlet and umber pelt was haphazard swirls, her eyes wide and panic stricken. “Thirty people!” she said. “That’s how many are in the party Skidoo booked.”

“I told her to cancel that reservation!”

“She didn’t,” Jakka said. “And now we are out of chairs.”

Out in the entrance vestibule, the admiral’s party could be glimpsed milling about, Lassite in the middle although dwarfed by the larger beings while Thorn and Talon tried to assemble chairs and tables in a side chamber.

“Grab the extra chairs out of the storeroom and my office,” Niko told Talon. “Stick them nearest the wall, so the mismatch is less noticeable—” She broke off as the admiral approached.