The office was still lined on two sides with shelves, now holding a mix of data pads, books, clothes, and miscellaneous ordnance and knives, and a hanging rack half full of white chefs’ jackets, the other half full of disused civvies. A folding cot was jammed up against the wall behind her, next to two crates filled with glossy black rocks left over from the redecorating effort. Past menus were stickied to the wall, the plastic slips fluttering whenever the door opened or closed.

She narrowed her eyes at Dabry. “I know,” she said, “and that was not the worst plan you’ve ever come up with, but you’re taking it so seriously. It’s a restaurant. A glorified location for the satisfaction of one of the most basic urges.”

Dabry pointed two lower fingers at her in emphasis. “And you cannot talk like that, or they will know you are not an artist.”

Niko shuddered. When it came to retiring from the Holy Hive Mind, there were few acceptable ways—most of its soldiers stayed in the army until they died, and a few of them long after that. She would have been one of those few, her brain extracted upon death and moved into a Holy Hive Mind container and reanimated to serve as part of its consciousness.

Not a fate she had anticipated with pleasure. When Dabry came to her with a crazy plan to claim that Niko was a thwarted artist—one of the sacred Occupations—and that her medium was cooking, it being her single talent, she’d been willing to play along.

A vast amount of bribery and wheedling had gone into the escape, but in the end she’d been able to use her considerable back wages—combined with those of her crew who wanted to come, and whom she declared part of her immediate family—to buy a small establishment aboard one of the largest space stations around, TwiceFar Station, relic of some long-forgotten race and now home to dozens of alien species.

Niko fixed her former sergeant with the stare that had straightened soldierly spines, cowed bureaucrats, and put the fear of the Holy Hive Mind into her enemies more than once.

Dabry, inoculated by long exposure, gave her a bland look back. “You know it as well as I do, Captain,” he said. “The Holy Hive Mind is still keeping tabs on us. If they suspected that you think of the restaurant as something other than an artistic enterprise, they would haul you back and scoop the brain out of your head.”

“I am an artist,” she said. “Just not in the way that it thinks of artists. Its definition is a cross between an addict and an artist possessed by their muse, unable to help creating. It’s hard to keep convincing it of that. An Orb would cement me as that kind of artist.” She frowned at her second-in-command.