She glared at him. “Think I was too hard?” she said. “I could have been much worse.”

“I know that.”

“We can’t go on like this. If they went at each other in the restaurant, we’d have customers screaming and fleeing.”

“I know that.”

“Not to mention one of these days they’re going to take it too far and hurt each other,” she said.

He grunted sourly.

“This station doesn’t like disturbances. That’s why we ended up here. Nice and peaceful.”

“Nice and peaceful,” Dabry echoed.

“You sound dubious.”

“Life is never all that peaceful with you, sir.”

Skidoo returned to her comms cubicle. Like many of the chambers here, it had once been storage space. The Tlellan preferred her quarters cramped, though; it kept everything within reach.

She’d changed the door, insetting a smaller hatch into the larger one so she could enter without spilling out all the moist, water-saturated air that she preferred, smelling of vanilla and chlorine and much closer to the atmosphere of her native planet than the station’s default setting. Inside, the machinery she used had been inlaid into the walls in a series of buttons and pads. From here she controlled not just the incoming and outgoing communications but also the music and atmosphere within the four dining chambers: two larger and two smaller, each joined by a small air lock that enabled Skidoo to alter conditions in there with ease.

She ran three tentacles over the walls, reading the restaurant’s vital statistics and adjusting them as needed: the kitchen was a degree and a half too hot for maximal comfort, and the air in Niko’s office needed to be lowered in humidity. A smattering of requests for reservations had come in while she was elsewhere. She sorted through the messages.

The captain had said to cancel the admiral’s reservation, but it was already taken, and the admiral would be most unhappy, since they had stressed that they wished to speak with Niko. Skidoo was torn; her tentacles flattened themselves against the walls, seeking out every iota of comfort-touch.

It was a big party. And a big party—particularly of drunken military—meant a lot of money. They could be kept in the room farthest away from the critic’s. Surely what Niko had meant was not to take any reservations that were in the room where the critic would be, not to cancel everything altogether. The restaurant needed money, and couldn’t afford to be turning things down.