“I’m not sure I understand?”

“Just enjoy that for a little while. Soon enough you will understand far more than you ever wished. For now, let us enjoy this excellent whiskey and speak of more pleasant things, yes?” He waited for her slight nod of agreement. “I understand your family has a rather happy occasion tomorrow, one which I feel privileged to witness. I have known Ilya literally from the moment she was born and I could not think of a finer mate for her than your brother. It warms this old heart to see love blossom in the middle of…”

He stopped himself. “Happy thoughts, yes?”

They sat together in silence until the summons to dinner came.

********************************************************************************************************************************

And Now

Carolina focused on the device she’d been working on for the past several days. She’d found several others like it and from what she could tell of the one she examined they were definitely monitoring devices of some type but how they passed their data on she had no clue, at least at first. It was only when she dissected the controlling code and examined its most basic components that she realized the routines she was looking at had been designed to damp flutter in gravitational fields. From there it was a very short leap to the realization that this was a communications device using that very gravitational flutter to convey information.

When the realization hit her she’d sat there staring into space for at least 30 minutes, pondering the implications. Clearly someone out there had an interest in both knowing what was happening aboard this ship and keeping that fact secret but why monitor the spaces she was using? They had to be on the lookout for someone like her hiding in the innards of the ship but to what end? Was this a threat or a possible helping hand and how would she be able to know before it was too late?

In the end she was left with a fairly simple binary decision. She’d decoded enough of how the device worked to be able to use it for a very simple message, just 3 letters. Once she made the final connection she realized she’d actually made her decision days before when she started working and there was nothing for it but to send. She would die, no matter what. The only question would be how many she took with her.

************************************************************************************************************************

Nimashet stared at her display, elated and puzzled. Once she’d worked out the encoding the message was clear and at the same time incomprehensible. It was just 3 letters… “IFF”.

She forced herself to put it out of her mind for the moment, parsing the newest data she had. Her hopes of finding “rats in the plumbing” on the other ships was bearing fruit on at least one other ship and possibly on yet a third. The second ship was intriguing because there appeared to be 2 of them although they were very stealthy indeed. Whatever they were doing had them very near essential control runs but in extremely inaccessible spaces and suggested they were hiding their work, whatever that may be. After several hours she leaned back and allowed herself a cup of tea, sitting there staring out at the stars in the main bridge display. Her thoughts turned to classifications of stars and suddenly the answer was there, blazing in her mind’s eye.

“IFF”… It was an old acronym for systems that allowed combatants to recognize who was who… “Identification: Friend or Foe”.

Her “rat” was asking if she was a friend or an enemy! How should she respond? The encoding had to be equally simple and unmistakable but nothing seemed to be both short and clear enough. In truth she was neither friend nor foe but she was something possibly more important and that answered the question. She would send a single letter, as clear as she could make it and as truthful as she absolutely had to be.

So her reply went out, repeating every 30 seconds for a 10 minute cycle, pausing for 3 hours, then repeating.

“A”

For while it may be true that she could not be a friend, neither of them needed friends just now. Allies… that was the most important thing they could be to each other.

********************************************************************************************************************

Chandra eyed the closing door with relief. His last meeting for the day had gone better than expected but sometimes these things could be incredibly tedious and he couldn’t manage to keep the pressure from knotting up his neck and shoulder muscles. It would be some time before he could properly relax though, so he contented himself with a few head rolls and a little stretching which helped some. Distractions out of the way, he picked up his tablet and began to plow through the ever increasing number of approvals and sign-offs required of him each day. His own sense of duty required that he read each one thoroughly to ensure it was as it should be which meant at least another 2 hours before he could go to his quarters and eat something he’d pick up at one of the kitchens on the way.

His new routine was decidedly different to that of a project engineer, even one of such a massive and all-encompassing project as building a new subterranean city under very nearly the worst conditions possible. This at least had the benefit of regular hours though he sorely missed the time hashing out details with his teams until all hours of the night. Those meetings had a camaraderie that was lacking in the life of a government minister although he had gained a new appreciation for the long hours his mother worked as he grew up.

Some while later he came to the end of the day’s paperwork and shut his tablet down, stretching again and taking a moment to simply lean back and relax before rising to exit his office. He made his way through the security checkpoints with a minimum of fuss, taking a few moments to engage in pleasantries before making his way to the kitchen closest to the route between his office and quarters. The fare on offer was greatly improved from a few months ago and he’d just made up a container to carry back to his quarters when a voice interrupted his musing.

“I thought I would be glad to eat alone after so long eating in cafeterias but I find that once the gladness has gone only the alone part remains.” It wasn’t the sort of voice you find in advertisements but there was something about it that made him turn to face the woman who’d spoken.

“Ironic, isn’t it?” He grinned at her moue of distaste. “I was thinking something along the same lines when I saw you here yesterday. I’m Chandra and you are?”

“Annoushka but call me Anna please.”

“Would you care to share a meal with me?”

“Here?”

“If you like. I do have a favorite place I like to go occasionally if you prefer a better setting.”

“I’m up for it. Lead on!” Anna finished assembling her container and sealed it up, running through checkout right behind him. There wasn’t any actual money exchanged, just deductions from their personal dietary allowances but those had to be monitored to ensure there was enough for all.

They walked through the largely empty corridors side by side until Chandra led her into a maintenance accessway. This passage was considerably narrower so they walked single file until he opened another hatch to lead her onto a walkway overlooking one of the recreation spaces that had been completed recently. It was a lush green space surrounding a huge salt water pool, due to open the following week along with several similar spaces but uninhabited at this point.

“Wow…” she breathed, taking it all in. “I knew these places were almost ready to open but this is… so much more than the picture I had in mind!”

Chandra grinned happily. “I’m very happy with the way they’ve turned out. I wish I could take you down there to have a proper picnic but right now the grass is a no traffic zone.”

Anna turned to him with a smile “I’m just so glad to see green growing things. Not that I’m complaining but its so… dreary…”

“That’s putting it mildly. We’ve worked so hard to survive, all of us… now that we’ve accomplished the basics we have time for spaces like this. In another 4 or 5 years a lot of the dust will have cleared and the surface will be habitable again so spaces like this won’t be as important but for now they are our only way to remember what should be. Spacers build green spaces into their ships and stations for the same reason.”

“I never realized that…” Anna mused. “I just assumed it was part of the air recycling.”

“Oh it serves some of that function“ Chandra was warming to the subject “but its not terribly efficient. Most of the air cycling work is done in algae tanks or the aeroponics bays. Spaces like this are almost purely for the animal in us.”

“I can see that. Just being in this space has helped somehow, released some of a weight I didn’t even realize I was carrying. This was your idea?”

“No, I was too busy trying to get the basics going to even think about anything else. It was actually something my mother put on my plate, then overruled me when I tried to delay it as wasteful. I’m afraid the only credit I can take was having the sense to say ‘Yes, Mother’ when I was clearly outmatched.” Chandra grinned and opened his container, sniffing appreciatively at the rising steam.

“Smart boy!” Anna returned his grin and followed suit, inhaling the aromas of her own meal. “Has there been any contact from outside yet?”

“Depends on what you mean by contact.” She arched an eyebrow at him in question. “We’ve had some spotty radio contact with Saturn and Mars but the atmospheric interference is too much to get a decent signal through without the new equipment. We’ve gotten a few transmissions that seem to be from earth but there’s no way to tell where. The way atmospheric skip plays with radio signals getting anything reliable or even intelligible for more than a few seconds is almost impossible.”

“You’re so sure we’re not the only ones?”

“I don’t see how we could be. Our models say the southern parts of Kerala and Tamil Nadu should be habitable but there’s a great deal more heat exchange going on near the oceans and to the south so the weather is likely pretty bad at times. North of us? We don’t have the beginnings of a clue. We know it’s a great deal colder than here but you have to add in the massive earthquakes the impact caused. We had a couple of 8.8 or 8.9 tremors and they devastated the city but the truly major quakes were further north and east.”

“How much worse than what we got can it get? That was… absolutely the most terrified I have ever been and it just went on and on… I can’t see how anything could survive worse.” Anna realized she was unconsciously hunching her shoulders with the stress of memory and made an effort to relax.

“We got the tail end of it. One series of big strikes in China were right along the fault lines and everything cut loose in a chain all the way across the mountains and the surrounding regions. Between that and the entire Pacific Rim going off all at once nowhere in China got under a 9.5 magnitude quake. Right before our equipment was destroyed we recorded an 11.5 magnitude in Tibet and that has been the accepted theoretical maximum.” Chandra shrugged. “I can’t imagine it myself.”

“It seems a little insane that even we survived and have rebuilt as much as we have so far. I credit your mother and you for that.”

“I don’t.”

She gave him an incredulous look. “Ok, I get that you deflect from yourself, you seem like the kind of guy who would do that but your mother? She is an inspiration to us all! This exists because of her leadership!”

“Had she not been here to take up that position by default it would have fallen to someone else just as well qualified who would likely have made largely the same decisions.”

“Someone like your brother you mean?” Anna instantly regretted her words as Chandra frowned and took a bite of his food, chewing thoughtfully.

“Ok I take your point. I just don’t understand people like him. I do think Mother has done a great job… Its just that I think we have many talented administrators who could have performed the task equally well.”

It was Anna’s turn to chew in silence for a moment. “I’m not arguing that. She was the right person at the right time. Just enough public recognition for people to be aware of her spotless reputation without being someone who was divisive in any major ways so most voters who were thinking of something besides themselves saw her as the best choice. At the time having your brother on her side was a positive in people’s eyes, more so than you were.”

“Really?” he examined her face, smiling a little as she flashed him a grin. “I guess I’ve just been so buried in work I’ve never looked up to see things like that…”

“That is one of the things people admire about you. They see you working all hours of the day and night because you’re dedicated to getting it right instead of just getting it done. You have a reputation too, for being unswervingly honest and direct. You say what exactly what you mean, no embellishments, no appeal to ego, no guile whatsoever, no matter who you’re talking to. Before all of this that got you in trouble but now others push themselves to be better because of your example… even me.”

“That’s just so weird…” Chandra shook his head. “I can’t imagine anyone looking up to someone like me.”

“Someone like you? What do you mean by that?”

“A semifunctional autistic.” Chandra felt himself starting to withdraw emotionally and mashed his thumbnail into the side of his index finger, letting the brief flare of pain steady him.

“Semifunctional? What sort of mean spirited asshole put that into your head?” Anna had to clamp down on the hot little spike of anger that snuck into her words.

“Its true. I had to go to a special school for people like me until I went to University. I didn’t fit well with the other students because I didn’t understand the things they said. I don’t understand emotional cues like other people.”

“So?” Her tone was sharp, almost argumentative and she immediately regretted it. “Just because people aren’t clear about what they mean doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you.”

“If only it were that simple. People deliberately try to obscure what they mean or make you think they are saying something different to what they are actually saying. I can usually spot an outright lie but sometimes I have to sit and think about less direct forms of untruthfulness. It’s a part of why I love what I do because there’s no room for any of that. Numbers can’t lie.”

Annoushka thought for a moment before she replied. She knew this conversation was terribly important even though she didn’t fully understand why and that knowledge made it clear what she had to do and say to avoid hurting the man she had seen as stoic and now understood was just as human as she.

“I can’t tell you I will never lie to you in any way because there are times when obscuring or smoothing something over will help work toward getting an objective accomplished.”

Chandra thought about that for a moment. Only his mother and one treasured friend had ever understood him enough to make their promises clear. “Fair enough. I’m sure there is more to be done before we understand each other but can you please tell me…” He trailed off, uncertain how to say what he felt.

“What my intentions are?”

He looked up from staring at his hand where it rested on his leg and trembled ever so slightly from the tension. “Please?”

“I don’t know yet. I find you fascinating and alluring and… sexually attractive.” She smiled at him and watched how tense his expression was.

“I can’t…”

“Neither can I. I have to have feelings for someone to be able to do things like that.”

Chandra had to stop and think about what she’d said. “I… Um… do you think?”

Annoushka couldn’t help smiling. “Yes, I think. I think I would like to date, spend time together, learn about you and you learn about me. Right now I am very attracted to you… emotionally and sexually.”

“I… um… I can’t…. um…” Chandra was trying to get to his feet, the impulse to flee almost overwhelming when he felt the hand on his arm. So gentle… no pressure at all yet she kept him from getting up, kept him rooted to the spot where he couldn’t get away and somehow instead of feeling like an attack he could tell it was done out of genuine concern.

“I’m not going to pressure you Chandra. I have been honest about what I would like to happen and I don’t want you to agree because its what I want. Take your time, ok?”

Chandra eased himself back into a sitting position and sat there with his legs crossed and his hands resting on his knees. He breathed deeply for a moment, feeling some level of calm seep back into him. “I’m sorry…” he finally said. “I’ve never done that before. I was overwhelmed for a moment and a flight response kicked in. Thank you for stopping me.”

“I’m glad you stopped.”

“I do want. To get to know you, to date… maybe more. I’ve never done anything like that though so I don’t know what to do and I don’t want to try stupid things out of books. I will likely make a great many mistakes.”

Anna rested her hand on his arm again. “I’d say you did pretty well for a first date. Don’t worry about it so much though. If I object to something I’ll let you know about it clearly and the same if I like something, ok?”

“You’re making this far less terrifying than I had envisioned.”

“Less terrifying huh? I don’t think I’ve ever had anyone say that but it’s a good place to start.” Anna took both of their now emptied containers and nestled them together to make them easier to carry. “I am tired and need to sleep and I expect you do too. Would you like to meet back here tomorrow after work?”

“I would, very much” Chandra was surprised at the depth of feeling behind his response.