The situation was dire. She was deep in enemy territory with less than the required number of predetermined exit strategies. Variables were hopping up and down like frogs all around. She was attracting attention where her mission had been to lay low. She had not in any conceivable way been properly prepared to handles situations such as these. And the food was even worse than the protein cubes back at home.

“I’m really sorry about that,” Lt. Greg Gaydos said embarrassedly. “They just, eh, they like to tease me because I’m so young to be an officer. They don’t mean to be so offensive—we’re just all soldiers here, and we’re not very used to having civilians around. Oh, I mean—”

“That’s all right, Greg,” she said, producing a dazzling smile. “They’re no worse than the boys at home used to be, right?”

“Still…” Lt. Greg Gaydos sat back down at their table in the corner of the mess hall.

River filed away the gleam in Lt. Greg Gaydos’s eyes in response to her smile. She would not repeat that smile. That hormonal reaction was exactly how she had ended up sitting here on a dinner date. Well, that and agreeing to it, but River was still a little confused about how that had happened.

Her ears warned her that nothing was being said. Even the other Alliance junior officers who before had been heckling Lt. Greg Gaydos and his ‘girlfriend’—which had been her, but she had of course not been that in any way and would never be that at all—were now eating in silence.

River recalled a lesson. She did not like recalling those, because lessons were given at school and her school had been a place of needles and of making her forget the good things and breaking her and fixing her up into something else. But the lesson applied, could give her an advantage, so she used it. The recognition and utilization of the resource that was each object and each piece of data. That was another lesson. But this lesson was: In conversation, turn the topic on your opponent before they can turn it on you, but never demand data in such a manor as to