The clinic doors parted with a quiet sigh and let Hugh Crowe back into the afternoon.

  Warm air rolled over him immediately, thick with humidity and sunlight. Portbase didn’t do subtle weather. It specialized in two modes: sunny, warm, and humid, or rainy, warm, and humid. Occasionally, during the winter months, the planet tried to show off and deliver both at once, as if the climate had decided to audition for a Union meteorological bulletin.

  Today, Biatune had settled for the classic arrangement of sunny, warm, and humid, with an option for rainy, warm, and humid later in the evening.

  The air smelled faintly of salt and hot pavement. Somewhere nearby, a street vendor was grilling something that, in Hugh’s personal opinion, had to be wildly optimistic about its chances of becoming a tourist’s lunch. The familiar seaside smell of the city was being overwhelmed by local flavor and a sharp spice made from gene-edited kelp that had been spliced with a pepper variety.

  Hugh stepped aside from the doors and let the flow of pedestrians slide around him. People moved with the loose rhythm of a city that had grown up beside the ocean and learned not to hurry unless the weather was doing something interesting.

  Biatune was a good planet.

  He’d seen enough worlds across Union space to know the difference between livable and merely survivable. Some colonies existed in the same way a man might exist after catching a grazing shot from a low-powered lasrifle—technically functional, but nobody involved would call the experience pleasant.

  Biatune had breathable air, open water, gravity that behaved itself, and weather that rarely tried to kill you outright. In the grand cosmic lottery of habitable worlds, that counted as winning several small jackpots in a row.

  Even the smell was tolerable.

  The harbor was the usual offender—saltwater, algae, and whatever the fishing fleets had hauled in that morning. Compared to some of the atmospheres Hugh had operated in during the Alum conflict, it was practically perfume.

  He took a breath and started walking.

  Portbase stretched along the coastline in wide tiers of stone, steel, and glass. Transit drones hummed overhead, weaving lazy patterns between the towers as they followed municipal traffic algorithms written by someone who had clearly never been late for anything important.

  Beyond the skyline, the ocean rolled toward the horizon, blue-green and indifferent.

  It looked almost exactly the way Hugh remembered it.

  The shape of the city hadn’t changed much since the day he’d gotten suckered into signing a Union Armed Forces contract. A few new towers. Different transit rails. Some ambitious public works along the waterfront. But the bones of the place were the same, which was strange to Hugh, because time was not usually that forgiving.

  Time had a habit of sanding things down and replacing them while everyone was too busy to notice things were changing. Cities changed. People changed. Planets changed.

  Travel through the void between systems had always been a negotiation with mathematics, and mathematics was a stubborn bastard. Union kept its clocks on Cradle. Ships kept their own. Time dilation and debt always got in the middle of the argument. The result was a galaxy full of people who arrived home slightly out of sync with the rest of history.

  Blink gates helped when you had them. They punched neat little shortcuts through the galaxy, letting ships step across impossible distances in the blink of an eye. But most people, the ones like Hugh, didn't journey through the blink.

  Acceleration. Deceleration. Long stretches of black where a ship crawled up toward near-light speeds and rode the edge of causality for months at a time while years were screaming past in the space dust. Traveling through Realspace with NLS accrued time debt.

  At around .995 c the numbers worked out to a neat little ratio. For every year you experienced aboard ship, about ten years passed back in the broader flow of Union history.

  It didn’t feel dramatic while it was happening. You strapped into a crash couch. The drive spun up. The ship leaned hard against the universe until it started outrunning time. Then you drifted. Eat. Sleep. Train. Run diagnostics. Wait. After a few months, you arrived somewhere else and discovered that the rest of humanity had been busy aging without you.

  The first time Hugh dropped out of near-light and called his mother had been worse than he expected. He understood the math. Everyone did. But seeing her with new wrinkles and the first threads of grey in her hair, when he looked almost exactly the same as he had a month earlier, had left him nauseous.

  Hugh crossed the street with the rest of the pedestrians, slipping back into the slow rhythm of Portbase foot traffic.

  By local calendars, Hugh Crowe was forty-two years old. By the broader accounting of Union Realtime, he was something else entirely.

  Add up the long burns between deployments. The months riding near-light bolts between frontier systems. The campaigns that had dragged him halfway across the Orion Arm at a respectable fraction of c.

  Hugh Crowe had technically been alive for a little over one hundred and forty years. All of that time had passed without him. The world he grew up in had marched forward while he slipped sideways through the calendar. Union had arrived. Post-scarcity infrastructure had spread across the system. Governments had modernized. Hugh had simply… returned.

  He left Biatune as a young cadet with a fresh contract and a headful of dreams of glory. He’d come back… older. Changed. Not by much, if you asked what was left of his original body, but the math had other opinions.

  A soft chime came from his breast pocket. Hugh blinked. He had apparently been standing at the crosswalk long enough for four separate groups of pedestrians to pass him.

  Hugh shook his head as he stood at the corner and reached into his jacket pocket. His slate woke the moment his fingers wrapped around it. The display flickered to life with the seeming joy of something that had been waiting patiently for him.

  A message had already opened.

  SLATE INTERFACE :: RAKTA

  >Pray attend, Hugh Crowe, for thou art summoned.

  )) Answer your phone, jackass.

  Hugh stared at the screen for a moment with a frown, then he sighed, checked the time, and slipped the slate back into his breast pocket. The pedestrian signal changed. The crowd carried him across the street in a slow tide of commuters and tourists.

  Can't just stand in the middle of the street like a shell-shocked idiot. Get it together, Hugh, stop thinking about it. Get something to eat. The thought arrived with the same stern tone he used to reserve for junior pilots who had just done something creative with their reactor.

  Food stall, it is then.

  He drifted toward the line of vendors along the waterfront, the smell of kelp spice growing stronger the closer he got. It hung in the air like a dare, sharp and salty and promising to wake up every nerve ending in his mouth.

  Most of the stalls were run by service subalterns—polite little machines with smiling default faces and the emotional range of a toaster. Hugh bypassed them entirely and made his way to the stalls that were run by an actual person, which he appreciated on principle.

  The woman behind the counter was short, broad-shouldered, with salt-and-pepper hair and the kind of apron that had clearly seen several small culinary wars. She ladled broth into bowls with the steady hand of someone who had been doing the same thing for their whole life and had absolutely no intention of stopping just because civilization had free labor robots.

  Hugh planted himself on the long benches bolted to the counter.

  "Large bowl, please," he said.

  She nodded once, already moving. Noodles hit the broth with a wet slap. Something red and oily followed. Then a practiced barrage of toppings that suggested long experience and zero patience for culinary debate or such unimportant things like what the customer wanted substituted.

  Steam rolled upward in fragrant clouds. The sights and smells made Hugh’s stomach wake up and start loudly complaining about the service in this dump. Watching the assembly process, he leaned forward and rested his elbows on the counter. A chime sounded in his pocket.

  Hugh groaned and rubbed a hand down his face.

  Too soon. It's way too soon after therapy to start talking to Rakta. They would want to know how it went. No dice on turning the slate off either, Hugh thought, rapping his fingers on the countertop. Rakta would just send the subaltern to find me.

  And then the horribly bright red custom job of a subaltern would be sitting near him while Rakta spoke through it. Which meant there would be absolutely no pretending to ignore them.

  Another chime.

  Persistent little bastard, Hugh thought darkly. Freeloads in my apartment, plays games all day, and harasses me.

  He ignored the slate with the stubborn determination of a man who had once spent three hours pretending not to hear a low-oxygen klaxon while finishing a mission that technically should have killed him.

  Not the klaxon.

  The mission.

  Low oxygen was a problem that could be ignored for a while. No oxygen was very up in your face.

  The bowl arrived with a solid ceramic clunk on the counter in front of him.

  “Oh, thank you, young lady,” Hugh said with a saccharine smile. “Now I don’t have to pretend to ignore my slate.”

  The woman snorted.

  “I don’t think anyone could mistake me for a young lady, old man. Stop trying to flirt and eat.”

  Steam rolled upward between them.

  Thick, bouncy noodles. A thin red broth with a surface sheen that promised gastrointestinal discomfort later. Something that might once have been fish. Several vegetables that had clearly been genetically encouraged to grow with enthusiasm bordering on recklessness.

  It smelled incredible.

  His stomach rumbled like it was willing to call some kind of meeting of the union of organs to get him to start eating.

  Alright, Hugh thought. I might be hangry. Shovel it down, pilot.

  He tapped the small countertop printer beside the bowl and waited while it fabricated a pair of recyclable chopsticks and a spoon.

  His slate chimed again.

  Hugh sighed and fished the needy little device out of his pocket.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  SLATE INTERFACE :: RAKTA

  >Thy behavior suggests cowardice.

  )) You are dodging me.

  >Was the counsel of the healer so dire?

  )) Therapy go bad?

  >Thou hast now ignored four summons, knave.

  )) Pick up the damn call.

  The printer finished with a soft tick.

  Hugh snapped the chopsticks apart and twirled a bundle of noodles, slurping them down before tapping out a response.

  \\Not dodging you, Rakta. Just grabbing some slop. Therapy was fine.

  The slate blinked.

  SLATE INTERFACE :: RAKTA

  >Thou hast employed the linguistic structure commonly associated with deception.

  )) That was a lie.

  Hugh chewed slowly and stared down into the bowl, cocking up an eyebrow in appreciation.

  The broth was rich. Slightly spicy. Whoever cooked up that kelp seasoning knew what they were doing. He moved to type again after gobbling down some more of the spicy fish noodles.

  \\It wasn’t a lie, I am getting lunch.

  SLATE INTERFACE :: RAKTA

  >Verily, what magnificent falsehoods thou wield. Speak truth to me, Hugh Crowe.

  )) Partial lie then. Don't bullshit me—you had a rough session.

  Hugh exhaled through his nose.

  Across the counter, the noodle vendor dropped another bowl in front of a different customer with a ceramic clunk and glanced back toward him.

  “Food alright?” she asked.

  Hugh nodded, though his nose had begun to run slightly and he could feel the heat climbing into his cheeks.

  “Great,” he said.

  “Good,” she replied, handing him a napkin. “You looked like you were fighting it for a second.”

  Hugh blew his nose as politely as he could manage.

  “The broth might be kicking your ass, old man.”

  He gave her a small grin, wiped his nose, and looked back down at the slate.

  \\Everyone hates therapy. It’s always rough.

  SLATE INTERFACE :: RAKTA

  >Falsehood! Thrice you speak lies, thrice I refute them!

  )) Plenty of people like therapy. Even the ones who hate therapy usually experience fewer emotional catastrophes than the ones who avoid it.

  Hugh stared at the screen with a scowl.

  “Traitor,” he muttered quietly. Hugh fidgeted with his chopsticks and leaned slightly over the bowl. The noodles had begun soaking up the broth, swelling and shifting from a pale white into a soft pinkish hue. Which, honestly, likely just made them better. Just as long as they did not go soggy.

  Sure, I haven’t gone to a specialty place yet, Hugh thought as he lifted another bundle of noodles, but why would I when the street food is this good?

  He slurped down another choice selection of noodles. The spice hit his tongue first—sharp, bright, a little too much for his tastes—followed by the warm, oily comfort of the broth.

  He tapped at the slate with his thumb.

  \\Listen. It was fine. I’ll talk more about it later, deal?

  Hugh waited, chewing slowly.

  Long enough had passed that he knew Rakta was thinking.

  Which, in his experience, was actually a small comfort. Rakta thinking usually meant Rakta wasn’t immediately about to suggest something catastrophic. They worked well together that way. Rakta had a gift for stupid ideas delivered with terrifying confidence. Hugh had a gift for committing to stupid ideas with no hesitation if no other option would present itself.

  Between the two of them, it was a miracle they had survived fifteen years of cockpit time.

  The slate blinked.

  SLATE INTERFACE :: RAKTA

  >Very well.

  )) Fine.

  >We shall discuss another matter.

  Hugh narrowed his eyes slightly.

  \\That sounds like a trap, Rakta.

  SLATE INTERFACE :: RAKTA

  >Thou hast been ordered to seek a path toward healing.

  >Such a path requires diversion of the mind.

  )) Doctor's orders.

  >What course of action hast thou chosen?

  )) So what are we doing?

  Hugh lifted another knot of noodles and lifted them out of the bowl. The broth steamed up into his face, carrying the smell of kelp spice and roasted fish oil. He paused halfway to his mouth, staring at the slate.

  “What are we doing…” Hugh muttered under his breath.

  Then he looked down at the bowl.

  Then out past the street toward the ocean.

  Cargo and fishing skimmers crawled across the harbor like patient insects. A pair of transit drones drifted overhead. Somewhere down the seawall, a gull screamed out a laughing cry.

  Behind the counter, the noodle vendor wiped down the surface beside him with the practiced indifference of the put-upon worker who was paying quite a bit of attention to the customers.

  Hugh shrugged and typed one-handed while slurping down the noodles, wiping his mouth with a napkin before glancing at the slate again.

  Rakta was like that. Probably didn’t mean anything by the question. It wasn’t like they were attached at the hip. They had just spent nearly fifteen years inside the same cockpit. Which, admittedly, created a certain familiarity.

  \\Lunch. I thought I already said that. These are some damn good spicy noodles.

  SLATE INTERFACE :: RAKTA

  >Thou hast already achieved this objective.

  )) That doesn't count.

  >Try again, Hugh Crowe.

  \\I am trying, Hugh typed, but then hesitated before he hit send. He stared at the words for a moment, then erased them and shoved another bite of noodles and veggies into his mouth.

  Across the counter, the woman running the stall glanced over from where she was refilling broth containers. She had the relaxed, observational stare of someone who had spent a long time feeding strangers and quietly judging them for it.

  “You know,” she said, “you were fighting with the noodles earlier, but now you’re eating like you’re racing someone.”

  Hugh paused mid-slurp and looked up.

  “Old habit.”

  “Military?”

  He nodded, and she made a small, satisfied sound.

  “That’ll do it.” She gestured toward the slate in his hand, “Work? I make it a point to ask patrons to either focus on the meal or move to one of the automated stalls if the conversation gets more interesting than the food.”

  Hugh smiled faintly.

  “Fair policy,” He replied as he lifted the slate slightly towards her, “Just a personal conversation. That allowed in your domain, young lady?”

  The woman barked out a laugh and waved the words away as she turned to help another customer.

  Hugh glanced back down at the screen.

  Another message had appeared.

  SLATE INTERFACE :: RAKTA

  >Thou art attempting to evade the question through consumption.

  )) Eating spicy noodles is not a hobby.

  Hugh took a slow sip of broth before answering.

  \\You’re judging me while I eat, that is so cruel. You're bullying me. You're bullying an Old Man.

  SLATE INTERFACE :: RAKTA

  >Indeed.

  )) Correct.

  >It is one of my many and varied hobbies.

  Hugh exhaled through his nose.

  Across the counter, the woman had come back and leaned on her elbows, watching him type.

  “Bad news?” she asked.

  “No, I just look this way." He said and frowned more exaggeratedly, "This is my happy face. I am just dealing with a Persistent friend.”

  “Ah.” She nodded with the grave understanding of someone who had encountered many persistent friends in her time.“Is it a Romantic Friend?”

  Hugh nearly inhaled a noodle and choked slightly on the spicy broth.

  “No, Christ the Buddha, No.”

  “Shame,” she said. “Those are the most entertaining ones to hear about. So you’re single, old man?”

  “Oh, are we really flirting now?” Hugh asked, grabbing a napkin and wiping his mouth of the dribbled broth while chuckling nervously.

  Am I nervous about flirting with a noodle lady? He wondered.

  Is she my type?

  Shit.

  “I’m married,” she said casually, “but I have a friend who’s looking. You’ve got the kind of look she goes for.” She declared as she eyed him critically while twisting her mouth in thought.

  “Ah. Hah. Well,” Hugh said, scratching just under his chin, “I’m still pretty fresh out of the service. I don’t think I’d be a great fit for… your friend.”

  “Just as well,” she said, dismissing the conversation with a wave. “Man eats like that, she might not know how to cook for him.”

  Hugh smiled awkwardly and slurped another mouthful of noodles. The slate chimed again.

  SLATE INTERFACE :: RAKTA

  >Thou art engaging in small talk with a noodle vendor!

  )) Progress. Pretty sure that this counts toward your recovery.

  \\That’s not how recovery works.

  SLATE INTERFACE :: RAKTA

  > Fool! Weep upon seeing the truth, you shall overcome through the connections thou forge.

  )) Correction: it is precisely how recovery works. You should talk to people more. Preferably, those who are not me.

  Hugh glanced up from the slate.

  The noodle vendor was watching him now with open amusement, the kind usually reserved for regular eccentrics and people who looked like they might become a very amusing eccentric if left unsupervised, and she did not want to miss out, just in case.

  “You arguing with your friend?”

  “Something like that.”

  She nodded approvingly, as if this were healthy civic behavior.

  “Good. Friends should argue sometimes. Is it a good argument?”

  “Lighthearted, mostly,” Hugh said, draining the last of the broth from his spoon and setting the bowl down with a satisfied little clink.

  She folded her arms and leaned one hip against the counter.

  “They always start lighthearted,” she said. “Next thing you know, someone’s raising their voice, somebody’s crying, and somebody else is storming off.” She said, moving her hands to emphasize the points, her eyes flicked down toward the slate in his hand, “You planning on causing a scene if you hang around here arguing with your persistent friend and dripping snot on my nice counters?”

  Hugh blinked at the strange pivot in conversation from the sassy older lady. It was for this reason that he let his mouth move on autopilot.

  “No, ma’am, no problems here.”

  The woman’s eyebrows shot up, and she gasped in offense.

  “I am ma’am now? Rude old man. Don’t you know I’m a fair maiden?” She said with a mock outrage that took Hugh a few seconds to process.

  “You give all your customers shit like this, young lady?” Hugh said, putting a little extra emphasis on the last two words, hoping that would be enough to placate the vendor lady.

  “Better,” she said, with a satisfied huff. “Nah. Just the ones that look like they can take it.”

  She gave him a quick, appraising look.

  “You can take it, yeah?”

  Hugh leaned back slightly on the bench and spread his hands.

  “Suppose I must. What is a snotty old man to do but accept the abuse of a nice young lady?”

  The vendor snorted.

  “You sure you aren’t ready to get into a relationship?” the vendor said casually. “I think you could set my friend on a good path to taking the stick out of her ass.”

  Hugh raised an eyebrow.

  “The one who goes after my looks? She has a stick up her ass?”

  “No, different friend,” the vendor said breezily. “We all play mahjong together.”

  Hugh stared at her for a moment, trying to imagine the particular chain of events that had led his life to intersect with a waterfront noodle stall and a matchmaking mahjong circle.

  “I think I’d be a bad match with someone who needs help getting anything out of their own ass,” he said carefully.

  The vendor nodded as if he had just delivered a thoughtful policy position.

  “That’s fair,” she said. “Can’t have old men going around messing with respectable ladies’ asses.”

  A couple of customers down the counter burst out laughing.

  Hugh felt the heat rise into his face immediately. The spicy broth helped. It gave him something else to blame. The vendor smirked, patted him once on the shoulder, and moved off to terrorize another section of the counter. Hugh watched her go for a moment. Then he looked back down at the slate and started typing.

  \\You see what you’re doing to my reputation?

  His thumbs moved faster.

  \\Soon I’m going to have a cartel of respectable mahjong-playing older women calling me names and mocking me because I’m stuck texting your needy incorporeal ass while eating lunch.

  He hit send.

  SLATE INTERFACE :: RAKTA

  >Thy reputation amongst the matriarchs of the myriad worlds was compromised long ere my arrival, Hugh Crowe.

  )) You did that yourself, own up.

  >And still thou evade the question set before thee. Preparations must be made.

  )) What hobby are we getting? I can start getting the licenses and print time lined up for whatever, but I need to know what we are going to be doing.

  Hugh leaned back slightly on the bench and looked out past the street toward the ocean. Cargo skimmers moved slowly across the harbor. Drones traced lazy patrol paths above the waterfront. The wind carried the distant sound of gulls. Beside him, the noodle vendor set another bowl down for a customer who was smiling widely and undoing a tie. It all felt too much like a movie set, this was not his world, well.. Okay, it technically was his world, but normally, when he would have street food, he would be wearing his uniform and be on leave.

  Navarro had brought up that he was trying to figure out normal life by what he expected normal life to be like, as opposed to what normal actually was. It was a good point. Hugh did not like that it was a good point, but he could concede some things. The hobby thing, though... They had spent the rest of the session going over options, and nothing jumped out at him, which Hugh was sure was on purpose. She was trying to get him to think for himself, fucking hell.

  Hugh tapped the slate again.

  \\Working on it.

  SLATE INTERFACE :: RAKTA

  >Thou hast been "working on it" for approximately fifteen minutes.

  )) Lazy ass, is it too hard?

  The vendor tilted her head, watching the little duel between man and slate like it was street entertainment.

  “Whatever you’re arguing about,” she said, “you’re losing.”

  Hugh snorted.

  “How do you figure?”

  “You keep typing like you’re trying to win.” She pointed lazily at the slate with her ladle. “That means you’re being played.”

  She twisted her mouth in thought for a moment, then squinted at him.

  “Is your friend single?”

  Hugh blinked.

  “Oh. No.” He glanced down at the slate, thinking of how best to say it without openly admitting that his friend was an NHP.

  “They’re… many.”

  The short woman stared at him for a moment, her eyes going slightly unfocused as she clearly ran through a private inventory of every lonely acquaintance she’d ever met. After a few seconds, she shook her head.

  “Sounds like a mess.”

  Hugh huffed a quiet laugh.

  “More than you know,” He finished off his bowl and put the utensils into a rawmat reclaimer, “But they’re nice. When they’re not harassing me during lunch.”

  He looked back down at the slate.

  SLATE INTERFACE :: RAKTA

  >She speaketh truly.

  )) She's right. You're losing.

  >Also, thou hast remained in the selfsame emotional bog for six months.

  )) You know your therapist is right.

  >Acquire hobby, blaggard.

  Hugh stared at the screen for a long moment. Then he sighed and handed his bowl to the noodle vendor, not wanting seconds.

  “Alright,” he muttered, not quite aloud and not entirely to himself either.

  He typed quickly with his thumb.

  \\Fine.

  SLATE INTERFACE :: RAKTA

  >Excellent.

  )) Good.

  >What shall we attempt first, Hugh Crowe?

  Hugh looked down at the empty bit of counter that he had been occupying for the duration of his meal. Then at the noodle vendor. Then out at the harbor again, as if the ocean might provide a better escape route from having to deal with this.

  He typed slowly.

  \\Still thinking, nothing's come to mind, I am open to suggestions at this point.

  No instant reply.

  Hugh narrowed his eyes at the screen. Then a shadow fell across the counter. It arrived with enough physical presence to interrupt the light, the breeze, and the ordinary flow of a lunch hour. Hugh looked up at the shade awning of the food stall and closed his eyes, trying to steel himself.

  Of course, I should have known that Rakta would send the subaltern regardless of whether I turned off the Slate.