For all the lives that you've piled up on your back, people you've killed and people you've got to save, you're still young.

Being young means...well, you know how you are: a new posting means new crushes. Youth is fickle.

Vidaura's all smiles, all soft touches, she's a bridge-builder and a friend-maker. She's got her own sleek fashion sense. She listens to what people say and she offers sensible thoughts just like she really does care. You see operators coming to her for advice - not with tactical matters, they've all mastered those, but advice about the simple interpersonal politics that come into play when you pack a few thousand hyper-aggressive apes into a pressurized can.

People outside the Fleet often imagine it as a place of starched uniforms and strict regulations. But the military, more than most organizations, has its own gossip and popularity contests, its own chickenshit. Vidaura's lord of that terrain.

"Hey Laporte!" she says, at the door of your quarters. The safety lights in the night-cycle passageway shadow all the hollows of her Indo-Brazilian face and light up her smile. "It looks lonely in there. Want to come see the favela?"

For some stupid reason a lot of the Fedayeen have moved camp away from ship's quarters, into a makeshift habitat along the central life support spine. Camping under a hollow sky has its appeal, but the vines of superconductor cable and coolant dew don't.

Youth is fickle. You follow Vidaura up-ship, in-ship. She makes soft occasional chatter about this and that, the kind of thing that slides right past you and leaves only the impression of her voice.

Christ and Allah, you think (the thought hurts like disinfectant on a wound): she's like the precise and calculated opposite of Simms.

There are birds in the life support spine. There's growing greenery. The Fedayeen have set up hydroponics systems. Staring up at the far side of the gravity ring, you can see the glimmer of liquid water and a single conifer growing green from a cylinder of dirt. In the jungle of eucalyptus leaves cookfires are burning.

"This can't be good for life systems," you say, at a loss.

"The Masyaf is different." She smiles a secret little smile. "Trust me. It works."

Vidaura takes you around the ring, to the pond. You swim. Something about the motion, left right left right, is soothing. For a long time you don't think about Simms or the war. And then when you come to the end of a lap you look up and Vidaura is there above you, looking down, and her eyes are as far away as two dead stars. Her smile is the smile of something hungry.

You know at once that she is showing this to you, so that you know where you stand with her.

When the two of you walk back to frame twenty-six and make your descent, there's not a hint of anything between you. 

Vidaura might be the first woman who's ever frightened you off. Maybe you're growing up. But she smiles at you, and touches you on the shoulder, like a friend.
