Meetings!
So, since we were trying to look like the reasonable ones, I agreed to the meeting. Didn’t agree to go on the ship, though. I honestly didn’t trust them not to get cute if we met on what was sort-of, kind-of Terran soil. Instead, we met in a little prefab office space, overlooking the field — and within easy range of the Redacted’s guns. Wasn’t that so much better?
It was me, Rubicon, and somebody who introduced herself as ‘the Anticipant Named Tyler.’ I swear to God: Terrans get weird, this far out from Earth. Like Rubicon himself, she looked, you know, Terran: beige skin, brownish hair (kept in a zero-gee snood), brown eyes, with nothing particularly distinctive. The melting pot got real busy after the Consolidation Wars, almost to the point where the pot itself melted. Anyway: Tyler or the Anticipant or whoever must have mostly been there to protect Rubicon’s virtue, or something, because she didn’t say much. Just kept staring at me as Rubicon talked.
“I think we ended our last meeting in a poor place,” he said, with considerably less sheer cultural chauvinism this time. “There was an unfortunate amount of drama in the room; and if I am being honest with myself, quite a lot of it came from me.” That last bit was accompanied by the tight smile of a man who felt forced to make a painful admission, wasn’t enjoying it, but also trying not to take it out on anybody else. He was presenting himself well, in fact. If I wasn’t currently waiting to find out whether Fenbian had survived the Redacted’s visit, I would have been impressed, generally. As it was, I was wondering if what I was admiring was Rubicon’s ability to act.