Just realized I needed to add a scene.
I was annoyingly fresh-faced and well-rested the next morning; there had been a pharmaceutical care package waiting for me at home. Eight hours of guaranteed restful sleep, full of amazing dreams, and complete with all the mood-shifters you could want to keep mental trauma from sticking around and turning into neurosis. I would have preferred Syah to stick around, but he had been a gentleman about it. I didn’t even think he was wrong to be one, either.
I still wished he had stuck around.
Greg had a look similar to mine, only a bit more so. It made me raise an eyebrow. “You all right, Greg? You almost look ready to fly.”
“Oh, do I? I was wondering. That dose I took last night had quite a wallop.” He said all of that perfectly clearly, with no vagueness or loss of focus. Whatever’s in that brew does the business. “I haven’t had dreams like that in years.”
“Same here,” I admitted as I sat. “What is all of this chaos doing to the schedule, anyway?”
He snorted. “What schedule? Right now I have everything grounded or on hold until Burcu shows up. She’s going to be a handful, and until we can figure out what she and the rest of the Council lunatics are really looking for, we’re going to need to walk careful. If only they’d tell us what their game is!”
“I don’t want to sound like Nur, Greg, but: maybe they didn’t have an agenda at all when they came here? They’re just here to act mysterious and see what happens?”
“Space travel isn’t that cheap, Pam.”
“Then I don’t know. Maybe the Great Powers gives them a budget to be assholes to colonists, and it’s just the end of their fiscal year.”