Rene chewed hungrily on a piece of cheese before helping himself to more ham. Although he knew the sensation had no foundation in biology he could feel the nutrients absorbed into his body with each mouthful. The lifestyle of a marine, even on a backwater like this didn’t give one the luxury of much stored body fat, a fact that was true in spades for a scion of a noble house whose genetic code had been altered to repress the tendency to avoid plumpness. The last meal he had eaten had been with Bowie before they set out on their patrol. He wondered if the owner of the komo had noticed the destruction of the base. 

Silence fell between them at her words save for the quiet mastication of his jaw as he continued to eat with stoic determination. Rene found he was reluctant to answer, not because he feared to speak but because he didn’t rightly know what the truth was. A dozen half truths and partial answers swirled in his mind, no one thing fully satisfying. With careful deliberation he set the knife down and looked up into Solae’s eyes.

“I suppose I could say that it as my duty as a marine,” he began, resting his palm on the tabletop and feeling the cool of the marble beneath. Rene took his duty seriously but truthfully risking himself to save someone he knew nothing about did nothing to warn his superiors about what had happened on New Concordia and probably on other worlds in the sector. It had felt good to pay back the Gids for the blood and horror of the Rat Trap but that was an effect of the action and not its motivation.

“But that wouldn’t be the real reason, not the whole reason anyway.” His eyes focused at a point in the distant past, a different life, where Renard Du Quentain had knelt before the Empress in the vast crystal throne room in Capella and she had touched him on the shoulder to elevate him into Knighthood. Despite everything that had happened, Amellia, the corp, the rat trap, at his secret core he was still that serious, earnest young man who had laid his blade before the Throne. The realisation made him slightly queasy for reasons he couldn’t articulate.

“Rene?” Solae prodded gently and his eyes focused back on the present and on her beautiful face. The reverie must have lasted longer in reality than on the brittle surface of his mind.

“The truth is, that I didn’t think about it. I didn’t know who you were or why they wanted you but I knew that you were in trouble. What sort of person would I be if I hid in a ditch when I could help?” The answer wouldn’t have pleased his rhetoric teacher, but it had a simple honesty which would have been apparent to a child.