Rene wrapped his fingers around Solae’s as she spoke, taking a measure of comfort from simple physical contact. Men, and soldiers particularly rarely touched each other outside of the bounds of duty or sparing and Rene wondered if anyone had touched him for more than a few seconds in the years since he had taken the star. The lightning flashed outside at pulsing intervals, the bursts of light illuminated the room in sharp momentary reliefs. The light made Solae’s hair flash a white gold that was almost painful in its purity.

“I was on a punishment detail,” Rene began, thinking of Solae being saved by happenstance. So much coincidence had gone into bringing them together. 

“When the Gids hit us I was halfway up a sensor antennae, a shell burst bought it down and I blacked out when I hit the ground and the wreckage fell on top of me. By the time I came to they were gone.” Lightning flashed again, illuminating his eyes as pools of darkness surrounded by brilliant white, the light casting his features in a sharp grimace of remembered pain. He squeezed her hand gently with his own.

“It isn’t surviving that makes you tough Solae, it was getting up and getting out of there,” he told her. She had been lucky, as he had, but he doubted many people of her station would have been able to keep themselves moving and evade capture. Plenty of people, even with military training, would have frozen up or simply shut down in the face of such an overwhelming calamity.

A shiver ran through Rene’s body and his left eyelid twitched spasmodically. The veins on his right hand stood out and throbbed for a moment then subsided. Side effects of the drugs Min Ho had given him and familiar from the course in combat pharmacology he had undergone back on St Croix.

“As for why I signed up…” he trailed off uncertain of what to say or if he should say anything at all. In his mind he had rehearsed such a conversation countless times, justification and self justification for what had happened. Amellia’s body flashed into his mind, laying on her white silken bed covers, her face cold and still in a mockery of the vital, vibrant woman she had been. The galling fact that her killer, who ever they were, was still at large and unpunished. For years Rene had harboured fantasies of finding out the truth, exposing those responsible but each imagined scenario had left him with the same hollow emptiness at its conclusion. None of it would bring the woman he had loved back. Solae kissed his forehead, her lips cool against  his skin and snapping him back from the mausoleum of the past. His face had twisted into a rictus of pain and he forced it to relax with an effort of will.

“There was a murder,” he managed in a ragged whisper. He realised he was gripping her hand far too forcefully and he relaxed his grip but was unwilling to let go of her completely.

“I didn’t do it but the evidence… well it doesn't matter,” he concluded in a whisper, unwilling to revisit the pain and the anger that simmered deep beneath his carefully constructed defenses. If he started down that road he might go to pieces and he couldn’t afford that now, maybe not ever. Nothing he could do now could change what had happened but he wasn’t going to let another woman face death or worse while he could still affect the outcome.

Three stabs of lightning lit the room in quick succession, the purplish light melding into a single sheet of wavering illumination, etching Solae’s beautiful face in fluid magenta. The smell of tropical rain and wet earth were heavy in his nostrils mixed with the slight sharpness of ozone and tropical flowers. Without conscious control his arms wrapped around the marquessa’s slender waist, pulling her gently too him. The warmth of her body pressed against him through the thin cotton garments sending a shiver down his spine that had nothing to do with the restorative drugs burning their way through his system. He looked down at Solae, her eyes luminous in the uncertain light of the storm. Forgetting the coup, the Gids, the storm and the whole universe he leaned forward and pressed his lips to hers.