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She went where the humans went, and where the Weredragons who worked with them went. The research caverns, where Earth's scientists sat with Colony researchers over instruments measuring a sun nobody could save. The supply halls, where the grain that came down on the alliance ships got counted and carried out to the settlements. She talked to everyone. She wasted words on no one.

He watched her stop at the mouth of the caverns and trade three sentences with a human scientist. He couldn't hear them and didn't need to. The woman had been wound tight as a wire when Diana walked up. She was steadier by the time Diana walked off, and nothing had changed except that somebody competent had looked at her problem and made it smaller.

Diana caught him watching, without turning around.

"That's Renna," she said. "Best sun modeler Earth sent us. She hasn't slept a full night in a month, because she thinks if she stares at the numbers hard enough, they'll turn kinder."

"Will they?"

"No." She said it without cruelty, the way you'd state a fact. "But she's carrying it better than the last one, and better is the only lever I've got. You take the wins the size they come." She started walking again. "You can walk beside me, you know. Three steps back is regulation, but it makes my neck itch, knowing you're reading it."

"Three steps back is where I can see the corridor and you both."

"Ah. A professional." She paused, almost amused. "Sillevia does send me the good ones."

He decided the safest reply was none, and kept his three steps. He was starting to suspect that answering her was how people ended up telling her more than they meant to.

* * *

The first person who didn't fit was a settlement steward.

She stopped in a supply hall to talk to an old campaigner named Toveth, who'd lost half a wing to a Drog in a war older than the alliance. Kavren knew him by reputation. Toveth handed his respect to no one he hadn't watched bleed. And here he stood, giving it to a human woman over a column of grain figures, grudging and complete, because she'd found two hundred rations a clerk had lost, for a settlement that could do nothing for her in return.

"You didn't have to chase those down yourself," Toveth said. "A steward's grateful. The children more so."

"A clerk's mistake shouldn't cost a child a winter," Diana said. "That's math, not charity. Feed them."

Toveth watched her go with a look Kavren had never seen the old warrior wear. Not gratitude; gratitude was cheap, and Toveth had never had use for cheap. It was closer to the look one soldier gives another who held a line he had no reason to hold.

"You're quiet," Diana said as they left, not turning around. "Most of Sillevia's people can't help narrating. It's nerves. You just watch."

"That's the job."

"It's the job done better than most of them manage." She said it like a fact, not a compliment. "Keep it up. I like knowing exactly how good the person watching me is."

He kept it up. He told himself he didn't enjoy it, and almost believed it.

* * *

Midmorning she went to the human women's quarters, and there he learned something the briefing had left out.

Six of them were still in the Colony, the ones who'd come down in the first years and stayed. Diana went among them like an officer among her own, no ceremony and no distance. She asked one about a cough. She looked over a younger one's shoulder at a schematic and said something that made the woman laugh. A third, gray at the temples and plainly the ringleader of the room, tipped her chin at Kavren by the door.

"New one," she said to Diana, not bothering to lower her voice. "Bigger than the last. Does he talk, or is he only for decoration?"

"He talks. Sparingly. It's restful." Diana didn't look up from the schematic. "Don't flirt with him, Hana. He's on duty, and he'll write it in a report."

"I would never," said Hana, who plainly would, and gave Kavren a grin that had survived a shipwreck and a dead world with all its mischief intact. He kept his eyes on the middle distance and his face on nothing at all, which only widened the grin. He'd faced a Drog line without moving a muscle. He had no drill for this.

He'd braced for these women to be broken. That was the story in the barracks, where the warriors bunked and ate and traded rumor: six humans stranded on a dead world at the mercy of a court that didn't want them. They weren't broken. They ran a clinic rotation and a repair schedule and a small fierce economy of favors, and they did it under a woman who treated their smallest complaint like a matter of state.

One of them caught Diana's sleeve on the way out. Broad-shouldered, an engineer named Peta.

"Is it true?" Peta asked, low. "They're saying if the surface keeps cooling, they'll move us deeper. Away from the light for good."

Diana didn't hand her a comfortable lie.

"I don't know yet," she said. "I'm fighting it. And if it comes to that, I'll be down there in the dark with you, not up in a warm room pretending I'm not cold."