Page 74 of Escape Velocity

Hoping the defiance of the group’s customs wouldn’t cause a problem, she sat down.

Everybody passed around the serving dishes, and Amber took a little from each. Then she watched what the swamp rats were doing and saw that they scooped up the stew on pieces of bread and ate the vegetables with their fingers. When she’d been a slave, she’d eaten without utensils, and she had no trouble doing the same here. But she saw that both Max and Rafe were a little awkward as they imitated their hosts.

She was hungry, and the food was surprisingly tasty.

The talk turned to the dresses and shirts the “traders” had brought.

“Where did you get these goods?” one of the men asked.

Rafe paused with bread and stew on the way to his mouth. “From the Hawkings colony.”

“You go there often?”

“Not in the past, but we will now.”

“Where else do you trade?”

He and Max talked about some of the other stops they’d made during their careers, and she listened with interest since she had never been to anywhere but Naxion until a few days ago. Their stories made her realize how little she knew of the universe and how much of a chance she’d been taking by putting her fate into the hands of a man she’d just met. One of their stops was a colony on a planet called Palamar that had been settled after a plague had wiped out all the women on the settler’s home planet. Only men and their sons were sent to the new world.

“So, they had no gals to fek,” one of the swamp rats said.

“Not for almost twenty years.”

“There must have been a lot of flogging the log.”

Male laughter around the table followed the comment. Amber felt her cheeks flame. She had never heard the term before, but she had a good idea what it might mean.

Max jumped in to refocus the conversation. “Bride ships have been arriving for the past few years.”

But the swamp rats weren’t about to let the interesting subject go. “And the young guys were all virgins?” another diner asked.

“Must have been.”

“Unless they fekked their farm animals.”

The crude talk made Amber look down at her plate and wish she wasn’t sitting with this group of men. Was this the way people on Danalon usually spoke to guests? Or were the swamp rats just earthier?

“How’d you meet your gal?” a dark-haired man asked Max.

“On the Freedom Station.”

The man turned to her. “So, you’ve gabbed with all manner of folks from the seven planets?”

She floundered for an answer, hating to lie. But she knew she had to come up with something and said, “My parents kept me very secluded.”

“Then how did you and Max hook up?”

He jumped in with an explanation. “I liked what I saw, and I didn’t take no for an answer.”

“Your parents made the decision?”

She squirmed in her seat. “I’d like to keep some things private.”

That drew several annoyed looks, but the head man said, “Don’t mind our curiosity. So few strangers come here.”

“I understand,” Max answered.

She felt like everyone was watching her until Max said, “We’re also curious about you, since you keep to yourselves.”

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