Zeb was gently tapping her foot beneath the coffee table, as she was waiting for her general to arrive. The long years, spent staring at all manner of monitors and terminals have dramatically dampened her social radar, if one had ever functioned properly. This was precisely why the feeling of unease she was experiencing since this morning, as she left the quarters, felt just as indecipherable as the smile of a boy.

It had started with an unpleasant shiver down her spine, as she was walking the streets - as if some large insect was looming around her, aiming to bite her as she least expected it. It was really annoying - it made her nervous, made her look over her shoulder more often than she would care to admit. And the most frustrating part was that so far she hadn’t seen one real reason to worry. And after all - paranoia was the single worst enemy of clear thought. For a woman like her, who depended almost entirely on her wits, this was a pretty scary perspective.

The pretty bartender who approached her table, as she sat down, literally startled her, but she hoped she’d managed to hide it well. Zeb stared off into his tight little ass as he went off with her order, in an attempt to distract herself from unpleasant thoughts. She would never admit this out loud in front of her colleagues, out of fear of unleashing an endless tirade of mockery her way, but contrary to their belief, she was just as interested in the gentler sex as they were. If not more, even. Their beauty enticed her, which didn’t help at all in her feeble attempts to understand them. The Goddess had apparently not deemed it necessary to grant them rational thought. Although, if she had to be perfectly honest with herself, she was far from the ideal image of a woman. Sports never were her thing, she wasn’t tall or strong enough and conquering male hearts was a mystical art which puzzled her more than the best encrypted terminal on the planet. But at least she still had command over her incredible intellect. Which was exactly why she couldn’t afford to lose it.

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, leaning back into her chair as she willed her mind back into calmness. After all, she was a lieutenant of the Earth army and she couldn’t allow stress to play her psyche so. There it went again! The small hairs on the back of her neck stood up and the feeling she was being watched intensified. It couldn’t have just been her overactive imagination. This time she tried to look around, seeming as nonchalant as she possibly could.

At the neighbouring table, a middle-aged woman was enticing a boy who looked just old enough to be her son. Zeb averted her gaze in distaste - awian debauchery filled her with a rage that turned her blood into boiling red stew. Apparently, the markings of a capable, successful middle-aged woman on the Twin-continents was a powerful ground vehicle, coupled with a barely legal lover. Her anger swallowed her whole and swept up her uneasy feeling like a cold ocean wave. It allowed her unique intellect to take over her once more, full force, and she kept dragging her pretend-innocent stare across the room.

The cafe was apparently a desired destination for most of the women in town to take out their husbands or lovers and prove themselves true ladies by paying a substantial sum for a couple of stimulating beverages and maybe, if they could afford it, a piece or two of the boutique cakes that were spinning on the display near the bar. There were however a few women who were sitting alone on the tables made of metalline and crystal - perhaps they were still awaiting their dates?

She stopped her eyes for a moment on one of them, but lowered her gaze to her terminal once more. The woman appeared to be at least ten years older than her but that wasn’t what caught her eye. Zeb had a feeling she had seen her somewhere before. She threw one more glance at the woman’s table, as she was pretending to stretch, to make sure she wasn’t mistaken. The other one didn’t show in any way that she had noticed the stares and Zeb smiled internally at her professionalism. The woman had a slight bronze tint to her skin, high cheekbones and almond-shaped eyes - slightly pulled at the edges, as was typical for a large portion of the population on the Air twin. Her dark-haired, almost bluish hair was tied up in a tight pony tail at the top of her skull. The lieutenant couldn’t remember her name - she was thinking something along the lines of Han or Pan, maybe San? But that matter little. What did matter was that Zeb didn’t have the wrong person - the woman truly was a Warden of AWA, although what she had heard from the other colleagues at the Syfis base was that the wind storm had just undergone an excruciating demotion, at the hands of the commander in chief no less - that water legless - Aquina Wotar.

Most likely, the lady San was waiting for a young boy to lift her spirits and draw her mind away from her troubles, as was the custom for the superficial women on these Kriya-tempted continents. It was therfore highly unlikely that she would even think to look over to Zeb and wonder what her foreign colleague was doing here. If she could recognise her at all, that is. Which was all the better for the Earth lieutenant.

She turned to her screen, a slight smile on her face, content that the feeling of dread had proved inconsequential. And for the second time today, she jumped in her seat. At the chair opposite her, general Shankh was seated, looking at her with her typical half-mocking reprimand that she reserved for her subordinates. Damn her and her spec-ops training, which had turned her into a silent killing machine...

“Still hovering in the clouds, are we, lieutenant?”, the general interrupted her internal tirade.

“I was concerned we were being watched”, Zeb hissed, praying to the Goddess that not an ounce of the envy she felt for her commanding officer had seeped into her tone “At the table behind you,” she continued hastily, inclining her head slightly to the right, toward the spot the wind storm had occupied.

Only to feel once more the proverbial rug being pulled from under her. The chair, which had been occupied by the lady San mere moments ago, stood empty as though she had never been there to begin with. Shankh blinked slowly, to conceal the sidelong glance she threw the empty seat, before swiftly turning back to her young colleague, disapproval clearly visible on her face.

“Lieutenant Zeb…”, she began.

“She was just there, I swear!” The girl started explaining. “But she must’ve already taken a working boy to some guesthouse to… you know, take her mind off her demotion, because she was… you know… demoted…”

“A bit more professionalism, if you please, Lieutenant”, Shankh admonished in a quiet, icy tone. “It doesn’t befit a warrior of the Earth nation to behave like a village tattler, unable to contain the barrage of smalltalk in his own empty head. I personally surveyed the perimeter, before entering - there is no cause for alarm.”

Shankh’s voice made it clear she would accept no further arguments and she considered the topic closed, as she grabbed one of the menus and stared at it with simulated interest. Zeb lowered her eyes to the transparent crystal table to stare at the tip of her shoes. Most likely, the general was right, so the feeling of unease she still had must be just a figment of her imagination. She just needed to ignore it.

“We have a babe and a loving father in charge of it”, she whispered, as if to the screen in front of her, but caught the court nod of the general out of the corner of her eye.

“Excellent”, her commanding officer whispered in response. “We should visit the happy family soon and bring gifts. How was the shopping trip?”

“Some stores were closed”, upon seeing the general’s raised eyebrow, Zeb quickly continued, “However, workarounds have been successful and we have acquired the goods in time.”

“Perfect”, Shankh nodded with a smile that menacingly bared her canines. “So we have time for coffee then?”

Zeb forced herself to smile in turn and took a sip out of her cup. Her coffee had already gone cold and left an unpleasant bitter taste in her mouth.

At the adjacent table, the chair slid quietly back, as if pushed by a sudden gust of wind. Aeris Tan waited for the cafe door to be opened by incoming customers so she could push past them and she ran almost three blocks down before pushing again the blue button on her uniform. A grey cat hissed at her from some trash bin, but other than that, thankfully nobody seemed to have noticed that the nothingness in the alley had suddenly transformed into a Warden of AWA. The Lieutenant kicked the container angrily, further scaring the poor animal, which jumped out past her still raised leg with an angry meow. The Warden’s gaze however was firmly plastered to the screen of the device in her hand, as if the entire planet was gathered inside of it.

“Dammit, dammit, son of a dog!” - the thought was circling her mind like a mad caged beast as she was delivering kick after devastating kick to the side of the building and the disposal bins she was standing next to. As a result, for a while the air was full of pieces of plaster and trash. When she calmed down a bit, she turned the damned gizmo off and inserted it back in her side pocket.

Right now she couldn’t afford to let her anger consume her. She had to think clearly, swiftly and to the point. She couldn’t count on any support from her colleagues, because technically speaking, she had no proof. At least none that was acquired through proper, legal channels. The recording she had was made by a top secret, experimental pocket translator, which someone of her rank shouldn’t have access to. Moreover, the background noise from the cafe, which was also very audible, made it near impossible to objectively identify the voices of the two Earth traitors by someone who hadn’t been there herself.

So she was on her own...

An eerie smile twisted her lips - those poor Earth terrorists, this wasn’t going to be fair at all...