Paul leaned heavily on his cane as he walked, slowly, down the country lane. The gravel that had been spread on the road at some point had migrated to the edges, creating soft shoulders that crunched with every step and forced him to pay attention to where he put his feet.

The discipline of walking along with his cane on the loose gravel gave him something to focus on, which left him free to mull the answer to his girlfriend’s question.

The idea of having a girlfriend, of having it be Millicent, about whom he’d fantasized all the time he was growing up, these were new ideas for him, for which he really needed some time to process and integrate, so every time he started thinking about the answer to her question, he got sidetracked by the fact that there was a question, posed to him by his girlfriend, who was Millicent.

Amazing. What? Oh, right, the question.

“I don’t know,” he said, looking over at Millicent, walking along beside him. She was wearing the dress that was fashionable for a small-town woman from a good family on an out-of-the-way part of a second-tier planet to be wearing, this season; she wore it more to make sure everyone else knew she knew it was what she was supposed to wear than because she liked it.

He thought she was beautiful in it.

He shrugged. “It’s just… how it is.” Aware as he said it that this was an unsatisfactory answer.

The question was this: If it was true that the war was just business, that it wasn’t about great forces of good and evil colliding, which he’d said several times, then why did he hate Andy Clemens so much?

The answer, at least as far as Paul had been able to formulate one, what with the distracting facts trying to integrate themselves in his worldview, was that Paul and Andy just didn’t get along, and never had, and that the fact that they’d gone off into the world and done similar jobs for competing companies and ended up back here, recuperating from their injuries and getting ready to go back to work trying to kill each other for money, was basically beside the point.

Andy was kind of an asshole. He’d been an asshole growing up, he remained an asshole.

The droneship that had powered into the side of the command module Paul had been sitting in, causing a number of fascinating thermo-kinetic effects and setting off a sort of improvised high-energy rube goldberg catastrophe machine which had, among its various end-states, driven a glowing red hot piece of ceramic from a supposedly-shatter-proof coffee mug through Paul’s knee, setting off another, wetter improvised rube-goldberg reaction inside his body — the droneship that had done that had been painted in the livery of the company Andy Clemens worked for, also controlling drone warships the same as Paul did.

This was almost a coincidence, as far as Paul was concerned. It wasn’t a war of good versus evil, it wasn’t even a tribal conflict; it was purely a negotiation by force, two giant trans-solar-system corporations performing a ritual to see which one was willing to commit the most resources to winning a particular contract.

Paul, trained expert in the resolution of diplomatic disagreements by other means — professional soldier, with the masters degree from a prestigious military academy to prove it — knew very well that it wasn’t personal; even if Andy Clemens had been personally flying that ship, it still wouldn’t have been personal.

He just didn’t like the guy.

“I just don’t like the guy,” he said. It sounded lame. “I didn’t like him growing up, and I don’t like him now. It’s got nothing to do with his employer.”

They waked for a while, each of them wallowing in their dissatisfaction with that answer.

“Have you tried talking to him?” She said it tentatively, as though offering him a suggestion that he might not have thought of.

He hadn’t thought of it, actually, until earlier today, when she’d broached the topic; not because he was angry or upset with Andy Clemens, or because he was engaged in some sort of feud, but because the fact that they disliked each other had resolved itself into a sort of mutual indifference about the time they were eleven, and he hadn’t thought much about Andy Clemens since.

Andy Clemens, however, had been thinking about Adeline Harper, and Adeline about Andy, just as Paul had been thinking about Millicent; and Millicent and Adeline were the closest of friends.

Paul sighed.

“I’ll talk to him,” he said.