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and this ship. That is what I was made to do.”
    Benedetta nodded, a certain brutal set to her mouth, as if she expected nothing less, although her eyes shone with a suspicious glitter.
    Not ruthlessness, but tears. She might pity the poor programmed killer now, but he had no doubt she would be the first to fire when he hijacked Shaxi’s empty code and unleashed her on the twins. But it would be too late, for all of them.
    He was silent as he led the next of his many victims to one of her last meals.
    The motion sensor lights flicked on at their entry, and he turned with resignation to face her. “What do you like to eat?”
    “I have no idea.”
    He cocked his head. “Hermitaj programming doesn’t override your personality. At least when you aren’t on a specific mission. You must have some preferences.”
    She was scanning the mess hall as if there might be some peril concealed in the tidy food prep area or between the banquette seating where the crew gathered for meals. Mostly, he suspected she was avoiding his gaze. “I do have preferences. In…some things. But not food.”
    He wondered what preferences she did have, that she’d hesitated to mention. But he didn’t want to push her. Yet. “I suppose your employers kept you on battle rations, and you were taken young enough that you hadn’t developed an adult palate.”
    “I wasn’t taken—” She let out a sharp breath. “I like pixberries. Fresh off the vine.”
    He raised his eyebrows. “Well, you don’t want much on a spaceship, do you?”
    She jerked her chin in. “I’ll eat anything, but you asked—”
    He raised his hand to quiet her. “So I did. Let me see what we have in stores. Won’t be quite the same as fresh, but better than nutri-bars.”
    He kept one eye on her as she prowled through the mess hall while he found a dessert package with the ubiquitous purple sphere on the label. Pixberries were always one of the first terraforming plants introduced to a new planet since they could be engineered to thrive in almost any soil and atmosphere to produce fat, sweet-tart berries that made the early days of planet-busting less dreary. He broke the seal on the package and set it in the wave-oven then dug around for a spoon while the dessert heated.
    When he straightened, Shaxi was standing on the other side of the counter, just beyond arm’s reach.
    For all his covert training, his pulse skittered. He hadn’t heard her approach. The gold ring around her irises widened, shrinking the blackness; she was scanning him.
    He handed her the spoon. “Do you want ice cream with that?”
    “I…don’t remember.”
    “I always recommend berry cobbler be served a la mode.”
    “If that means with ice cream, then yes.”
    Even when he opened the freezer compartment and let out a blast of super-chilled air, the deep burn of her gaze still prickled between his shoulder blades. He took a steadying breath before he turned back. When he plucked a laser cutter out of a drawer, she stiffened.
    He kept his movements slow and easy, making sure his hands stayed where she could see them. Other ex-Hermitaj commandos had gone rogue, and he didn’t want to trigger a shoot-out with this one; he’d seen what she was capable of. “We can cryo-preserve long-range sheership passengers, but science still hasn’t found an easy way to spoon up ice cream.” He adjusted the depth of the cutter and sliced out a generous portion of the frozen treat. The sound of the cutter sizzling around the softening edges was lost in the ding of the wave-oven. He pulled out the cobbler package and neatly centered the ice cream on top. “There are certain benefits to traveling with two young women, three if you count Benedetta.” He handed Shaxi the dessert.
    She looked down at the faint twist of steam and inhaled. The unnatural gold ring constricted to near invisibility as her pupils dilated in pleasure. “This I remember,” she said softly.
    He waited until she’d taken the first