The evening wound down as the dessert course made the rounds, a simple bread pudding that was the chef's particular specialty. All the while during dinner, Sam watched Tahlia but got increasingly less worried about her as he saw her relax around his crew. He knew them and they, for the most part (and<i>especially </i>Mika) were excellent judges of character.<br/>When his mind drifted, it drifted back to how he saw her ship get blown away by the raiders, and , in particular, the vector he saw them escape on. Not that it would matter much. Space was big and no raider skipper worth his ship fled an attack vectoring for home. Nor did he come in on the same. This was a hit, after all, and he'd have to start from scratch.<br/>It would be another day before he could get anything remotely resembling a realtime chat going with the standing system patrol and see if any of them had spotted the ship that Rabbit was still hunting down in shipping records elsewhere in the system.<br/><br/>He polished off his cake as the steward made the rounds with cocoa. He'd inherited the tradition from an old skipper of his, who, and Sam had no idea how, seemed to be the only command officer in space who didn't just not run on coffee but hated its very existence. He'd at least come to realize that coffee after dinner was a terrible idea.<br/><br/>"Now then," he said, as the conversation wound down and Hawk excused himself to retire for the evening. "Shall I show you back to your quarters?" Sam asked his new guest.