"The craziest things happen when you get a lot of people all trying to accomplish secret goals at once. Sometimes even when they're all ostensibly on the same side. You should know."

"Yes. I suppose Carmina could have just been convenient, but there were certainly hundreds of people with agendas who'd be thrilled to have dinner with a delegation on that station; why her and only her? Doesn't that seem strange?"

"A bit, yeah. I don't know. I would give you an explanation if I had one. Maybe her schedule was convenient. Maybe the list of possible diversions was alphabetized by first name."

"It's a suspicious coincidence. But I'm not sure how to investigate it; Carmina would have told me if she knew anything - about why she was invited or whether someone else really sent the invitation, about my husband's secret identity, whatever."

"Yeah. Sometimes coincidences do just happen. The vid feed from the docking bay glitched for a few seconds while I was with the Lairoubans, no foul play, just a normal random outage, and that was when Bel noticed I'd gone missing - trying to report that the troopers who'd gone to check it out hadn't found anything, and it couldn't reach me. Probably saved my last couple of ribs."

"That makes two coincidences that were extremely helpful and relevant to your mission."

"'Once is chance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action' - I don't see a third," he says. "And it stretches credibility to think I'm being stalked by some kind of good fairy whose idea of helping is to make it slightly likelier that my troops will find me before the enemy is quite finished beating me to death."

"Well, three times wouldn't be enemy action. It would be good fairy action." Hair pet hair pet hair pet. "If not especially fantastic good fairy action."

"Mediocre fairy action," he suggests.

"Yes. Mediocre fairy action. Is this really two coincidences? The Toramirans being drawn away from the poisoned dinner engagement to another meeting could be counted separately from the other meeting being with my export agent."

"If it was an action, it was one action," he says. "So I'm only counting it once. And I'm pretty sure the vid glitch wasn't an action at all. Although thank you, now every time something goes slightly less badly than it could have on a mission I'm going to chalk it up to the mediocre fairy."

"I predict that this will lead to interesting mission reports."

He snickers softly. And briefly. "Ow. I love you."

"Sorry. I can sing instead of risking being amusing if you like."

"I like it when you sing."

She lets the doctors shoo her at that point, and doesn't press the point about visitor allowability until the formal day of such permission has arrived.

She goes and kisses him, ever so obligingly. "Hey you."

"I love you. I also love good painkillers," he says. "But I love you more. I'm stuck in this bed for another week, can you believe it?"

"Easily. I am afraid you will have to be flat. I will do what I can to mitigate the boredom part."

"I loooove you."

"I love you too." Kiss.

Kiss! Very flat kiss.