It struck Moira, just then, that Markus and Tekla were quite comfortable with each other. It made sense. Markus would not be the least bit troubled by Tekla’s sexuality; on the contrary, it would make things much simpler for a man like him if he knew she were unavailable. He was an ex–military pilot; so was she. Naturally they would tend to view certain things in the same way. For a while, during the Cloud Ark’s first year, Tekla had been a sort of itinerant laborer. It might seem strange that a space station could support a person with no particular job. But none of the Scouts had really been expected to survive, so none of them had been sent up with long-term roles in mind. Her alienation from the Russians who took the brunt of the spacewalking work had led her to try her hand at a number of different tasks. She knew the interior of Izzy as well as anyone, but she also knew how to operate the controls of an arklet, and she could put on a space suit and go out and weld things in space. Her period of wandering in the wilderness seemed to have ended when Markus had taken over. Moira was no longer precisely certain what it was that Tekla did for a living. But she now had the clear sense that Tekla was working for Markus directly, that he was trusting her to do something.