I watched the cruiser into the sky and sighed. I was reasonably sure that going to Ortega openly had been a good move, but I hadn't expected it to be so messy. However long she and Ryker had been together, the chemistry must have been devastating. I remembered reading somewhere how the initial pheromones of attraction between bodies appeared to undergo a form of encoding the longer said bodies were in proximity, binding them increasingly close. None of the biochemists interviewed appeared to really understand the process, but: there had been some attempts to play with it in labs. Speeding up or interrupting the effect had met with mixed results, one of which was empathin and its derivatives.