Free Silver Shark by Ilona Andrews

both Melko and Brodwyn adopted no-waste policies and encouraged population growth to build their armies. There was only one city on each continent and they looked exactly the same: picture a hive of uniform rectangular buildings about half-kilometer tall. The buildings were so large, each one was like a village ran by a Building Association. You would be born, live, work, and die in the same building sometimes."
    "It sounds bleak."
    "It was. On most worlds when a war breaks out, both sides have access to prior culture, to art, to pre-war luxuries such as gardens, clothes, entertainment. We didn't. Most clothes were standard issue and un-dyed. We had one solid meal a day, usually a meat block and some sort of grain, the rest of the time we had nutrient paste." Claire hesitated, not sure how much to share. "When I fourteen, I was taken away from my mother."
    "What do you mean, taken away?" He refilled her glass and emptied the rest of the wine into his.
    "It was decided that I should become a part of the military support staff, so some soldiers came and took me away from my mother. I was given new rooms in a Military building and I had to live there. My father had died years ago, and my mother was sick with Meteor Shower Virus. A lot of mining people get it - it looks like black burn marks on your skin. Nobody knows why it flares up, but the outbreaks will spark and die out on their own. The MSV is incurable. It attacks the nervous system and it's a very slow killer. The victim becomes weaker and weaker, until they lose the ability to walk and then fade into death. All you can do is make the person comfortable."
    She took a swallow of her wine.
    "Normally a child of my age would be working and would be expected to take care of their parent, but I wasn't allowed to do that. The Building Association stepped forward. The Elder, Doreem Nagi, apparently said that nobody in his building would die a slow death alone. The Elder has the legal powers of magistrate: he can marry people, divorce them, he acts as civil judge and so when he made that decision, people listened, and the building collectively took care of her. There were about three thousand people signed in the building, but toward the end with the war and all only about seven hundred residents remained and every day someone watched my mother and made sure that she had food, was clean, and took her pain killers. I owe them a debt I may never get an opportunity to repay."
    "I take back my sad story," Ven said. "Yours is worse."
    She shrugged. "There isn't much more to tell. I would wake up, go to work, come home, fall asleep. I did this for fourteen years. And then suddenly the war was over. We didn't even know. They told us we were winning until the very end."
    She sensed discomfort emanating from him. Her story affected him, but he wasn't sure how to respond without offending her. Mighty Venturo Escana, lost for words.
    "Well, that part of my life is over. Now I'm here," Claire said. "Drinking pink wine and enjoying good company.
    "And eating meat cooked by a barbaric user of fossil fuels," Ven said.
    "I love the food here," she confessed. "I don't know what most of things are, so I just order at random."
    "New Delphi is the culinary capital of the South. Or it claims to be. Truth is, everyone in the Provinces is expected to learn to cook whether we like it or not."
    "Oh?"
    "Oh yes. In the Provinces, if a woman is a bad cook, people make jokes." He leaned closer. "Mina, Lienne's daughter? Can't cook at all. Everything she makes tastes awful."
    Claire smiled. "I'm sure anything I made would be awful as well. Sometimes when I taste food, my mouth feels overwhelmed. This whole planet is overwhelming: the clothes, the colors, the people..."
    He leaned toward her. "You're the most disciplined, grounded person I know, Claire. I've never seen anyone hit the ground running the way you did. Nothing rattles you. If you had a psycher mind, you would be something else on the bionet."
    She