The one area where life had inarguably improved on board the Rebellion was in the communal mess. In the freighter’s original configuration, the mess area had been larger, but it had also been meant to accommodate far more people. Under Daniel Shays, the Rebellion had always made do with far less redundancy than most ships of its size. Most of space travel consisted of waiting around, he reasoned, so why pay three separate shifts of people to do so at the same time?
With the crew depleted by battles with the undead and then desertions on board the Finger, though, there weren’t enough bodies on board to make up one shift, and with the ship running shag, there was far less waiting around between destinations. On the other hand, there was a lot less competition for seats in the mess hall, and the food stores went further.
With the financial outlook so dire, austerity measures like rationing might have been excusable under the circumstances, except for the circumstance where no one who’d stayed would have excused them. So Lilliana made a point of buying luxury food items whenever their clients or the destination ships had any available. Mushrooms and hydroponic vegetables were both deep-space staples, of course, but they came in widely varying grades and she went for the good stuff. Meat cultures weren’t rare, but they were pricey, and she didn’t skimp there, making sure the ship’s baconesque dispensers were kept full. She even picked up a battered and second-hand cocktail shrimp extruder, which Regan was able to repair.
Her real coup came when she scored a batch of tofu made from real soy.
Lilliana fully realized that after her shipmates got used to eating like this, she couldn’t very well go back to the old practice of negotiating for whatever was available cheaply and in large quantities, with the occassional luxury item offered only when she was able to score a phenomenonal deal on it. That, in fact, was what she liked best about the situation: the food budget Shays would never have approved in ordinary circumstances would prove impossible for him to repeal once circumstances that could pass for ordinary returned.
He’d get his own back, of course. He would put his foot down and block expenditures or otherwise meddle in the ship’s operations out of spite. She was prepared for this and already had three different important-looking but inconsequential targets lined up for him to vent his ire upon, when the time came.
In the meantime, he simply took a tithe of the fruits of her shopping and said nothing. On a settled world he could get the best food money could buy, but out in the deep black, it took a certain way around a communication array to find the good stuff.
No, nobody who’s stayed with the Rebellion had any reason to complain about the food, which was why the only person who did was Galatea.
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