Jiang Shasha, for her part, now saw Zhao Chen walking straight toward her.
Loathing rose in her to the utmost. She'd never imagined this fellow could be so pigheaded. Last night she'd told him plainly that she and he were people of two different worlds — yet he'd gone on and on about how the two of them were childhood sweethearts, in the hope that she might have a change of heart.
Was he joking?
Only after leaving that impoverished system had she come to know what a truly brilliant life was!
How could she ever be content to go back to that wretched system one day as the wife of some nobody baron — and to have her own children barred, on top of it, from inheriting any title?
She would not allow herself to live a life like that. She wouldn't so much as entertain the thought!
The boy at her side was a promising stock she'd picked out: a good family pedigree, a father who was presently a viscount and, by all accounts, stood a fair chance of being raised to count within the next few years — in which case wouldn't his son, too, be able to inherit the title?
Never mind — I'll find some pretext in a moment and turn him down. I've already left him his dignity; if he can't take the hint, then he can't blame me for shaming him in front of everyone, Jiang Shasha muttered inwardly.
Her face had already turned cold, the words of refusal readied on her tongue.
Even the boy beside her wore a mocking look. In courting Jiang Shasha he had naturally looked into her background, and so knew all about Zhao Chen, the down-at-heel baron.
He was the sort who relished the shamed, furious face of a man whose beloved had been snatched away.
And just as the two of them sat waiting for the scene to play out —
Against all expectation, Zhao Chen didn't so much as spare Jiang Shasha a second glance. He walked right past them.
The gesture left both Jiang Shasha and the boy dumbfounded; even Li Wei froze.
He'd assumed that Zhao Chen, catching his fiancée in another man's company, would take it hard and go over to demand an accounting. Instead Zhao Chen had simply walked straight on by?
"See? This is the best table. You can even watch the ships docked over there." Zhao Chen sat down at a table beside a huge transparent floor-to-ceiling window and pointed off toward a distant starport where ships lay at berth — a few dozen of them.
Big brother, thought Li Wei, bewildered, did you really come sit over here just to look at the view?
Zhao Chen had, in fact, come to look at the ships. Perhaps it was something written into a man's very blood; whatever the reason, Zhao Chen was now keenly interested in starships.
Drawing on the knowledge in his head, he matched up the ships berthed in the starport one by one. Most were T2-tier; a portion were T1.
In this age T1 ships already counted as outmoded goods, generally civilian craft, or ships a given star system used for patrol and guard duty.
To take a ship into an actual battle, you needed a T2 at the very least.
A T2 hull ran several times the bulk of a T1. The most various in kind were the interstellar destroyers and interstellar frigates — those two types alone made up two-thirds of the lot. The rest were interstellar cruisers and interstellar battlecruisers.
Zhao Chen even spotted a single T1-tier interstellar battleship, though it was plainly an antique.
Carriers, though — that type he did not see.
Interstellar battleships and carriers ranked among the costliest of all ship types to build: the one the overlord of space-borne battle, the other the very banner of the giant-ship-and-giant-gun creed.
Before long Zhao Chen picked out a ship identical to the one Li Wei had bought — a T2 Hyena-class Medium Interstellar Destroyer.
At present this was the best-selling T2 interstellar destroyer in all the Starlight Empire, and no small number of people were fond of the class.
The hull ran 230 meters — near the bulk of a great sports stadium.
That berthed Hyena-class destroyer wore its factory steel-gray paint, and on the hull's right flank were sprayed the crests that marked its identity: three of them in all.
Foremost was the Galactic Alliance crest.
The Starlight Empire was a member state of the Galactic Alliance, and every starship within the Alliance was required to bear this crest.
Behind it came the Starlight Empire's seven-star crest — those seven stars standing for the seven families who had founded the Starlight Empire.
Last was the crest marking the ship's owner, together with the vessel's registry number and the like; this final one was the largest and the most conspicuous of the three.
Those three crests amounted, in effect, to the ship's identity card.
"So what are you having today? My treat!" Li Wei declared expansively.
"Really, now?" Zhao Chen shot him a teasing look, then tapped the ordering button set into the tabletop. A holographic order page rose up before him, and he swiped straight to the very end of the menu.
Li Wei's face crumpled into a bitter smile at once. "Big brother… look, my dad may have bought me a ship, but you know the monthly allowance he gives me… it's honestly not much…"
Zhao Chen let up teasing him. "You may be a rich man's son and I only a down-at-heel baron, but I haven't sunk so far as to live off you. When you've truly made your fortune, you can treat me then."
With that, Zhao Chen ordered the cheapest set meal on offer. Li Wei ordered much the same.
Soon a robot server set the two meals down before them.
"Your Nutrient Set A and Nutrient Set C. Please, enjoy…"
Zhao Chen set to eating the food in front of him — handsome enough to look at, but truly nothing to speak of in flavor. If he had to sum it up… it was rather like eating plastic.
"Food's gone up in price again lately, seems like. Eating this artificial nutrient stuff day in and day out, I feel like I'm going to lose my sense of taste altogether. What I wouldn't give for some of the naturally grown food…" Li Wei grumbled, pulling a long face.
"Go beg your old man for a bigger allowance," said Zhao Chen without lifting his head.
"That iron rooster of a father of mine? Apart from this one grand gesture of buying me a ship, there's no prying another coin out of him. And do you have any idea how pricey naturally grown ingredients are these days? Even my dad can only manage the basic three-meals-and-a-soup, with meat once a week. The life of wine-pools and meat-forests[1] — that's for the upper nobles alone to enjoy, I expect." Li Wei waved a hand.
Zhao Chen looked down at the food on his tray.
In this age everything was fine and everything was advanced. The one thing that wasn't fine was the food. With the population so vast, with planetary land developed to exhaustion, with the cost of naturally grown crops driven so high, the great majority of ordinary folk now ate cheap artificial nutrient meals — food without savor.
Only the high officials, the great nobles, and the rich merchants could put naturally grown, natural food on their tables.
Even the plainest staples of Zhao Chen's past life — rice, steamed buns, vegetables — were costly commodities here; the ordinary lower and middle nobility could indulge in them only now and then.
"If it isn't Baron Zhao Chen? How is it that a proper baron, sir, is eating food like this?" An unfriendly voice carried over from beside them.
Li Wei knit his brows and looked over. Jiang Shasha and that man — the pair Zhao Chen had paid no mind to earlier — had, of all things, seated themselves right next to them.
The man's standing was no ordinary thing, either. His name was Zhang Haoran, and his father was a viscount.
Zhao Chen paid him no heed and went on, head down, eating his food.
"Forgot to give you a piece of news, Baron Zhao Chen — Shasha has agreed to be my girlfriend. As for that betrothal between you and Shasha, if you know what's good for you, you'll void it yourself. You, worthy of Shasha? Better take the measure of your own worth first." Zhang Haoran jeered without the least restraint, his gaze full of contempt for Zhao Chen.
He was the sort who relished this feeling of humiliating a man.