Bao had been a formidable tennis player, as Lorca discovered the hard way during their frequent, spirited games on Sunday mornings, while Nolokov had fancied himself an amateur astronomer. It was not unusual to find him sitting in an open field a kilometer or so west of the outpost on clear evenings, using an old-fashioned refractor telescope to peer at the stars in Tarsus IV’s night sky. Lorca had joined him on a few of those occasions, during which he also enjoyed samples of the latest bourbon produced by the lieutenant using a method of his own devising. The results were something that had
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