Cormus turned the glass slowly in his hand and looked at it rather than at Ress for a moment, the way he sometimes looked at an instrument panel when he wanted to think without looking like he was thinking.

"Information broker," he said, not with judgment, just letting it sit in the air between them. He took a sip. "I've worked with a few of those. Mostly on the contractor side, guys who knew which landing pads had eyes on them and which ones didn't, who was buying cargo without asking questions, that kind of thing." He set the glass down and looked at Ress then, easy and direct. "Good ones were worth every strip of latinum. Bad ones got people killed, but that's true of most professions if you're bad enough at them."

He leaned back slightly on the stool, crossing his arms loosely without closing off. It was more habit than anything, the posture of someone who had spent a lot of time in jump seats and cockpit harnesses and had learned to get comfortable in small spaces.

"Allergic to trust," he repeated. "Yeah, that tracks for this line of work. I've found the trick is figuring out who has the right incentives to stay honest with you. Doesn't always hold, but it narrows the field." He looked at Ress for a moment and then picked up his drink again. "I'll keep that in mind. The quiet enquiries thing. I tend to land in places where knowing things ahead of time is the difference between a clean extraction and a very bad afternoon."

He finished the last of the glass and set it down with a quiet click, nudging it forward a few centimeters in Ress's direction.

"And I'll take another one of those while you're at it."

Ress smiled at that, taking the empty glass and setting it aside before they reached for a fresh one. "Sure," they said, and began building the second drink with the same lazy precision as the first, though this time they showed off a little with a couple of neat bottle tosses. "Bad information is worse than no information. No information makes people careful, makes them read the signs a bit...Bad information makes them confident, and confident people are beautifully easy to kill." Their mouth curved as they twisted the strip of peel over the glass, letting the oil catch the light before dropping it in. They slid the drink back toward him with two fingers. "If I ever sell you an answer, Fletcher, I’ll tell you what I know, what I think, and what I’m guessing...so you know where you stand."

Cormus picked up the second drink and watched the peel settle to the bottom of the glass before he looked back at Ress.

"That's the most useful thing anyone's said to me since I came aboard," he said, and meant it. He had worked with people who blurred those three things together on purpose and people who blurred them together because they did not know the difference, and both had cost him in different ways. Knowing which category you were dealing with ahead of time was most of the job.

He took a sip and set the glass down without moving it far, keeping it close the way he did when he intended to stay a while.

"I'll hold you to that," he said. "And I'll return the favor where I can. I don't deal in information the way you do but I know airspace and I know approaches, and sometimes that's the same thing with different terminology." He turned the glass slightly on the counter. "Landing zones people think are clean. Routes that look exposed but aren't. The kind of thing that only matters when it suddenly matters a lot."

He glanced around the room for a moment, taking in the empty tables, the low light, the particular quiet of a bar before the shift change brought people in looking for somewhere to put the day down.

"You picked a good spot for it, by the way," he said, nodding toward the room in general. "Bar's the one place on a ship where people talk without thinking about what they're saying. Whoever put you here either knew that or got very lucky."

He looked at Ress with a slight tilt of his head, not quite a question but close enough to one that it functioned the same way.

Ress gave a soft laugh at that, more breath than sound, and rested one hand against the counter. "Oh, I have a strict...no spying clause in my bartending," they said as they looked at Fletcher, raising an eyebrow and tilting their head. Their cybernetic eye caught the amber light as they studied him as if he was a starmap, taking their time over whatever routes and warning signs they thought they could see. Then they reached for their glass of water, taking a small sip before giving a shrug. "I like the job. The...rest, that is for outside the ship. You don't release snakes in your sleeping quarters."