Bobbie, Alex, and Clarissa ate lunch together in a tiny compartment with ELECTRICAL SUPPLIES stenciled on the door in four languages. It had a few unlabeled crates in it that they could use as tables and benches, so they’d taken to calling it the Diner. The meal was the heavily spiced and deep-fried balls of bean paste that Belters called red kibble. On the side they had a few bits of dried fruit, and a thin seafood soup that tasted like the flavor came from having a fish swim through the broth.
“You know what I miss most about the
He was exaggerating his Mariner Valley drawl the way he always did when he spoke of the ship. Bobbie laughed at him, then noisily drank off the last of her broth.
“It’s good for you, boy,” she said, mocking his drawl.
“It keeps body and soul attached, and that’s about the best I can say for it.”
Clarissa smiled at their banter, but said nothing. She was picking up a single ball of kibble at a time, then carefully chewing it. It was like watching a bird eat in slow motion.
“I wonder if the Laconians still eat Martian food,” Bobbie said. “We could ask.”
Alex tossed his plate down onto their crate-table in disgust. “You know, I think what chaps my ass more than anything else about this shit? The guys who came out of the gate and started wreckin’ our shit and takin’ over aren’t some damn aliens. It’s fucking Martians. I bet there’re people on that Laconian ship I served with back in the day. Dollars to donuts, the top brass in the Marine detachment here are people you know, at least by name.”
Bobbie nodded, chewing the last of her kibble. “That’s actually an interesting idea. I mean, could that be useful? Find some people in their command structure that know us? Is that an in?”
“I ain’t talkin’ about how it’s useful, Bob,” Alex said, nearly knocking over Clarissa’s water glass with his angry hand gestures. “I’m talkin’ about the idea that people just like us, Martian patriots, picked up and ran off with this Duarte guy, and took about a third of the fleet with them.”
“You ever wonder if it could have been us?” Bobbie asked.
Alex lowered his brows at her. “You lost your mind?”
“No, really, think about it,” Bobbie said. “We were both out of the service when Duarte started making his move. You’d been retired for a decade at that point. I’d been out of the Corps for a couple years. But if we’d still been active duty, could we have fallen for his pitch? I mean, a lot of good people did.”
“A third of the stars of heaven,” Clarissa said, as if she were agreeing.
“Uh,” Alex replied, cocking his head in confusion.
“A third of the what now, honey?” Bobbie said.
“From the Bible. Revelation. When the devil fell from grace, he took a third of the angels with him. It’s described as the great dragon pulling a third of the stars of heaven down with its tail.”
“Huh,” Alex said like he had no idea what she was talking about.
“Why’d that pop into your head?” Bobbie asked.
“Whatever story Duarte was selling was compelling enough to get a big chunk of the Martian military to buy in. The devil’s story was freedom from the oppression of God’s rules, and it was good enough to win a lot of angels to his side. Whatever Duarte’s pitch was, it’s a good one. Don’t be so sure you wouldn’t have bought it.”
“Oh, I’m pretty fucking sure,” Alex replied with a snort.
Bobbie had to admit she wasn’t. A galaxy-spanning human civilization run the way the Martians, at their best, ran things. Organized, focused on a single overarching goal. Efficient, well planned, not wasting anything. She could see why that appealed to a lot of people when Mars was watching its dream of terraforming die. Duarte could step in and sell them a new dream that used all the same skills and attitudes that the old one had, but was even grander in scope. Bobbie recognized that there was a version of her that was fighting on the Laconian side right now, and it made her itchy.
Alex had started to gather up the plates and cups from their meal when Amos walked into the room. “Hey, Babs. Cap wants to see us about that thing.”
“Which thing?”
“The making-sure-no-more-bombs-go-off-we-don’t-know-about thing.”
“Oh, that thing. Be there in five,” she replied, and he shrugged and walked off without another word.
“Still kinda chafes, don’t it?” Alex said, his voice gentle.
“What? Hearing him go back to calling Holden ‘Cap’?” Bobbie said, ready to shrug it off. But something caught in her throat. “Yeah. I gotta admit it does. I might have a word with him on that.”
“Be gentle,” Clarissa said. “He’s fragile right now.”
Bobbie had no idea what the word
