“Pretty sure we told that story,” Bobbie said.
Alex blinked and looked into his glass. She was right. He had told that story, and since they’d all sat down, Ip might not be the only one well on her way to tipsy. “Right,” he said. “In that case, you want to talk about flyin’, you should get another drink.”
He lifted his arm and leaned back, trying to catch the server’s eye.
The Blue Frog was a port bar, and if Alex had to guess, he’d say it had seen better days. The round tables hunched together within larger, swooping, glowing structures that defined the booths that he and the others leaned against. Only the lights seemed dirty and the table was chipped. Different menus detailed the services of the bar: food, drink, pharmaceutical, sex. An empty stage promised live music or burlesque or karaoke, only later. Not right now. And more than that, there was a smell to the place. Not unpleasant, not rotten, but tired. Like spent oil or old sealant.
The expanded crew of the Rocinante were scattered among three tables. To Alex’s right, Amos sat grinning like a vaguely ominous Buddha with Clarissa Mao, Sun-yi Steinberg, and a shirtless young man who Alex suspected had been ordered from a menu. To his left, Naomi and Chava Lombaugh were locked in a vigorous conversation, while Gor Droga and Zach Kazantzakis leaned back, keeping out of it. The other tables were dominated by a mixture of Earth and Mars navy crews. The crispness of their military uniforms and haircuts seemed out of place, like they were rebuking the architecture for being only what it was. Here and there locals hunched together like they were defending a position against a siege. Covert glances of the natives of Ceres didn’t carry a sense of threat as much as bewilderment. The music that leaked from hidden speakers stayed lower than the conversation, shimmering major scale notes making an ambiguous wash of sound, neither celebratory nor sad.
The manager—a dark-skinned man with cold blue eyes and a permanent near-smirk—caught Alex’s glance, nodded to him, and sent a server trotting over. The smile on the woman’s face seemed almost genuine. Alex ordered another round for the table, and by the time his attention came back to the conversation, the topic had moved on.
“There were rules about that in the service,” Bobbie said.
“But there were ways to get around them, right?” Ip said. “I mean, you aren’t telling me everyone in the Martian Navy’s celibate.”
Bobbie shrugged. “If you’re in a relationship with someone above you or below you in the chain of command, it’s not a joke. Dishonorable discharge, loss of benefits, maybe jail time. That takes a lot of the shine off. But I wasn’t Navy. I’m—I was a marine. If there was a little cross-training between services, it wasn’t a problem until it started messing up operational efficiency.”
“I heard they put chemicals in the food to lower people’s libido,” Arnold said.
Bobbie shrugged. “If they did, they didn’t put in enough.”
“What about on the Rocinante?” Ip said, turning her full attention to Alex. There was definitely more than just alcohol in the question. “Do you have rules against cheap, sleazy fraternization?”
Alex chuckled, not certain whether he was getting excited or uncomfortable. “Captain and the XO have been together damn near since we got on the ship. It’d be a difficult rule to enforce on the rest of us.”
Ip’s smile shifted. “You used to be a Navy boy, didn’t you? You and the gunny here ever …”
Alex regretted ordering the next round. He was going to need his wits about him pretty soon here. “Me and Bobbie? Nah. That ain’t a thing that happened.”
“We haven’t actually shipped out together that much,” Bobbie said. “And anyway … No offense, Alex.”
“None taken.”
“Really?” Ip said, leaning forward. Her knee pressed against Alex’s in a way that was absolutely innocent. Unless it wasn’t, in which case it absolutely wasn’t. “Never even wanted to?”
“Well,” Bobbie said. “There was one night on Mars. I think we were both feeling a little lonely. I’d probably have made out with him if he’d asked.”
“I can’t know that,” Alex said, suddenly flushed with heat and unable to look Bobbie in the eye. “You can’t tell me that.”
Ip kept her leg pressed to his and cocked her head at him. The question was clear. Is this a thing you’re still working out? Alex smiled back at her. No, it was never really a thing.
Naomi’s voice lifted, carrying over the murmur of conversation and the music both. She was leaning over her table, finger raised to make some boozy point to Chava. He couldn’t make out the words, but he knew her tones of voice well enough to know it wasn’t anger. Not real anger anyway. For that, Naomi got quiet.
The server reappeared with a tray of drinks, and Ip leaned across to get hers, then didn’t lean all the way back. Alex felt something in the back of his mind relax. It had been a long time since he’d made this particular kind of mistake. Figured he was about due.
“Y’all excuse me for just a minute,” he said. “Need to find the head.”
“Hurry back,” Ip said.
“Count on it.”
Walking across the floor, past the bar, and to the back hall, Alex felt like something out of a bawdy joke. Soldiers pairing off after battle was about as old and worn a scenario as there was. But it had gotten that way for a reason. The tension going into battle wasn’t like any other feeling Alex had ever had, and the relief when it let up was bone-deep and intoxicating. It wasn’t only him or Ip. It wasn’t even only sex. He’d known sailors as locked down and shipshape as a training-manual picture who’d come through action and spent the hours afterward weeping or puking. There was one pilot—Genet, her name was—suffered chronic insomnia that even medication could only manage. Every night, she’d be up for an hour between two and three in the morning. Except after an action, when she slept like a baby the whole night through. It was what came of being a primate with a body built for the Pleistocene savanna. Fear and relief and lust and joy were all packed into the same little network of nerves somewhere deep in his amygdalae, and sometimes they touched.
The flight out from Earth had been short and hard and seemed to last forever. The long-range sensors showed no active threats between the ports on Luna and the Belt, but all the way out the thought hung in the air like smoke: Were there rocks falling undetected toward Earth? Toward Mars? Was Marco Inaros three steps ahead of them, the way he always seemed to be? Even Fred Johnson had seemed preoccupied, pacing through the halls with his hands clasped behind his back. The Battle of Ceres was coming. The first fight in the war since the first straight-up ambush. The combined fleet would find out just how badass a bunch of Belters piloting stolen Martian warships really were, and there was reason to expect that would be pretty damned badass.