“Oh. Right,” she said. “For a second, I just thought… Yeah. It’ll be good to see Holden too. And Avasarala.”
“Be good to be on my own damn ship,” Alex said, tapping pepper onto his plate of reconstituted eggs. “Now if we can just get Amos and Naomi back. Whoa. Did I say something?”
The shadow that had come over Bobbie’s expression vanished again and she shook her head. “Nothing. Just… I don’t know. Envy, I guess. It’s been a while since I had people.”
She stabbed one of the sausages with a fork and glanced around the mess hall as she ate it. Alex’s eggs were chalky and tasted more of yeast than something that came from a chicken, and it brought decades of memory with it. “Being back around active-duty folks making it hard to look forward to civilian life?”
“Sort of.”
“Things change,” Alex said.
“And they don’t change back,” she said, quoting him back to himself.
Alex broke off a piece of toast, popped it in his mouth, and talked around the crust. “We still talking about the service?”
Bobbie smiled. “No, I guess we’re not. I still can’t really get my head around it. Earth’s never going to be Earth again. Not like it was.”
“No, it won’t.”
“Mars either,” Bobbie said. “I think about my nephew. Smart kid. Book smart, I mean. He hasn’t really been in the world except for going through university and then the terraforming project. That’s his whole life. He was one of the first people I knew to really get what off-world colonies meant for everything back here.”
“Yeah. It makes everything different,” Alex said.
“Except how we deal with it,” she said, then racked an imaginary shotgun and fired it off with a popping sound.
“Amazing how much we’ve managed to do, considering how we’re doing it all with jumped-up social primates and evolutionary behaviors from the Pleistocene.”
Bobbie chuckled, and he was glad to hear the sound. There was something about making the people around him feel better that left him feeling lighter himself. Like if the others on his crew could be upbeat, whatever it was couldn’t be that bad. He understood the flaw in that logic: if comforting them comforted him, maybe comforting him comforted them, and they could all drive the ship into a rock while they smiled at each other.
“I heard the relief ships are here,” Alex said.
“Yeah, that may not be as good as we’d hoped,” Bobbie said around a mouthful of sausage. “They were talking about it at training this morning. The relief ships should be getting in operational range right around now, but the scuttlebutt is the crews are all green as hell. Like first-mission green.”
“All of them?” Alex said.
“The good crews are all back at Hungaria covering our six.”
“Well. Better a bunch of teenagers flying with us than just the two frigates,” Alex said. “But you’ll excuse me if I’d hoped the cavalry coming over the hill was a little more experienced.”
“They probably said the same thing about us when we started up.”
“You know they did. First mission I flew solo, I almost dumped core by mistake.”
“Seriously?”
“Got flustered.”
“That’s military-grade flustered, all right,” Bobbie said. “Well, hopefully, this’ll be a milk run to Luna.”
Alex nodded and took a sip of coffee from his bulb. “You think that’ll happen? You really think it’s over?”
Bobbie’s silence was an answer.
They spent the rest of the meal on less fraught subjects: how training for marines and Navy were different and which one was better; Alex’s stories from Ilus and the slow zone; speculation about what exactly Avasarala was going to do once they got the prime minister to Luna. It was all shop talk, and Alex found it easy and pleasant. He hadn’t crewed with her in years, but she was good to talk to, good to be around. In another life, he could imagine shipping with her. Well, in the military anyway. He couldn’t quite place her on a water hauler like the Canterbury, and he wondered what it would have done to have her on the Roci. Part of what made the Rocinante home was that the crew was so small, and had so much shared context. There was an intimacy that living in quarters with the same handful of people for so long gave. Anyone coming in – even someone as competent and smart and easygoing as Bobbie – would have had to contend with that, and there was nothing that screwed up a crew like having one person who felt excluded.
He was still thinking about that, chewing the next-to-last mouthful of so-called eggs and listening to Bobbie tell a story about free-climbing on the Martian surface, when the Klaxons went off.
“All hands to battle stations,” the calm, crisp voice said between whoops of the alarm. “This is not a drill.”