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Bobbie looked around at the featureless dirty ice of Ganyh-tech arruravity shuffle around the doreen private nah he’d been in the Marines all of about a rumbled just as loud as the other two in his Mariner Valley drawl

She couldn’t bla for the Martian soldiers on Ganymede to do to keep them busy If Earth decided it needed Ganyreenhouse dome wouldn’t stop them With dozens of Earth and Mars warships in a tense standoff in orbit, if hostilities broke out the ground pounders would probably find out only when the surface boan

To her left, the dolass panels separated by glea copper-colored struts that turned the entire structure into a e Bobbie had never been inside one of the greenhouse doe in troops to the outer planets and had been walking patrols on the surface almost since day one Ganymede to her was a spaceport, a suard outpost she currently called home

As they shuffled around the dome, Bobbie watched the unree much without a catastrophic event The surface was rees waren so thin it could pass as an industrial vacuued when rocks fell on it from space, or ater from the liquid core forced itself onto the surface and created short-lived lakes Neither thing happened all that often At hoed the landscape hourly Here, she alking through the footsteps of the day before and the day before and the day before And if she never came back, those footprints would outlive her Privately, she thought it was sort of creepy

A rhythh the normally smooth hiss and thump sounds her powered arot so croith infor except as actually in front of her Now she pulled it up, using blinks and eye nostic screen A yellow telltale warned her that the suit’s left knee actuator was low on hydraulic fluid Must be a leak somewhere, but a slow one, because the suit couldn’t find it

“Hey, guys, hold up a minute,” Bobbie said “Hilly, you have any extra hydraulic fluid in your pack?”

“Yep,” said Hill it out

“Give my left knee a squirt, would you?”

While Hill on her suit, Gourab and Travis began an argument that seemed to be about sports Bobbie tuned it out

“This suit is ancient,” Hill is just going to happen more and more often, you know”

“Yeah, I should,” Bobbie said But the truth was that was easier said than done Bobbie was not the right shape to fit into one of the standard suits, and the Marineshoops every time she requisitioned a new custohtly above average height for a Martian hed in at over a hundred kilos at one g None of it was fat, but her h a weight room As a marine, she trained all the time

The suit she had noas the first one in twelve years of active duty that actually fit well And even though it was beginning to show its age, it was just easier to try to keep it running than beg and plead for a new one