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“You like space monsters, kid?” the woman asked

“I want my mommy”

The woers were skinny She lifted Mei down to the floor

“C’”

The woman walked away and for a moment Mei hesitated She didn’t like the wo alone even less She followed The wo h when the door swung open Mei followed her The new room was cold Mei didn’t like it There wasn’t an exalass box like they kept fish in at the aquariu there wasn’t a fish The woman motioned Mei closer and, when Mei ca inside looked up at the sound It was a man, but he was naked and his skin didn’t look like skin His eyes glowed blue like there was a fire in his head And solass, and Mei started screaain,” Private Hillman said “I think his CO must be pissed at him”

Gunnery Sergeant Roberta Draper of the Martian Marine Corps upped the nification on her armor’s heads-up display and looked in the direction Hill Twenty-five hundred meters away, a squad of four United Nations Marines were troreenhouse doreenhouse dome identical in nearly all respects to the do

One of the four UN Marines had black sle ears

“Yep, that’s Snoopy,” Bobbie said “Been on every patrol detail so far today Wonder what he did”

Guard duty around the greenhouses on Gany what you could to keep youron the lives of the Marines on the other side

The other side Eighteen months before, there hadn’t been sides The inner planets had all been one big, happy, slightly dysfunctional fa up the solar systeive up was Ganymede, breadbasket of the Jovian systenetosphere, it was the only place where dorown crops stood a chance in Jupiter’s harsh radiation belt, and even then the domes and habitats still had to be shielded to protect civilians fro off Jupiter and onto the ned to let a soldier walk through a nuclear bomb craterJupiter fro Martian Marines

Behind the Earth soldiers on patrol, their doht captured by enormous orbital mirrors Even with the mirrors, ht Only the heavily modified versions the Ganymede scientists cranked out could hope to survive in the trickle of light the mirrors fed the the Earth Marines outside their little guard hut, knowing they atching her too In addition to Snoopy, she spotted the one they called Stumpy because he or she couldn’t be much over a meter and a quarter tall She wondered what their nickna Red Her are on it She hadn’t been on Ganyray and white

One by one over the course of five minutes, the orbital mirrors winked out as Ganylow froed to actinic blue as the artificial lights cao down e and subtle ways Above, the sun—not even a disk frohtest star—flashed as it passed behind Jupiter’s li syste back in,” Corporal Travis said “Snoop’s bringing up the rear Poor guy Can we bail too?”

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