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“Is he drunk, do you think?” Sa to save face,” Bull said

“The Behemoth filled its diddies in front of God and everyone, so noe’re going to be the biggest badass in the system to make up for it?”

“Pretty much”

“Gonna talk him out of it?”

“Gonna try”

Sam scratched her cheek

“Could be hard to back down after that little once-”

“He won’t,” Bull said “But I’ve got to try”

The inner planets ca that they were soldiers sent to a foreign land Bull re from when he’d first shipped out: the sense that his home was behind him For the inners, the expansion out into the solar system had always had the military at its core

The Belters didn’t have that They were the natives here The forces that had brought their ancestors out to the Belt had roots in trade, co proun its life more like a labor union than a nation The difference was subtle but powerful, and it showed in strange ways

If they had been in any of the Earth or Mars ships that floated now in the darkness near the Ring, Bull would have co down by the captain to seek out XO Pa in a galley or mess hall But this was the Behemoth, so he found her in a bar

It was a small place with bulbs of alcohol, chocolate, coffee, and tea all set with temperature controls in the nipple, so the unifor to just this side of ice The decor was cheap nightclub, with colored lights and cheap graphic films to hide the walls Half a dozen people floated on handholds or tethers, and Pa was one of theht as he pulled himself toward her was that she needed a haircut With the false gravity of acceleration gone, her hair floated around her, too short to tie back but still long enough to interfere with her vision and creep into her ht was that she looked as tired as he was

“Mister Baca,” Pa said

“XO Youyou You’ve been to see the captain?”

Bull wished he could sit down, not for any actual reason so iven their conversation

“I have He wasn’t happy to see me Showed me the proposal you’d built up on how to reency plan,” she said

“Yeah So this idea where we take the Behe? We can’t do that We start any kind of serious burn, we’re going to have two navies on our butts And we don’t knohat’s on the other side except that it’s way more powerful than we are”

“Do you want an alien civilization taking its ideas of hu, word for word It had been his ument, and now Bull knehere he’d borrowed it fro trip down in the lift to let his sleep-deprived brain coument