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“You couldn’t go back?”
“Nope”
“Yeah,” Alex said “Me neither”
“The Navy, you mean?”
“Any of it Things change, and they don’t change back”
Bobbie’s sigh was like agreement The vast emptiness between Mars and the Belt, between the two of them and the distant stars, was an illusion ood exterior cameras The way the space contained their voices was more real The two of thereater than s that Alex normally found hard to talk about Bobbie herself was in that halfway space between a stranger and a shipmate that let him trust her but not feel a responsibility to protect her froaria were like sitting at a bar, talking to someone over beer
He told her his fears about Holden and Naomi’s romance and the panic attacks he’d had on the way back to Earth frohtuilt The stories about when his father died, and hisfor the Navy and the regret he still felt about it
For her part, Bobbie told him about her family The brothers who loved her but didn’t seem to have any idea who or what she was The atte since she’d becoone The ti involved with the drug trade
Rather than trying to fold into the bunk, Bobbie slept in her couch Out of unspoken solidarity, Alex did the same Itwatches, good for longconversations
They talked about the rings and the protomolecule, the rumors Bobbie had heard about the new kinds ofbased on observation of the Ring and the Martian probes reverse engineering what had happened on Venus In the long hours of comfortable silence, they ate the rations that they’d packed and watched the scopes as the other ships went on their oays: a pair of prospectorsfor an unclai the Martian pri back out toward Saturn to gather ice for Ceres Station, en hureatest port city in the Belt The tracking systeenerated tiny dots from the transponder data; the actual ships thenification Even the high albedo of the Hungaria cluster only meant the sensor arrays picked them up a little easier Alex wouldn’t have identified that particular centi different from any other if the ship hadn’t told him
The intimacy of the Razorback and shortness of the trip was like a weekend love affair without the sex Alex wished they’d thought to bring a few bottles of wine
The first sign that they weren’t alone came when they were still a couple hundred thousand klicks out froaria The Razorback’s external sensors blinked and flashed, the proxi in and out Alex closed down the false stars and pulled up tactical and sensor data in their place
“What’s the matter?” Bobbie asked
“Unless I’, this is the ti us that so us”
“Targeting lasers?”