Cibola Burn

“And the ships to use them. Who’s going to have those ships when Mars is a ghost town, Bobbie? Where are they going to go? Who are they going to kill? We’re all moving out our pawns for the first interstellar military conflict. And James Holden, who could have made New Terra a poster for why you might rather stay home and give us a little breathing room, instead found a bright new way to fuck things up.”

“By succeeding?”

“By some definition of that word.”

“The planet blew up on him,” Bobbie said.

“Small favors,” Avasarala replied with a snort.

“Well,” Bobbie said. “Shit.”

“Yes.”

They were quiet for a long moment. Bobbie looked at her salad without seeing it. Avasarala finished her wine. She could see the former marine tracking though the lines of implication and consequence. Bobbie’s eyes went hard.

“This dinner. We’re at a recruitment meeting, aren’t we?”

Avasarala folded her hands.

“Bobbie, as long as we’re all pushing out our pieces…”

“Yes?”

“I need to put you back on the board, soldier.”

Acknowledgments

As always, there were a lot of people without whom this book wouldn’t have seen the light of day. We owe particular debts of gratitude to our agent Danny Baror and to our editor Will Hinton, the amazing team at Orbit, the gang from Sakeriver, and Joseph E. Lake Jr. All of them have helped make this a better book. All the errors of fact and logic and infelicities of language are on us.