Ana stuck around long enough to help Rose from the floor, and hold the door for her. She even had the decency to look remorseful while she did it. And when Rose had finally managed to navigate her way out of their room, dizzy and delirious like it was her first day on a starship, replete with space-sickness and oh-one vertigo, she found the others kicked up in the hallway, waiting for her.

Corking their laughter and smothering their smiles were the two tallest of the group: an older woman with a cybernetic leg, the rest of her sun-bleached and suntanned, whose corded, tatted arms were knotted across her chest; and a leaner, sculpted man, with a ponytail and bangs styled into a heavy cowlick, still teasing the zipper of a flightsuit riddled with patches and insignia as a paper target is riddled with bullet holes. Two more looked less amused: a shorter, leaner man with aviators hanging from his collar and a mullet draping past his shoulders, and a muscly girl in an eyepatch, a fringe bob, and a wifebeater. Rose's hiring manager had warned her about a "cyclops" on the ship, as humorless in R&R as she was ferocious in battle; this must've been the commander whose good side she belonged on. If she had a good side ...

The shorter man shoved a hand through the overflowing abundances of his slightly oily hair. "Making our usual first impression, I see," he said, tinges of a sigh in his voice, and of an accusation in the stare he leveled at Ana. That got a crack out of the two who'd been trying not to laugh.

"Shut it, you," she growled with a shake of her fist. "Me and Rosie are already best friends. Isn't that right, Rosie?"

Rose was finding it increasingly difficult to speak with Ana's arm thrown around her neck, and her fingers pinching her cheek.

The mullet swept across his shoulder as the skinny one rolled his eyes and shifted them sidelong to his NCO. Visibly unpersuaded, his sharp, angular, aristocratic features, rigid as if sculpted from alabaster, only flinched enough for him to ask her: "How long until launch?"

"If the engine people and the nav people all did their jobs last night," eyepatch girl replied, briskly and dourly, "we'll be over the insertion site in four hours."

"Big 'if,'" sighed the big lady, wearing her cynicism as naturally as she wore her scars and her patina, both earned in half a dozen tours-of-duty or more. But if she really had survived that much time among the lowest-bidder contractor work, and the bullshit uniform inspections and the dress-downs, the inefficiency and the mismanagement, then she had every damn right to be jaded, Rose reckoned, as she walked up behind Rose and clapped her and Ana on the backs. "But the rookie's got the right idea: enough yap, it's chow-time."

Chow. As the others turned and marched in quiet, tired solidarity for this, one of their few material comforts aboard a PMC dropship, not all of them were wearing attention-grade articles, but of those who were, Rose saw the fireteam's insignia—[i]her[/i] insignia—blazoned there on the backs: a tiger in sinister-rampant, its claws sunken into the nose of an AMM-3 "Cestus" missile with which it wrestled: glowering, grimacing, the exhaust nozzles shoving hard against the hindlegs of its flesh-and-bone opponent, rear claws sinking deep into the soil, exhaust burning yellow-hot. Amidst the pale smoke and the tatters of a banner which had been torn to ribbons in the struggle, read the team's threadbare credentials: "1st Battalion." "5th Airborne Mechanized Armor Squadron." And in red cursive, "Fireteam 9: 'The Fightin' Tigers!'" It was the first time Rose had seen so many of this patch all in one place, but also the first that she'd seen it in motion, and in full resplendence; not hanging from her bedside, not splayed out over her workbench as she sewed it onto the back of her flight-jacket, not even reversed in the mirror as she sprained her neck seeing how it looked on her. She was finally walking among them. As one of them. And the colors proved it beyond any doubt.

Her teammates led down the cramped and labyrinthine corridors to an escalator, which they walked aboard without reading where they were or where it would send them; the [i]Artaxerxes[/i] was said to be a hair over three klicks long, and these five men and women were more familiar with Rose's new home than she was, a fact she'd have to avoid overthinking if she didn't want to go crazy getting lost in this place. Still yawning, stretching, and swiping the rheum from their eyes, while trying to salvage themselves from the ravages of sleep, they settled into the guardrails and began to watch the ship go by.