"Oh, you know," said the man at the front of the procession, his hands stowed in pockets and his back slouched against the sliding handrail of the escalator, "[i]foie gras, filet mignon,[/i] fatty tuna [i]sashimi,[/i] oysters Rockefeller ... the usual spread for us rock-sta——ow, shit!"

The big lady struck him, too, but with less of the same joviality and camaraderie as which still rang out from Ana and Rose's spines. Aiming to avenge herself of some inconsolable temptation, avenge herself she did, with a punch to his deltoid which sent him reeling, grimacing, and clutching in his hand a muscle which may just as well have turned to jelly. The others responded in their turns——giggling, scoffing, shaking their heads in pity (they knew, some firsthand, how hard Yrma could hit)——but Rose could not ignore a certain ... forlornness, with which they dismissed this play-fighting. Because whatever childhood dish or [i]haute-cuisine[/i] classic it was which came to mind for each of them, it was 2.7 trillion miles away, in the smoky, lantern-lit alleys of Europa, or the idyllic windswept fields of Venus, unattainable and inimitable in the canteens and mess halls of the [i]Artaxerxes[/i]. For a single moment they reminded Rose of frontier settlers, weary for butters and creams, custards and wine sauces; the comforts of distant places. But in the next these expressions were gone, smothered under soldierly stoicism.

She couldn't imagine food which was [i]that[/i] demoralizing, even if it came from cans and cartons.

"What's the deal, anyway?" asked the big lady, seemingly to change the subject before the dread of breakfast made her grumpy. "We should've been briefed by now."

The commander led the charge off the escalator. Not stopping to wait for any stragglers, she replied with a beefy shrug, "All we've got is a distress signal from a vanadium mine down in the Aronnax Trench. A big megacorp interest, so Streymoy handled the negotiations for us, and ..."

"And here we are," Yrma sighed.

"So what'd it say?" said Ana, hurrying into a trot to catch up and listen in. "And, why did so little intel make its way to us?"

Her gaze tore expectantly from one senior to the next, as if to gauge which one was likeliest to answer her, and aim her question accordingly. It only so happened that Gan, trailing behind the group at a casual pace, had paused by a porthole to quite literally stare into space. His narrow eyes, black as spilled ink, didn't wander; they had settled upon something specific out in the starry sea. He put a fingertip to the quartz-glass. "That."

Ana blinked, processed the reply, and wandered over to the porthole to press her nose to it. "Wh—Whoa!" she exclaimed, breath misting against the window. "Team leader, we're not seriously airdropping into [i]that,[/i] are we?!"

"We are if we want our 2.4 million credits," the team leader said plainly.

"Crud," Ana grumbled, "we do, don't we?"

They did.