"Relax," the big lady chuckled. Rosie suspected, being just ahead of her in the chow line, that she would've been due for another one of those thunderous, bone-shattering claps between the shoulderblades, except that those ham-hock-like hands of hers were already clutching an aluminum mess tray. "That's for the whole ship, not just us. With our pay-grades these days, we'll get about ... three and a half percent, I think? Still, that's a few thou to blow on a hotel room and a tight little twenty-something once we're back on Titan, right?"

"And some better room service," grumbled someone further back.

"What, you mean you ain't livin' the dream already?" the big lady called behind her. "[i]Voilà:[/i] [i]confits[/i] of green bean and dredged chicken, served with a potato [i]purée[/i], a chicken pan sauce, and elbow macaroni [i]béchamel. Bon appetit,[/i] everyone."

With every step Rosie took along the counter, another exhausted, bag-eyed cook dropped another scoop of slop into another little squared compartment of her tray. In the end there were a mushy mint-green slop, a lumpy pale-gold slop, a fluorescent-yellow plasticky slop, and an oily, golden-brownish-black slop; each smothered in either cheese or gravy. If she was to believe the presentation, the cooks on this ship had fed the afternoon shift a half-succulent southern dinner, only to reach down their throats an hour later, pull out the masticated, half-digested goop, and spoon it back under the heat lamps to serve again to the graveyard crew, like aproned, paper-hatted robins shoving chewed-up worms down the gullets of their chicks.

Still, although the others grumbled and groaned, they received their ice-cream-scoops of mush and carried them to a table and shoveled them down all without complaint. And as Rose steeled her gut and took her first apprehensive bite, suggestions of an oversalted fried chicken flooded her mouth, and thus her memory, and the other piles—pigfaced effigies of buttered mashed potatoes, mac 'n cheese, and steamed vegetables—proved similarly bearable. (It was no worse than what she'd eaten in cafeterias at private school, at boot camp, or even at her old space-station.) Then again, it was only her first day; she might have ten days, [i]maybe[/i] two weeks before she couldn't stomach it anymore, and she'd be thrashing against the ship walls desperate to bore right through the hull, airdrop down to the nearest moon, and chase down the nearest bowl of fresh [i]tonkotsu[/i] noodles. She thought back to how desperate she was for a [i]real[/i] cup of coffee about halfway through basic, half a lifetime ago, not that instant powdered shit.

As they ate, Rosie noticed her new team paying the window bay no more than a fleeting glance each; even though Neptune was a great blue blob set among the stars as a royal sapphire is set among smaller diamonds; even though her other moons, Hippocamp and Proteus and Triton-3, tumbled along their orbits in plain view of the humble crewmen shoving mashed potatoes and greasy fried chicken into their ungrateful maws; even though, down on the surface of Triton-5, grey clouds and choking black clouds streaked across the pocked surface like the moon wore a zebra-hide cloak, utterly swallowing, in its chaos, the battleground below. She would be there soon. She would fall through that storm, land among its gusts and pressures, and do what the mission demanded of her. For one-sixth of three-point-five percent of the bounty, apparently.

When she came to, ripped away from the yawning expanses of space and returning to her hard little seat nestled among 150 such seats crammed inside the [i]Artaxerxes's[/i] fore canteen, the others were still bullshitting; about their one-rep deadlifting records, about the hotties up in the comms room (and about how lucky a "sunnuvabitch" named "Druid" apparently was for getting to work with them), even what they were going to eat tomorrow. (Ana and the shaggy black mullet, arguing for variety, hoped for tacos; pompadour and the big lady put their votes in for chili dogs and grilled cob-corn.) They really weren't noticing this, were they; the way Triton's surface roiled and frothed like a boiling sea? Even Ana appeared to have forgotten all about what she'd shoved her nose to quartz-glass to see.