Portraits revealed through your current reading position.
Martian Marine veteran turned outreach worker, watching her homeworld hollow out as humanity floods toward a thousand new worlds.
Bobbie Draper, the lone survivor of the Ganymede massacre and a former gunnery sergeant, has come home to a Mars that is quietly losing its future. She works thirty hours a week with veteran's outreach and is still, by her own admission, putting the pieces of her life back together, living cheaply in the rough neighborhood of Innis Shallow beneath the Aurorae Sinus. Riding the evacuated tube to a family dinner at her brother's home in Breach Candy, she coldly humiliates a panhandler who falsely claims to be a Ganymede veteran, the old rage still close beneath her calm.
At dinner she watches her brother and her nephew David argue the question consuming Mars: the terraforming project that shaped her whole life versus the thousand empty systems now open beyond the alien gates. Enrollment is down, the tube stations are emptying, and Mars is feeling the competition. The dinner is broken by a red-bannered newsfeed: TRAGEDY ON NEW TERRA.
A big woman, tall as well as broad, her genetic line reaching back to Samoa; visibly muscular rather than fat, an effect a baggy civilian sweater cannot hide. Her size startles people who aren't expecting it. Now in early middle age, out of uniform.
POV of the prologue; a decorated Martian Marine veteran now doing civilian outreach, embodying a declining Mars in the age of the gates.
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