Portraits revealed through your current reading position.
Scraping by on Mars in veteran's outreach, Bobbie hears Avasarala lay out how New Terra dooms Mars — and grasps that their dinner is a recruitment: 'I need to put you back on the board, soldier.'
Bobbie Draper, the former Martian gunnery sergeant, is living small — 'veteran's outreach, it pays the bills' — when Avasarala summons her to a closed-off dinner on Mars. She follows the newsfeed line about gate-access treaties, but Avasarala tells her the truth: a thousand Earth-like worlds beyond the Ring, sixteen hundred ships already inbound, Holden's Ilus the feel-good precedent for a land rush that will hollow out Mars — its people gone to open skies, terraforming abandoned, economy and state collapsing, leaving only its enormous navy as a resource to sell or use. Bobbie tracks the logic to its grim end ('fifteen thousand nuclear weapons') and her eyes go hard as she realizes what the meal is: 'This dinner.
We're at a recruitment meeting, aren't we?' Avasarala confirms it — 'as long as we're all pushing out our pieces… I need to put you back on the board, soldier' — pulling the veteran back into the game as Mars faces its slow death.
A very large, powerfully-built Martian woman of Polynesian descent; here out of uniform in civilian life, still dwarfing the room and its lavish furnishings just by sitting in it.
Former Martian marine; the veteran Avasarala recruits back into service as the interstellar stakes come clear.
Also appears in books you've already read — spoiler-safe to their endings: