“Grossly?” she echoed. She looked down at herself and up at him again, as derailed as she’d been when the medico back on Earth had called her obese. The next argument that wanted to come out of her wasn’t even about him, but just that she’d lost sixty pounds, goddammit, and how overweight could she possibly still be? Grossly?!

Scott seized the opportunity of her angry silence to make another speech, half-turning away from her to include all the other people watching them as he said, “It wasn’t all that long ago that you decided you had to lecture me on how a leader should be willing to sacrifice his popularity when he makes a command decision. Well, we all have to make sacrifices, Miss Bierce. We have limited rations and frankly, you can live off your reserves for a while.”

“I’m fat, so I don’t need to eat ever again, is that what you’re saying?”

“Hey.” Eric stepped up between them, both hands raised and empty. “Both of you. Calm down.”

“I’m not upset,” said Scott. “There’s nothing to get upset about. The facts are these: A human being can survive without food for at least three weeks, provided he or she has plenty of water, which we have.”

“Now wait a minute,” said Mr. Yao.

“And judging from the looks of you, you could probably go twice that, easy. Now we’ve got a long hike ahead of us, Miss Bierce, so why don’t you stop complaining and get ready to go.”

Nicci grabbed at her arm. “Please!”

Amber shook her off. “These aren’t command decisions, damn it! This is just you being a dick!”

Scott did not immediately reply. Instead, he reached out to touch Nicci’s shoulder, his brow furrowed with concern. “Are you all right, Nichole?”

Nicci blinked at him. So did Amber.

“I didn’t hit her, for Christ’s sake!” she sputtered. “Why wouldn’t she be?”

“Mr. Gunnarson, can you take Nichole and see if you can’t find her some tents or something to carry?”

Dag glanced at Amber. “Sure,” he said, beckoning to Nicci. “Come on, people. Show’s over and we got a lot of shit to shift.”

Scott waited, watching while the crowd loosened up and milled away. Amber waited too, watching only him. When they were mostly alone, except for the other Fleetmen, he finally turned back and faced her again.

“I’m warning you,” said Amber. “This is not the way you want to play this.”

“Miss Bierce, I’m willing to continue to take care of you, but I’m not going to stand here and entertain your selfish little temper tantrums. This is still a colony—”

“It’s a what?”

“—and now more than ever it is absolutely essential that we support one another in the spirit of that colony. You do not have the right to ask the rest of us to suffer the consequences of your choice to be obese.”

There was that word again. Amber sent a single furiously baffled glance down at herself—this is not obese damn it i fit in the sleeper i fit in your stupid clothes this is not obese this is just plush—and when she looked up again, Scott was walking away.

“Let him go.”

Amber swung around, ready to throw all her embarrassment and anger right in Eric’s face. “And thank you so much for standing up for me!”

“Come on, this isn’t personal.”

“That,” she snarled, pointing at Scott’s retreating back, “was personal! If the food is so limited and we’ve all got three weeks before we start starving, why am I the only one losing my rations?”

“I’ll talk to him about that,” said Mr. Yao.

“What did you expect?” asked Eric, looking pained. “You’ve been out here convincing people the whole valley’s going to flood out when we told you how important it was to keep people calm.”

“What? I have not!”

“We’ve had, like, six people bring that up in the last two days,” Crandall said.

“Because it’s raining, you idiots!” she exploded. “We’re in a goddamn valley taking in all the goddamn runoff that’s pouring over the goddamn fucking hills! I don’t have to say a fucking word! Everyone can see the water rising!”

The Fleetmen exchanged frowning glances.

“I’ll talk to him,” said Mr. Yao again and this time, he headed after Scott.

“So don’t tell me it wasn’t personal!” snapped Amber. “You just admitted he thinks I’m plotting against him!”

“No, at the moment he only thinks your bitching is bad for morale,” Crandall said. “If he thought you were really plotting, he’d toss you out on your butt.”

“He can’t do that!”

They looked at her. Crandall laughed a little. After a moment, Eric swiped rain out of his face, sighed, then looked her in the eye. “Have you ever been popular in your life?”

She blinked again. “What?”

“Popular. Have you ever been. In your whole life.”

“No,” she admitted, puzzled. “But I’m still standing.”

“Yeah, yeah. Stick to yes or no, Bierce. Have you ever been popular?”

“No.”

“Have you ever had any reason to think that being popular doesn’t matter in social situations?”

Her eyes narrowed.

He waited.

“No,” she said.

“Is this a social situation?” he asked patiently.

“It’s a fucking survival situation!”

“Aside from that.”

She glared over her shoulder at the camp, which was already coming down and being crated up. Dag was still with Nicci, trying to teach her how to bundle up a tent when all she seemed willing to do was hold one.

“Making friends here matters,” said Eric, coming up beside her. “Making friends with Scott matters. You’re a smart girl, Bierce. Surely you’ve got to see that.”

“I’m smart enough to see that he doesn’t know what he’s doing. Why the hell aren’t you the one giving orders? You were trained for this!”

Crandall laughed again.

Eric looked at her for a long time as the rain drilled their hair flat against their heads. Then he said, without expression, “Yeah, I was Fleet. And when I enlisted, they taught me how to shoot guns we don’t have, run computers we don’t have, pilot vehicles we don’t have, and keep the peace on a ship we don’t have. I’m not the hero here, Bierce. I don’t want those people down there to look at me like I am. When it goes bad here, the guy in charge is probably going to get strung up from the nearest tree.”

“We are one more disaster away from a mob as we speak,” Crandall agreed, crookedly smiling. “I think the space-scout is finally starting to wise up to that and that’s bad for you, sweets. He’s going to need someone else to blame when the shit hits.”

“Keep your head down and your mouth shut,” Eric warned. “For what it’s worth, I actually think you’ve got your head on pretty straight, but I’m not putting my ass on the line to cover yours. Regardless of what that loudmouth says, this isn’t a colony. This is a whole new world, Bierce, and it’s every man for himself.”

3

They hiked for days in the rain, moving the camp piece by heavy piece, following a storm-swelled fall of water up the eastern slope and away from the Pioneer. It shouldn’t have taken as long as it did, but Scott refused to leave anything behind. The purifier, the generator, even the stupid bags of concrete—everything was the property of Manifest Destiny, everything was necessary to the settlement of a self-sustaining colony, and everything came with them.

Amber did not object. She carried her concrete all day and slept in the rain all night and took the single ration she was allotted and did not so much as mutter under her breath. Now and then, Scott came out of his tent long enough to say inspiring things about the indomitable spirit of exploration or the human will to thrive and survive, and it bothered her to see so many people not only listening but smiling and nodding and sometimes clapping their hands, but she didn’t say anything.

The rain began to wind down the same day that they actually made it over the top and started down the other side. The view was pretty much what it had been on the other side of the valley, except that there wasn’t an enormous skid-mark slashed through the middle of it or a pile of melted wreckage entombing fifty thousand human beings. It was just grass. Brown grass and tangles of trees stretching out for God knew how many miles beneath the low, rolling clouds, uninterrupted by even the most ambiguous sign of civilization.