Earth Afire (The First Formic War)

anything about the Kuiper Belt? I couldn’t tell you two facts about the Deep.” She smiled. “Let’s help each other. Isn’t that how a free-miner family works? Everybody has their expertise, and you work together, sharing skills and information. Stronger together than alone, and all that?”
    He smiled. It should be him making this argument. He should be the peacemaker. “That’s the gist of it, yes. Although if we were a real miner family, we’d also be yelling at each other and threatening to kill each other. You’d be calling me a pig-faced rockhead, and I’d be crying and saying how I wished I’d never been born in this family.”
    She held her smile. “Something tells me your family isn’t like that.”
    He shrugged. “Not usually, but we have our moments. It wasn’t a very big ship. When you have that many people in that tight of a space, everyone’s faults are glaringly obvious. Believe me, we had our disagreements.”
    In truth, El Cavador had never felt tight or close-quartered to Victor. It was simply the life he knew. People crammed in together to sleep. That’s what you did. You stacked four or five or even six hammocks on top of each other—so close together that turning over in your sleep would likely brush your hammock up against someone else’s. It wasn’t always comfortable—there were smells and other annoyances occasionally—but that’s how you lived.
    Now that Victor had spent time on Luna, now that he understood Imala’s world and all the space it afforded, he realized how confining this shuttle must seem to her. It made her sacrifice to accompany him all the more selfless and significant. She was doing this for him, suffering for him, and he was acting ungrateful.
    “Let’s dock at the depot,” he said. “A few umbilicals have opened up. Let’s go inside and stretch our legs. We’ll take a holopad and read the feeds in there for a while.”
    “They’re charging ridiculous docking prices,” said Imala. “They bill you by the hour. We don’t have that kind of money.”
    “I do,” said Victor.
    “Yeah, money for your education.”
    “Which I’m not likely to get. Please, Imala, let me buy you lunch. We could both use a breather.”
    They docked and floated down the umbilical to the café. There were few people inside. Victor launched toward a table near the back, away from everyone else, and strapped himself in. Imala followed, and soon a waitress floated over.
    Victor looked at the menu, but then returned it to the waitress. “Would you do a specialty order?”
    “Depends,” said the waitress.
    “White rice, black beans, shredded beef, fried platanos, and an arepa with butter.”
    The waitress looked up from her wrist pad. “I don’t know what platanos and arepas are, so we probably don’t have those.”
    Victor wasn’t sure what the English word was, so he looked it up on the holo. “ Platanos are plantains. You know, like giant bananas, only starchier?”
    The waitress looked annoyed. “I know what a plantain is.”
    “Do you have any?”
    “I’ll have to check. What’s an arepa ?”
    He had been looking it up. It wasn’t in the dictionary, which meant it was unique to Venezuela and had no English equivalent. “It’s a round corn patty, maybe four to five inches across. Really thick, not thin like a tortilla. They’re not hard to make.”
    “They are if you’ve never made one before. I’ll have to check.” She turned to Imala. “Let’s hope you’re easier.”
    “I’ll have the same as him,” said Imala.
    The waitress sighed. “Of course you will.”
    She floated back toward the kitchen.
    “A family dish?” asked Imala.
    “The unofficial plate of Venezuela, where my family’s from. We ate it all the time on the ship, although truth be told, we usually ate it without the shredded beef and plantains. Both were practically nonexistent in the Kuiper Belt. Our diet was more about quantity than quality. We ate whatever was cheapest and would last the longest. Sometimes we’d eat nothing but rice and beans for weeks on end. Even your sweat starts smelling like beans after a while.”
    Imala scrunched up her nose.
    “Sorry,” said Victor. “Not good table conversation.”
    She smiled. “You miss your family.”
    Victor was folding his napkin into odd little shapes just to keep his hands busy. “Yes. I do. Very much.”
    “We’ll find them, Vico. We’ll get you back to them.”
    Victor sighed and looked up at her. “I’m