Bobbie threw the wrench at the ground, knocking over the gun oil, which began to spread across her mat like a bloodstain.

“I fucking fell down! We were at a full g, and I just… I fell down.”

“And in the meeting today? Yelling at two civilian intelligence analysts about how Marines would rather die than fail?”

“I didn’t yell,” Bobbie said, not sure if that was the truth. Her memories of the meeting had become confused once she was out of the room.

“How many times have you fired that gun since you cleaned it yesterday?”

“What?” Bobbie said, feeling nauseated and not sure why.

“For that matter, how many times had you fired it since you cleaned it the day before that? Or the one before that?”

“Stop it,” Bobbie said, waving one hand limply at Martens and looking for a place to sit back down.

“Have you fired that gun even once since you’ve come on board the Dae-Jung? Because I can tell you that you’ve cleaned it every single day you’ve been on board, and several times you’ve cleaned it twice in one day.”

“No, I-” Bobbie said, finally sitting down with a thump on an ammo canister. She had no memory of having cleaned the gun before that day. “I didn’t know that.”

“This is post-traumatic stress disorder, Bobbie. It’s not a weakness or some kind of moral failure. It’s what happens when you live through something terrible. Right now you’re not able to process what happened to you and your men on Ganymede, and you’re acting irrationally because of it,” Martens said, then moved over to crouch in front of her. She was afraid for a moment that he’d try to take her hand, because if he did, she’d hit him.

He didn’t.

“You’re ashamed,” he said, “but there’s nothing to be ashamed of. You’re trained to be tough, competent, ready for anything. They taught you that if you just do your job and remember your training, you can deal with any threat. Most of all, they taught you that the most important people in the world are the ones standing next to you on the firing line.”