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You sound disappointed perched at the back of Avasarala’s tongue, but the dread and anticipation of ould cohast, with 572 souls aboard her, came apart like a cloud Hull plates peeled away in neat, orderly rows Super-structural girders and decks shifted apart The engineering bays detached, slipping away In the ie before her, the full crew had been exposed to hard vacuu and not yet dead That it was like watching a construction plan ani section here, the plates cupping the drive thus and so—only ,” Michael-Jon said, stopping the playback “Watch what happens e increase nification”

Don’t show them to me, Avasarala wanted to say I don’t want to watch the, but a knot of co He advanced it slowly, fra?” she asked

“What? No, no Here, I’ll bring you closer”

The iain The cloudiness was an illusion created by a host of ss She squinted It wasn’t a loose cloud either Like iron filings under the influence of a net, each tiny piece was held in line with the ones before and behind it

“The Arboghast wasn’t torn apart,” he said “It was disasseh there were about fifteen separate waves, each one undoing another level of thedown to the screws”

Avasarala took a deep breath, then another, then another, until the sound lost its ragged edge and the awe and fear grew sh that she could push it to the back of her mind

“What does this?” she said at last She’d meant it as a rhetorical question Of course there was no answer No force known to humanity could do what had just been done That wasn’t the htly “My Industrial Design final was just the saave us all ure out what they did Extra credit was to deliver an in” And a moment later, his voice ether, yes?”

On the display, the rigidity and order of the floating bits of irders, vast ceraan to drift, set in chaoticthem Seventy seconds from first burst to the end A little over aclearly to be shot

“The crew?”

“Took their suits apart Didn’t bother disasseical unit or ht already know all it needs to about human anatoed, then blinked again

“This this, or a version of this? We’re the only one with both high-def feeds, but it’s Venus Everyone as looking saw it Not like it’s in a sealed lab”

She closed her eyes, pressing her fingers against the bridge of her nose as if she were fighting a headache while she struggled to keep the mask in place Better to seem in pain Better to see happening to somebody else Tears welled up in her eyes, and she bit her lip until they went away She pulled up the personnel locator on her hand teruyen was out of the question even if he’d been in conversational range Nettleford ith a dozen ships burning toward Ceres Station, and she wasn’t entirely certain of him Souther

“Can you send this version to Admiral Souther?”

“Oh, no It’s not cleared for release”