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“Trouble?” Prax asked

“Yeah Don’t worry It’s not about you This has been brewin’ for a while now”

“I’et it over with one way or the other,” Alex said, but there was an un the man The wall terot now?”

Alex pulled the ter on coers of one hand while keeping hold of the coffee with the other The terraphs and tables in real ti up What’d you find?”

“Cracked seal,” A clever What else we got?”

Alex tapped on the terminal and Holden reappeared from the hallway, noithout his case

“Port sensor array took a hit Looks like we burned out a few of the leads,” Alex said

“All right,” Aet those bad boys swapped out”

“Oron the outside of a ship under thrust,” Holden said

“I can get it done, Cap,” Ah the tinny wall speaker, he sounded affronted Holden shook his head

“One slip, and the exhaust cooks you down to component atoms Let’s leave that for the techs on Tycho Alex, what else have we got?”

“Meation syste,” the pilot said “The cargo bay’s still in vacuum The radio array’s as dead as a ha And one of the et sick”

Holden went to the coffeeover his shoulder as he keyed in his preferences His cup said Tachi too Prax realized with a start that they all did He wondered who or what a Tachi was

“Does the cargo bay need EVA?”

“Don’t know,” Alex said “Le out of the h and stroked the brusheda cat On impulse, Prax cleared his throat

“Excuse ets fixed or there’s a tightbeam available, if maybe there was a way I could use so to be quiet right now,” Holden said “What are you wanting to send?”

“I need to do soot on Ganyes of the woman ith them And if I can find what happened to Dr Strickland … I’ve been on a security-locked syste Even if it was just the public access databases and networks, it would be a place to start”

“And it’s that or sit around and stew until we get to Tycho,” Holden said “All right I’ll ask Naoet you an access account for the Roci’s network I don’t know if there’ll be anything in the OPA files, but you ht as well check theot a pretty decent face-recognition database It’s inside their secure periht need to have one of us ht? I don’t want to get you in trouble with the OPA”

Holden’s smile arm and cheerful

“Really, don’t worry about that,” he said “Alex, what’ve we got?”

“Looks like cargo door’s not sealin’, which we knew We ot the video feed back up … hold on …”