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“You’re fked,” she said

Avasarala took another sip of her tea She should have been ruined She should have been in tears She’d been cut off from her oer, tricked Jules-Pierre Mao had sat there, not a hed down his sleeve at her Errinwright and Nguyen and whoever else was in his little cabal They’d tricked her She’d sat there, pulling strings and trading favors and thinking that she was doing so real Forclosed out

They’d made a fool of her She should have been huame, and if she was behind at halfti better than being underestihed

“They don’t like having Martian soldiers walking around the United Nations with guns I have to eat lunch with a dull spork We’re at war”

“All right, fine When we get on the yacht, you’re in charge of security You’re going to need a gun I’ll arrange that for you”

“You can? Honestly, though, I’d rather have my suit”

“Your suit? What suit?”

“I had custom-fit powered armor with me when I came here The video feed of theit over to your guys to confire hadn’t been faked”

Avasarala looked at Bobbie and sipped her tea Michael-Jon would knohere it was She’d call hiht on board the Mao-Kwik yacht with an innocuous label like WARDROBE sta she needed to be convinced, Bobbie kept talking “Seriously Get un, I’m a soldier Get that suit for ot it, you’ll have it”

“All right, then,” Bobbie said She smiled For the first time since they’d met, Avasarala was afraid of her

God help whoever makes you put it on

Chapter Twenty-Nine: Holden

Gravity returned as Alex brought the engine up, and Holden floated down to the deck of the cargo bay airlock at a gentle half g They didn’t need to go fast now that the monster was outside the ship They just needed to put soet it into the drive’s star-hot exhaust plume, where it would be broken down into its various subato reduced to ions

He hoped, anyway

When he touched down on the deck, he intended to turn on the wall monitor and check the aft ca be torched, but the ht came down, a white-hot spike of pain took his knee He yelped and collapsed

As and started to kneel “You okay, Cap?” he said

“Fine I mean, for I-think-I-blew-out-my-knee levels of fine”

“Yeah Joint injury’s a lot less painful in ravity, ain’t it?”