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Holden let go of the rim of the hatch and dropped a half led below hie was a hunk of bulkhead plating stuck in the wall exactly on the other side of the reactor Holden couldn’t see any way that the shrapnel could have gotten there without passing directly through the reactor, or else bouncing off two bulkheads and around it There was no sign of the first, so the second, incredibly unlikely though it was, had to be what had happened

“I ood fifteen centih to have at least breached the shielding on the reactor Maybe worse

“Grabbing your ca The walls in there areso”

Holden tried to pull the shrapnel out of the wall by hand and failed “A”

“So no on the distress call, then,” Naomi said

“No But if someone could point a camera aft and reassure me that for all this trouble we actually killed that dao as now”

Holden lay on one of the sick bay beds, letting the ship look his leg over Periodically a manipulator prodded his knee, which elled up to the size of a cantaloupe, the skin stretched tight as a dru sure to keep hiistered only as pressure without any pain

The panel next to his head warned hi while a third injected a needle-thin flexible tube into his knee and started doing so sensation

At the next bed over lay Prax His head was bandaged where a three-centilued back down His eyes were closed Amos, who had turned out not to have a concussion, just another nasty buthea te bulkhead They wouldn’t be able to fix the cargo bay door until they docked at Tycho Alex was flying the to make it easier to work

Holden didn’t et back to Tycho and confront Fred about what he’d seen The longer he thought about it, the further he got froht Naoht It made no sense for Fred to be behind any of this

But he wasn’t sure And he had to be sure

Praxon the bandages

“I wouldn’t mess with those,” Holden said

Prax nodded and closed his eyes again Sleeping, or trying to The auto-doc pulled the tube out of Holden’s leg, sprayed it with antiseptic, and began wrapping it with a tight bandage Holden waited until theto his knee, then turned sideways on the bed and tried to stand up Even at a quarter g, his leg wouldn’t support hiot hirabbed his ar

“It’s dead?”

“Yeah,” Holden said, patting his hand “We got it Thanks”