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Even now, just hours after nearly being cut in two by a highspeed projectile, Prax was belowdecks with Nao holes inside the ship He hadn’t even been asked He’d just climbed out of his bunk and pitched in

Holden stood above one of the bullet entry points on the ship’s outer hull The small projectile had left a perfectly round hole and alh five centih-tensile alloy armor so quickly it hadn’t even dented it

“Found it,” Holden said “No light co out, so it looks like they’ve already patched it on the inside”

“Conetic boots, a portable welding torch in his hand Bobbie followed in her fancy powered ar sheets of patchup the outer hull breach, Holden wandered off to find the next hole Around hi with the Rocinante like an honor guard With their drives off, they were visible only as small black spots thathis ar the ships out, they were almost impossible to see

Holden tracked the Martian cruiser on his HUD until it passed across the bright splash of the Milky Way’s ecliptic For a moment, the entire ship was a black silhouette framed in the ancient white of a few billion stars A faint cone of translucent white sprayed out from one side of the ship, and it drifted back into the star-speckled black Holden felt a desire to have Naohts, that bordered on a physical ache

“I forget how beautiful it is out here,” he said to her over their private channel instead

“You daydrea someone else do all the work?” she replied

“Yeah More of these stars have planets around them than don’t Billions of worlds Five hundred million planets in the habitable zone was the last estiet to see any of them?”

“Our grandkids?”

“When this is over”

“Also,” Naomi said, “at least one of those planets has the protomolecule masters on it Maybe we should avoid that one”

“Honestly? That’s one I’d like to see Who ? What’s it all for? I’d love to be able to ask And at the very least, they share the huht have more in common than we think”

“They also kill whoever lived there first”

Holden snorted “We’ve been doing that since the invention of the spear They’re just scary good at it”

“You found that next hole yet?” Amos said over the main channel, his voice an unwelcoaze away fro the da to his HUD, it took only a ht here,” he said, and A his direction

“Cap,” Alex said, chi in from the cockpit “The captain of that MCRN cruiser is lookin’ to talk to you”

“Patch hier,” Alex said, and then the static on the radio shifted in tone

“Captain Holden?”

“I read you Go ahead”