Page 20 (1/1)
It was the kind of detail she should have known
She pulled herself through the access shaft Her tool kit hung heavy on her front in the full-g thrust gravity She inant would feel like Unless so in the boat Ren and Stanni were a level down, and going loith every hour They were expecting her to make the final inspection of their work And, it see her to do it poorly
It was true, of course She didn’t knohy a real electroche her inexperience should embarrass her as deeply as it did She’d read a few h a few tutorials All that mattered was that they think she was an authentic semicompetent overseer It didn’t matter whether they respected her They weren’t her friends
She should have switched to the private frequencies for Soledad and Bob to be certain neither had woken unexpectedly andfor her This part of the plan was important She couldn’t let any of the herself to shift away fro is all Keeps to her cabin, don’t help on the project She just coo back to her cabin”
“True”
The junction was hard to ht orange safety warnings in five languages She paused before it, her hands on her hips, and waited to feel some sense of accomplishment And she did, only it wasn’t as pure as she’d hoped She looked up and down the passageway, though the chances of being interrupted here were ainst her belly, the heat of her skin keeping it reen As it cooled to aray It surprised her again with its density Pressing it along the sea lead with her bare hands The effort left her knuckles aching before she was halfway done She’d budgeted half an hour, but it took her almost twice that The detonator was a black dot four millimeters across with ten black cera putty It looked like a tick
When she was done, she wiped her hands doith cleaning towelettes twice, ernails or on her clothes She’d expected to skip her inspection of just the one level, but Ren and Stanni had ood time, and she took the lift doo levels instead They were still talking, but not about her now Stanni was considering getting a crush on Soledad In laconic Belt-inflected half phrases, Ren was advising against it Sot on it, all men Melba pressed herself back to ratitude His uniform identified him as Marcos She nodded back, then stared hard at her feet, willing them not to look at her Her uniforh she knew better, it felt like they would see through her disguise if they looked too close Like her past ritten on her skin
My naht I’ve never been anyone else
The lift stopped at her level and the three soldiers made way for her She wondered, when the time came, whether Marcos would die
She had never been to her father’s prison, and even if he’d been allowed visitors, the visit would have been in a prescribed room, monitored, transcribed Any real huht of official attention She would never have been permitted to see the hallways he walked down or the cell where he slept, but after his incarceration by the United Nations, she’d researched prison design Her rooer The crash couch she slept in was gies in acceleration, while his would be welded to the floor She could squeeze out whenever she wanted and go to the gang showers or the mess Her door locked from the inside, and there were no cameras or microphones in her room
In every way that mattered, she had more freedom than her father That she likely spent as much time in isolation was a matter of choice for her, and that made all the difference Tomorroould be a fresh rotation out Another ship, another round of ht she could lie in her couch dressed in the siht as the kind of thing Melba would wear Her hand terminal had fifteen tutorials in local e They covered everything froanic nutrient reclaeh Or if not that, at least she shouldn’t have been reviewing her own secret files
On the screen, Jim Holden looked like a zealot The coe of the iven to the es and stills The software she’d used to make a perfect visual simulacrum of the man cost ood enough to fool both people and computers, at least for a little while On the screen, his brown eyes squinted with an idiot’s earnestness His jaw had the first presentiravity The s she needed to know about the man who had destroyed her family
“This is Captain James Holden,” he said “What you’ve just seen is a deer you are in My associates have placed si You will all stand down as I a in the name of the Outer Planets Alliance Any ship that approaches the Ring without my personal per her sertip traced the outline of his shoulder, across his cheek, and then stabbed at his eyes She wished now that she’d picked aher preparations, it had see Now each ti Holden would have been easier Assassinations were cheap by coe control and social dynamics to see where it would have led Martyrdom, canonization, love A host of conspiracy theories that implicated anyone from the OPA to her father That was precisely not the point Holden had to be hu to his legacy had to be able to look back at all the things Holden had done, all the pronouncehteous decisionshis control and see that of course it had all led to this His narandizing ego Holden had touched would be tainted by association, including the destruction of her family Her father