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“You don’t knowto keep her voice cal”
At one of the tables nearest the door, a young officer stood up and took two steps toward theot her thrown in the brig, they’d look into Melba’s identity They’d find Ren’s body They’d find out who she was She had to keep it together
“You’re right I apologize,” the woed up in Melba’s mind, pure and black where it wasn’t red A swamp of obscenities rose in her throat, ready to pour out on the idiot priest as putting everything—everything—in jeopardy Melba sed it all and walked quickly away
The corridors of the Thoue presence in the unquiet of herwith Ren throw her It stole her focus and led her into risks she didn’t need to take She hadn’t been thinking straight, but now she was She got into the elevator and selected the level where Stanni and Soledad were checking the electrical syste coar
“Stanni? Sole?” she said into her hand ter I need to do”
She waited for the inevitable questioning, the prying and suspicion
“Okay,” Soledad said And that was all
At the hangar, Melba authorized the flight of her shuttle, waited ten minutes for clearance, and launched out the side of the Thomas Prince and into the black The shuttle monitors were cheap and small, the vastness of space compressed into fifty centiure the fastest burn for the Cerisier It was less than an hour She leaned into the thrust like she was riding a roller coaster and let the torch engines burn The Cerisier appeared in the dusting of stars as a sray dot that hurtled toward her The ship, like all the others in the flotilla, was in the last of the deceleration burn to put the drive pluht from her mind It made her think of Stanni and Soledad and their quiet fears She couldn’t think of them now
Impatience to arrive made it hard to start the flip and the deceleration burn She wanted to get there, to be there already She wanted to speed into the Cerisier like a witch on a broo in at speeds that wouldn’t have been possible in at, and did the last half of the ju When she docked, she had a headache and her jaw felt like someone had punched her
No one asked why she was back early and alone She listed personal reasons in the log Walking through the cra past the other crew back to recognize how much the wider spaces of the Thomas Prince had bothered her It felt too much like freedom, and she was all about necessity
Her cell was a s—clothes, terminal jack, tampons, communications deck, toothbrush—were scattered on the floor She’d have to find a way to secure the out into the corridor People would wonder why they weren’t packed away She let herself glance at the olden curl of sealant foa and sonets That would do It didn’tlatertimes to the Rocinante were under thirty seconds Melba loaded the sequence she’d been waiting to load for months Years It was a short script It didn’t take a second to proone The hatred was too For ajust woken froht She’d come so far and worked so hard, and despite all of the mistakes and screwups and last- in her life had been ai toward this moment, and now that she was here, it was al fro s she’d fought for, and then her world would never be the sa each keystroke, she put in the confirmation code—jules-pierre lowed aht, a tiny packet of inforround static But the software on the Rocinante would recognize it The communications array on Holden’s ship would be slaved to the virtual machine already installed and i the whole systeer code to the Seung Un, wait fifty-three seconds, and announce Holden’s responsibility and his demands And then the virtualsyste, no power in the universe, could stop it froot the confirmation response, and the amber LED shifted to red
Chapter Fifteen: Bull
B
ull’s hand ter with every bump in the corridor floor The siren blatted its standard two-tone, scattering people fro them out behind him If they didn’t know yet, they all would inyou could overlook
On the sain At first it was only a flicker of orange light ae or a gauss gun finishing its imen Half a second later, sparkles of yellow radiated out from the site Two seconds after, the major detonation Between one frame and the next, the destroyer’s side bloo for ten full seconds before the fusion reactor core ehter than the sun Bull watched the intense white gases begin to diffuse out and fade into acohesion in the oceanic black
He looked up to make the turn onto the ra man ambled slowly out of his path, and Bull leaned on the cart’s horn
“There’s a siren,” Bull yelled as he passed the young e said fro the first security analysis Best guess, so blew out in one of the power conduits, fused the safety systems so they couldn’t shut it down Would have taken about that long to turn the whole starboard ”