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“Hank, Anna Please call otten in the air in front of her “We are so fked”
“Hi Nono,” Anna said to the video camera in her room’s communication panel “Hi Naed her pillow to her chest, squeezing it tight “This is you This is both of you”
She put the pillon, taking a ize again”
Chapter Nineteen: Melba
T
he injustice of it shrieked in the back of her skull; it wouldn’t let her sleep It had co So , and soe invisible fist drive itself into her gut And it was still there
She’d watched the whole thing unfold in her quarters, sitting cross-legged on her crash couch, her hand ter information from any feed The network had been so swanal wouldn’t stand out No one would wonder why she atching when everyone else was doing the same When the OPA had opened fire, she’d heard the Earth forces bracing for a wave of sabotage explosions that never caer at Holden, the conde cool water on a burn Her tea Un, repairing the dae she’d done, but she’d checked in whenever there was a freelasers on the Rocinante, guiding the hed out loud Holden had stopped her outgoinghis whole communications array There was no way he could send out a retraction in ti, she’d been in three conversations sierous fluctuations She didn’t find out until they were being rotated back to the Cerisier that Holden hadn’t died That he wasn’t going to The missile had been stopped and the eneht to her bunk, curled up on the crash couch, and tried not to panic Her brain felt like it had cohts ran in random directions If the Martians had just launched a fewfor the OPA’s to do the job, Holden would be dead If the Rocinante had been a few thousand kilometers closer to the Behe under her couch hushed back and forth in the last of the deceleration burn, and she realized she was shaking her body, banging her back against the gel If the thing thatthat was hunched in the abyssal black on the other side of the Ring—hadn’t changed the laws of physics, Holden would be dead
Holden was alive
She’d always known that the destruction of Ja Discrepancies would be there if anyone looked closely She couldn’t match her announcement to the exact burn that the Rocinante would be on when she sprang her trap There would be artifacts in the video that a sufficiently close analysis would detect By the tih, it would have been too late The story of James Holden would have been set New evidence could be dismissed as crackpots and conspiracy theorists But it required that Holden and his crew be dead It was so she’d always heard her father say If the other e only has one story to follow When he put his coin She’d be caught They’d find out it was her
And—the thought had the copper taste of fear—they’d find Ren They’d know she killed him Her father would know Word would reach him in his cell that she had beaten Ren to death, and that would be worse than anything Not that she’d done it, Melba thought That she’d been caught doing it
The sound came from her door, three hard thu, the blood tapping at the inside of her throat, banging at her ribs
“Miss Koh?” Soledad’s voice ca fear in soot to her feet Either the pilot was repositioning the ship or she was just unsteady She couldn’t tell which She looked in herout could almost have been a normal person woken froers through her hair, pressing the dark locks against her scalp Her face felt cla to be done She opened the door
Soledad stood in the thin, cramped corridor TheHer wide eyes skittered over Melba, away and back, away and back
“I’o there They can fire o” Melba reached out and put her hand on the woht,” she said “It’ll be all right Where can’t you go?”
The ship shifted That one wasn’t her iination, because Sole moved too
“The Prince,” she said “I don’t want… I don’t want to volunteer”
“Volunteer for what?” Melba asked She felt like she was coaxing the girl back froh self-awareness left in her to appreciate the irony
“Didn’t you get the e? It’s from the contracts supervisor”
Melba looked back over her shoulder Her hand terreen-and-red band on the screen showing that there was a prioritySoledad out of the roorabbed the terh ten hours before,she’d been lying in her couch, lost in her panic fugue She thual script poured onto the screen, brash as a shout
Danis General Contracting, owners and operators of half the civilian support craft in the fleet, including the Cerisier, was invoking the exceptional actions clause of the standard contract Each functional teanated volunteer for temporary duty on the UNN Thomas Prince The remuneration would remain at the standard level until completion of the contract, when any hazard bonuses or exemptions would be assessed