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nstead of putting hiiven Holden a new persona A version of himself that stood in front of a cas and told stories in ways entertaining enough to keep the focus on hi that he’d have expected to have any practical application

Oneto the large video monitor behind hi the slow zone”

“That’s a terrible name,” Naomi said She was at the ship operations panel, just out of view of the documentary crew’s cameras “Slow zone? Really?”

“You have a better na to Clip and he shifted a few degrees to his left, ca with him in a slow pan The burst blood vessel in his eye was starting to fade The high-g burn through the Ring had been hard on all of them

“I still like Alex’s name,” Naomi replied

“Dandelion sky?” Monica said with a snort “First of all, only people frohtest idea what a dandelion is And second of all, no, it sounds stupid”

Holden kneas still on camera, so he just smiled and let the two of them hash it out The truth was, he’d been partial to Alex’s na out, it did sort of look like being at the center of a dandelion, the sky filled with fragile-looking structures in an enormous sphere around the the co at her

“Sorry I interrupted,” Nao sorry at all She winked at Holden and he grinned back

“And, three… two…” Monica pointed at hiet, is approximately one million kilometers across” Holden pointed at the 3D representation on the screen behind him “There are no visible stars, so the location of the zone is impossible to determine The boundary is made up of one thousand three hundred and seventy-three individual rings evenly spaced into a sphere So far, the only one we’ve been able to find that’s ‘open’ is the one we cah The fleets we traveled out with are still visible on the other side, though the Ring seeh it unreliable”

Holden tapped on the ed rapidly

“We’re calling this Ring Station, for lack of a better term It appears to be a solid sphere of aabout five kilo of other objects, including all of the probes we’ve fired into the slow zone, and the Belter ship Y Que The torpedo that chased us through the Ring is headed toward the station in a trajectory that see too”