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In the body of the elevator car, Juarez took a position firing down the hole at the pursuers Bull didn’t knoclose to the end of his supply Bull would have slouched against the wall if there had been any gravity Instead he shifted his suit radio to the channel for Naoun,” she said before he could speak “Give ,” he said “Get to the top of the shaft”

“But—”

“Maybe you can get the hatch open for them Get into command”

“You can’t access the controls from inside the shaft”

“In this piece-of-shit boat, you never know,” Bull said “Soht have put a self-destruct button there Wouldn’t surprise me”

“That’s your plan B?”

“I think we’re pretty much on plan Z at this point,” Bull said “Anyway, you’re the engineer There’s fk-all you can do here And I heard you with Holden before You ain Not like it costs us anything”

He watched her face as she decided Fear, despair, regret, calm, in that order Impressive woman He wished he’d had a chance to know her better And if she was able to ship with Jiht either

“Thank you,” she said, then turned and launched herself along the elevator shaft toward coht Juarez’s rifle flashed again and Bull shifted his radio frequencies to include the two o too Head up top See if you can storm the command”

“You sure?” Cass said, her voice calot cover here There won’t be a better place farther up”

“Yeah, pretty sure,” Bull said

“What about you?” Juarez asked

“I’ here,” Bull said

“Okay, bro,” Juarez said, then he and Cass were gone too Bull thought about looking down through the shaft to see how close the eneot shot in the eye at this point… well, that would just be sad The little box of the elevator was a monochroht He took as deep a breath as he could It was pretty shallow He drew the grenades out from his pocket, one in either hand, and carefully dialed the to die here Not what he would have picked, but what the hell It probably beat going back and having his spine grown back wrong He’d seen guys who lived their whole lives in a drug haze fighting the pain of a bad regrowth He hadn’t really let himself think about that before Noas safe to

He tried to decide whether he regretted dying, but the truth was he was too fking tired to care And he couldn’t breathe for crap He was sorry he hadn’t killed Ashford, but that wasn’t new He was sorry he couldn’t avenge Sam or find out if Pa was alive Or whether Ashford would actually be able to destroy the Ring If he was sad about anything, it was that everything that was inin motion without hi he’d done had made a difference

His hand terminal blinked A connection request from Monica Stuart He wondered for a moment what she wanted with him, and then res had to be for shit in there He routed the request to his suit No pictures, but the voice connection would be enough

“Bull,” the wo attacked up here I think Anna’s dead What the hell’s going on down there? How ,” he said He felt a pang about Anna, but it was just one of many at that point “Pretty much everyone in the attack party’s dead now Maybe five folks holed up in the elevator shaft, but the bad guys got the top and the bottoed to duh to fire the laser Ashford’s guys are probably in engineering putting that back online, and I don’t see we’ve got any damn way to stop him”

“Oh my God,” Monica breathed