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The access panel was open, the guts of the ship exposed She grabbed the edge of the panel gently, slowing herself Blood welled up from her palm where the metal cut into her She didn’t feel it as pain Just a kind of warnore The brownout buffer sat behind an array control board She slid her hand down to it, her fingers caressing the pale forreen She took a breath, gripped the buffer, pushed it down, turned and then pulled The unit caun went off A scar appeared on the wall before her, bits ofat her Or near her It didn’t matter She flipped the unit end for end and reseated it The buffer’s indicator blinked red for a reen Just the way Ren had showed her Terrible design, she thought with a grin and held down the buffer’s reset Two ainst her eardru she’d been holding the reset, if she’d slipped it off and back on She thought it should have gone by now, but tiain She was crashing

The buffer’s readout went red Clarissa s failure as if she were the ship itself One bad readout causing the next causing the next, the levels of failure rapid and increer it couldn’t define Doing what it could to be safe, or at least to be sure it didn’t get worse

Failing closed

She turned Ashford stood on his couch, holding the restraint straps in one hand and pressing his feet into the gel His e Two of his people had shifted to face her as well, their guns trained on her, their faces ale, Cortez was framed by the security office doorway His face was a ht, a man who dealt ith the unexpected Must be hard for him She hadn’t noticed before howabout the shape of their jaws, hts flickered She felt her body starting to shudder It was over For her, for all of them The first twitch of the collapse pulled at her back like a cra nausea caht You showed me how, and I did it I think I just saved everyone We did

Ashford caught his pistol out of the air and swung toward her She heard his screa, launching hih the space There was a contact taser in the oldIt was good to know that on sohts flared once and went out as Ashford brought the barrel to bear on her The e didn’t kick in

Everything was darkness, and then, for a ht

And then darkness

Chapter Fifty-Two: Holden

H

olden ejected his spent ers hit only an e his aazine in reserve Corin was firing around him with her rifle She had spare pistol aazines off her belt and putting them in his She fired off a few more shots and waited for hi around the corner firing Answering bullets hit everyplace on her side of the corridor except where she was Holden was about to shout at her to get back into cover when the lights went out

It wasn’t just the lights So ed all at once that his hindbrain couldn’t keep up It told him to be nauseated just in case he’d been poisoned It orking with fifty-orithms

Holden collapsed to his knees with the nausea, the sudden appearance of gravity being one of the ainst the floor because he was no longer wearing a heavy environment suit Which also uely swampy, sulfurous odor His inner ear didn’t report any Coriolis, so they weren’t spinning There were no engine sounds, so the Beheround around hi that felt like ground-cover plants

“Oh, hey, sorry,” a voice said Miller’s The light level ca naked on a wide plain of sorass It was as dark as a ht, but nolike a forest was visible Beyond that,up at the sky, still wearing his old gray suit and goofy hat His hands were in his pockets, his jacket ru around them