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"Keep it there for now"

There was a hard bang as they rocketed through a deep hole

"Those buses are going to blow apart," Chase said

A scriht appeared ahead: the moon It lifted swiftly from the eastern horizon, plue rose up before theure with its long scoops of wire slung froain

"Drivers, anybody seeing anything out there?"

Negative Negative Negative

--

Through the windscreen of the pilothouse, Michael and Lore atching the drydock doors The portside door had opened without cole to the dock, the door had stopped cold They’d been trying to open it the rest of the way for nearly two hours

"I’m out of ideas here," Rand radioed froet"

"Will we clear it?" Lore asked The door weighed forty tons

Michael didn’t know "Rand, get down to engineering I need you there"

"I’e" He hung the hts on the panel went dead

--

Twenty-eight miles west, the sa orange light shone down upon the deck; it shioon like a skin of fla like a small explosion, the hatch detonated skyward It seehtti on its horizontal axis with a whizzing sound; then, like a ht, it appeared to pause in ht For the thinnest ht easily have been forgiven for thinking it was charged with soravity But, not so: down it plunged, into the befouled waters

Then: Carter

He landed on the foredeck with a clang, absorbing the i his body to a squat: hips wide, head erect, one splayed hand touching the deck for balance, like an offensive tackle preparing for the snap His nostrils flared to taste the air, which was imbued with the freshness of freedohts and sounds boarded the moon His vision was such that he could detect the smallest features of its face--the cracks and crevices, craters and canyons--with an almost lurid quality of three diht, as if he were holding it in his arms