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“You’re flattering me”
“It’s habit I don’tby it”
Monica rooted around in the satchel she’d brought and pulled out a flimsy roll-out video screen She pushed plates out of the way and flattened the screen out on the table When it cahter, blocky and thick, heading toward one of the rings inside the slow zone “Watch this”
The picture sprang into ate at low thrust He assumed it was the one that led from the solar system to the slow zone and Medina Station, but it could have been any of the others They all looked pretty e flickered and danced as the recording equipnetic flux The ier visible That didn’t ates had always behaved oddly, bending the ies like refraction in water The video ended
“I’ve seen that one before,” Holden said “Good special effects but the plot’s thin”
“Actually you kind of haven’t Guess what happened to that ship?” Monica said, face flushed with excitement
“What?”
“No, really, guess Speculate Give me a hypothesis Because it never came out the other side”
Chapter Six: Alex
“Hey, Bobbie,” Alex said to his hand teronna be downstairs in Mariner for a week or two, stayin’ with a cousin I ondering if you wanted to get lunch while I’m in town”
He ended the e and sent it, put his hand terain He started paging back through his contacts, looking for another distraction With every minute, he came closer to the thin exosphere of home They were already inside the orbit of Phobos and the now invisibly thin scatter of gravel that people called the Dei The drop ship didn’t have screens, but from here he’d have been able to see theup the side of Olympus Mons He’d been a boot there after he joined the Navy
Mariner Valley had been one of the first large-scale settlehborhoods that burrowed into the sides of the vast canyons, huddling under the stone and regolith The network of bridges and tubes that linked thee structures and the trailing tubes h-speed line to Londres Nova was a spear in the jellyfish’s crown
Three waves of Chinese and Indian colonists dug deep into the dry soil there, eking out a thin, perilous existence, pushing the limits of human habitation and ability His family had been one of them He’d been an only child to older parents He had no nieces or nephews, but the variety of Kao fro out his welcome at any one of them
The drop ship shuddered, the ath now to cause turbulence The acceleration alarm chimed pleasantly and a recorded voice instructed hiel couches and put any objects more than two kilos into the lockers set into the wall at their sides The braking burn would cos The automated concern made that sound like a lot, but he supposed some folks would be impressed
He put his hand terminal in the locker, cycled it closed, and waited for the braking rockets to push him back into his couch In one of the other coan, a e When the tones resolved into a gentle and reassuring chord, the burn kicked in, pressing hiel He dozed as the ship rattled and shook The at on their steep descent path, but it could still generate a lot of heat Half-awake, he ran through theht sleep washed over hie in the burn, an ih the ship, a shift in the couch’s gimbals – he’d have been awake and alert in an instant But nothing happened, so nothing happened As hos went, it wasn’t bad