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“So that call between Kohl and Holden is e’re all listening to,” Bobbie said “We’ll pass out a list of code words Holden will use during the call as signals This is our onlythe action, and there’s no way for us to signal an abort or call for help Our backup plan is everyone does this right the first time so we don’t need a backup plan Understood?”

“Lot of risk for a duibberish we can’t make sense of,” Ramez said

Bobbie felt a little flush of annoyance at the man “The more we have, the more likely we find e need in it when the encryption probleets fixed,” she said “We start where we can, and that’s this Are we all clear?”

A h the room

“Outstanding,” Bobbie said “Let’s get to work”

The slow zone or the ring space or the gate network Noweird

Bobbie and Clarissa exited the dru an old maintenance airlock that Saba sasn’t monito

red froency vac suits, the so-thin-they’re-barely-there type whose only purpose was keeping the wearer froht orange and yellow to ainst the black of space They had large flashing lights on the helmet and shoulders to aid rescue workers, but Bobbie had sh to be a brightly colored blob cli up the outside of the station No reason to flash a distress signal too Under nor the e to be cooked by radiation The cheap throay suits had al to them

But the slow zone was fucking weird

There was literally no radiation in the ring space that huround radiation, no solar wind, nothing Just a massive, unnaturally black void all around, defined only by the distant and faintly glowing rings equally spaced around it and the blue sphere of the alien station at the center where they’d had the rail-gun emplacements

Bobbie and Clarissa rode the outside of thedrum section of Medina inside the old airlock The indicator of theirpast the blackof the outer airlock door, and the fact that so to shove the Bobbie had them both tethered to a clip inside the airlock so they wouldn’t be hurled into the strange non-space outside

A large rectangular structure whipped past the outer airlock door Bobbie pressed her helmet to Clarissa’s and yelled so that sound would conduct directly “That’s one of the exterior elevators We go for the next one”

Clarissa nodded, wide-eyed, and braced for the jump Outside of the druth of the ship fro deck aft of the drum to the ops deck in the bow They housedfroh the drum itself Bobbie and Clarissa planned to use one of them to climb the station up to the comm array on the nose, and back down to the Laconian ship docked at the stern

Bobbie opened thethe same way she had a dozen times before Spare air bottles for herself and Clarissa They’d be outside for hours h-tensile cable and a winch And finally, a fat black recoilless handgun that one of the Belters had ed to hide from the Laconian weapon sweeps If they actually needed to use it, thedown fighting that appealed to Bobbie’s romantic notions

She hooked the eency cable on her suit to a loop at Clarissa’s waist, then unhooked herself from the airlock The station tried to throw her out the door, but she grabbed the lip of the outer airlock with one hand and held on In the other hand, she held the grapple gun Behind her, Clarissa had one hand on her shoulder, and one hand on the bulkhead