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Except that he was going to blow a hole in it

Aun, his hands splayed wide on his knees, his head freshly shaved From his place in the backseat, Holdene spots but still muscular and hard He didn’t need to see the amiable smile to knoas there, and how little it meant A massive conduit wrench clanked at Amos’ feet Katria drove with the studied boredo the attention of station security Her hair was already in a tight bun, prepped for the null g of engineering She tapped her pal to music, so maybe she already had her earpiece in Holden tried to lean back against the seat, but in the lower g, it just scooted him forward The bomb rested on the bench beside him like a fourth person

It wasn’t big A square box, safety orange with scratches at the edges and corners, theuse He didn’t know exactly as inside it, only that Katria was certain it would blow the right kind of hole into the pressure tanks and that the ruptured pressure tanks would blow the right part of the station apart She also said that, in its present form, it was both hard for securi

ty to detect and stable enough to play football with if you didn’t mind a square ball Still, Holden didn’t rest his elbow on it

They were nearly at the top of the ra the sa At the entrance to the transfer point, three Laconian Marines in power arreen jumpsuit

“Checkpoint,” Holden said

“Inconvenient,” Katria said She sounded like it was an annoyance more than an immediate threat to all their lives and the safety of everyone in the underground as counting on them He really did admire the way she did that

The raid had come two shifts before, when Holden had been in his sleep cycle Between the time he’d curled up in the bunk and put his head on the thin pillow and when he’d opened his eyes again, a quarter of Saba’s people had been snatched up and a man na the rest of Medina about it And the Typhoon was already past its flip-and-burn, braking noard the other side of the Laconia gate They weren’t saying exactly when it was supposed to arrive, but their data placed it at around ten days And the news fro for the fact that it was all coh the state-run newsfeed

The noose was drawing tight And in order to have any chance of escaping it, they were about to at least risk the lives of, and ineering decks at the wrong time

“Holden Do you have to do that?” Katria asked

“Do what?”

“Grunt”

“Was I grunting?”

“Cap does that when he’s thinking about so he don’t like,” Amos said

“He has a wide variety to choose from,” Katria said