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Holden hit pause and felt a chill go down his spine Stagnating in a quagmire of petty ethical constraints He didn’t need Moynahan to tell him which company would snatch a man like that up He’d heard almost those exact words spoken by Antony Dresden, the architect of the Eros project that had killed a y experien and disappeared He’d come back as Strickland, abductor of sht, the murderer too

Chapter Thirty-Five: Avasarala

On the screen, the young hed twenty-five seconds earlier on Earth It was the level of lag Avasarala hated thelike nor she did took too long, every reading of reaction and nuance crippled by the effort to guess what exactly in her words and expression ten seconds before had elicited it

“Only you,” he said, “could take another Earth-Mars war, turn it into a private cruise, and then seeive their left testicle to go with you”

“Next time I’ll take up a collection, but—”

“As far as an accurate o, “there are reports in place, but they’re not as good as I’d like Because it’s you, I’ve got a couple ofsearch paraet is about a tenth of theto actual research With your clearances, I have rights to look at it, but these Navy guys are pretty good at obscuring things I think you’ll find …” His expression clouded “A collection?”

“Forget it You were saying?”

She waited fifty seconds, resenting each individually

“I don’t know that we’ll be able to get a definitive answer,” the youngthey want to hide, they can probably hide it”

Especially since they’ll know you’re looking for it, and what I asked you to look for, Avasarala thought Even if the incoht was in all the budgets right now, by the time Avasarala’s allies looked, it would be hidden All she could do was keep pushing on as many fronts as she could devise and hope that they fked up Three more days of information requests and queries, and she could ask for traffic analysis She couldn’t know exactly what infor, but if she could find out what kinds and categories of data they were keeping away fro, but not much

“Do what you can,” she said “I’ll luxuriate out here in the middle of nowhere Get back to me”

She didn’t wait fifty seconds for a round of etiquette and farewell Life was too short for that shit