The segment passed its second check at dawn. Four readings, under load, with the governor connected through the bench model’s pocket, and Tavin read all four himself and called the segment sound. Then the Tern lifted. Tavin watched it go from the yard apron, his cap in his hands, until the hull was a spark above the cooling towers.
The moon station was under a day out, in the dark side’s shadow, and Sera flew it as she had flown the cargo ring: in silence, counting.
Mara rode in the right-hand seat. Eshel rode in the left, the rattling one, with his case on his knees and his slate in his hands, the registry entry for Halden Wake open on its screen. He had never flown off Cinder before. He did not say so. He read his gauges twice, aloud, every time the Tern changed course, and Mara understood that this was how Eshel was frightened.
The moon came up in the port as a grey curve, pocked and dead, and they went around it into its shadow, and in the shadow there was the station.
It was small. Smaller than the gate at Lorn. Mara had imagined, from the name, something grander: a station worth naming a ship after, or a ship worth naming a station after. It was neither. It looked like a supply depot, or a weather post, the kind of place the Compact built and staffed with two people and forgot. A cluster of grey modules…
