The clamps let go, and the Tern lifted. The station fell away into the moon’s shadow, its radiator fins glowing dull red, and then the moon fell away, and they were in open dark with Cinder ahead, under a day out.
Mara sat in the right-hand seat with notebook IV on her knee.
She had not opened it since the side passage. She opened it now, carefully, by the edges, and turned past the first pages to the middle: the calculations. Her mother’s cooling schedule, worked out in pencil, page after page. Flow rates. Pump cycles. Coolant ratios. And in the margins, here and there, notes: test before you trust. Recipe holds at this ratio for six cycles. Revised, see over.
The coolant recipe. Her mother had worked out a coolant mixture to keep the station’s pumps alive: a ratio of the station’s remaining coolant stock to water and to a third thing, a salt, that kept the mixture from freezing in the lines. She had tested it, the margins said, cycle after cycle, and revised it, and tested it again.
Mara read the recipe twice. Then she thought about Hearth.
At the guild hall, at the hearing, she had said what she needed. Access to Hearth’s forge. Current load figures. Safe coolant. She had the access, supervised. She had Pell’s survey, nearly done. She did not have safe coolant. Hearth’s forge had a shadow-chamber feed, like Lorn’s, and a valve, and a quench line. But the brace would need…
