Sable came up out of the dark on the second morning like a cracked egg.
Mara had seen it on the chorus’s model as a small dark point on the lattice’s outer strut. She had seen it on the public chart as a gap on the open paper, Unlisted in the margin. She had not imagined what it would look like through the Tern’s cockpit glass, close: a sphere of grey plating a few kilometers across, its surface fractured in long jagged seams like a shell dropped on stone, with darkness showing through the cracks. No light came from it anywhere. Hearth was a long way behind them now, a bright star, and its light fell on Sable’s near side and showed every crack.
Around it, in a loose cloud, hung the debris field.
Plates. Struts. Fragments of shell that had come away when the lamp failed and had drifted outward and stopped, held in a slow orbit by Sable’s own small pull. Some of them were the size of the Tern. Some were the size of a hand. They turned slowly in Hearth’s distant light, flashing as they turned.
Sera brought the Tern in slowly.
She did not look at the beacon. Mara watched her not look at it. The rescue code had been looping on the console for a day and a half, three short and three long and three short, and the console had helpfully drawn a bright line from the Tern to its source on Sable’s…
