Doss had carried the Tern’s folding bench in from the docking ring and set it up beside the hub’s main console, and Mara sat on it with a pencil and a calculation sheet on her knee.
The sheet was a guild-shop form, ruled in faint blue, with columns for quantity and rate and time. She had headed it Sable harvest: minimum sample and then stopped, because she did not know yet what the minimum was, and the minimum depended on things only Ysol could tell her.
Ysol stood above the console. She had come back up from the shell chamber with them, along the old lines in the walls, and settled into the light above the screens where she had first appeared. Her cup was in her hand.
The station’s heaters were running, the small air heaters in the hub’s walls that kept the room above freezing. Eshel had found them on the console an hour ago and turned them up a notch, because the five of them had been in suits for most of a day and their fingers were stiff. They cycled. On for a few minutes, off for a few. Mara could hear them: a faint rising hum in the walls when they came on, a tick when they went off.
