Sera stood at the foot of the Tern’s ramp with her wrist slate and read the fuel margin aloud.
They had gathered in the docking ring’s lock, where the Tern’s hatch opened onto the station’s collar, because Sera had said it was the only place she would have this conversation: with the ship in reach. The five of them in suits, helmets off, breath showing in the cold. Ysol was there too, faint, standing in the light of the lock’s one panel. The archive reached this far, along the docking strut’s old lines. Just.
“Fuel,” Sera said. “Return reserve, untouched: what we need to make Cinder with the margin the guild requires.” She read the figure. “Above the reserve, what’s left for anything we do here.” She read that figure. It was small. “And the exit clock: fourteen hours. If we leave inside fourteen hours, we make Cinder with everything as planned. After that, every hour we stay comes out of the margin.”
She lowered the slate.
“Now,” she said. “What are we doing?”
Mara looked at the faces around her.
“Ysol’s given us two ways,” she said. “The station’s store, quick, at the cost of her memory. Or the Tern’s own heat, a day longer, at the cost of the clock.” She held up notebook I, open to the page where she had copied the second line. “And Eshel’s worked a minimum: the smallest sample that’s any use. A test section of channel lining, no more.”
