Doss knelt on the Tern’s dock flange in his rigging gloves and lifted a jacket panel against the curve of the shell.
The flange was a narrow steel lip that ran around the Tern’s lock where it met the docking collar, wide enough to kneel on if you did not mind the drop beside you into the space between the strut and Sable’s plating. Doss seemed untroubled by it. He knelt there in his suit, tethered to a cleat by a short line, and held the panel out at arm’s length against the shell where the docking strut came closest to it.
The panel was one of six the crew had cut overnight, after Mara chose the minimum. Rectangles of the Tern’s spare hull insulation, quilted, foil-backed, with grommets along every edge. Together they were meant to make a jacket: a tent of insulation wrapped over a patch of the shell’s outer face, sealed at its edges, so that the Tern’s engine waste could be routed into it and warm the shell from outside, with the inside held cold by the station’s own chill. The reverse of Ysol’s method. Anwen’s idea.
Doss held the panel against the shell and watched it.
