Anwen put her gloved hand on Sorrel’s shell and felt the cold come through the leather.
It was colder than Sable’s. She had thought nothing could be. But Sorrel lay further out on the lattice’s edge, further from Hearth’s light, and its shell had been dark longer, and the cold in the plates was the deep settled cold of a thing that had not been warm in living memory. It came up through her palm into her wrist and made her fingers ache inside the glove.
Frost streaked the plates. Nothing like the patchy rime of Sable: long streaks, running in parallel across the shell’s face, the way frost ran on a window when the wind blew one way all winter. Anwen looked at the streaks. They followed the plating’s grain.
She took her hand away.
“Coils,” she said. “Small sections. A meter square. Not more.”
Her crew laid the warming coils. Flat spirals of resistance wire on ceramic, like the one Doss had clamped to Sable’s inner face, but more of them, smaller. The Fallow Hand had brought forty. They laid them in a grid across the shell’s north face, where Ysol had said the deposits lay, each one clamped to the plating, each one wired to a separate switch on the freighter’s power bus.
