The panel came out of the dark at the second hour of the night, rolling.
Sera was on the Bellwether’s bridge. She had crossed from the Tern at dusk to fly the tender home herself, because the Bellwether’s captain had been at the controls for eighteen hours and she did not trust his reflexes, and because the tender’s starboard engine still ran rough even with the new gasket. The fleet was in convoy back toward Cinder: the Fallow Hand leading, with the harvest’s cargo pod slung under its belly; the Bellwether second; the Tern third, with Doss at its controls; and Odren’s patrol cutter alongside, a little out from the line. The second escort cutter had turned back for Cinder at Whitlow.
The route board on the Bellwether’s console showed the channel clear.
It had shown it clear all evening. The fleet was routing by an old relay, a Compact navigation beacon on the lattice’s edge that fed debris positions to every ship in range. The board drew the channel from it. Clean. Empty. A green lane through the dark.
Sera had looked at it and not believed it, because she never believed the board. But she had no second column tonight. Odren’s patrol scans were a month old and did not cover this stretch.
