Mara went home to Cinder on the Tern, with Sera at the controls and a new engine collar in its socket.
The Tern had been in the Meridian dock’s repair bay for most of the tribunal. Its engines had flown it from Cinder to Meridian on its old collar, and then the old collar had cracked, the week after the quench, when Sera was running the engines up for a test run. A hairline. Sera had found it with her thumb and said nothing for a whole morning.
Now it had a new one.
Mara had watched it go in, in the repair bay, from the ramp.
Sera sat at the controls with her hands on the throttles and her eyes on the collar’s gauge, which she checked every few minutes, and complained.
“It’s too neat,” she said.
Mara waited for the rest.
“The collar,” Sera said. “It’s too neat. Look at it.” She tapped the gauge. “Every reading dead on the mark. No wobble. No drift.” She looked round the cockpit: at the patched bulkheads, the taped cables, the scratches on every surface from six years of rescue work. “Nothing else on this ship is that neat. It doesn’t match.”
