An hour past the grid, Sera reached up to the panel over her head and flipped a switch Mara had not noticed, and a small amber light came on beside it.
“Transponder,” she said. “Salvage registry now. As far as the Directorate’s board is concerned, we’re a licensed waste hauler bound for the far scrap rings with a hold full of rubbish. That’s what it’ll say on every scan. That’s what it said when we went through.” She did not turn around. “Go aft. The cargo bay. Stay there until I call you.”
“Why?”
“Because if anyone looks in through a port, I want them to see one bored pilot and no passengers.”
So Mara went aft.
The cargo bay was a long low space behind the cabin, ribbed with steel frames, lit by a single caged lamp turned down to a glow. The parts crate was lashed to the deck in the middle, with EDRIN on its lid facing up. Around it Sera had packed actual rubbish: sacks of slag, two broken pump housings, a coil of corroded cable, a crate of corroded impellers and cracked valve bodies from Tavin’s reject bin. Disguise, or ballast, or both. The air smelled of rust and cold oil.
Mara had brought the notebooks back with her from the bunk. Sera had handed her a sealed case for them once they cleared the grid, a flat steel box with a rubber gasket, the kind rescue crews used for medical records, and the three grey books lay inside it now, side by side. She set it on the crate beside her. She unwrapped the hammer from its oiled cloth and wrapped it again in a plain rag from the bay’s locker, because the rag was less likely to catch anyone’s eye than oiled cloth, and held it in her lap.
She waited.
It was not what she had imagined. All the way across the bay that night, walking toward the Tern’s blinking lights with the harness on her chest, she had imagined danger as something fast: a chase, a ship coming up behind them, guns, a dive into darkness. This was not fast. This was the cargo bay’s cold seeping up through the deck into her boots, and the single lamp ticking as it cooled, and the engine’s long steady chord in the graft, and Sera’s voice coming back from the cockpit every few minutes, low, counting.
“Two.”
A pause. A long pause.
“Hold.”
Another pause.
“Three.”
At first Mara had no idea what she was counting. Then she understood. Somewhere ahead, beyond the hull, there were sensor stations, buoys or platforms or patrol ships, sweeping the dark in a regular rhythm, and Sera knew the rhythm, and was counting between the sweeps, and holding the ship in whatever shadow it was in until the count told her it was safe to move. Two. Hold. Three. The ship’s engines dipped on hold and rose again on the number after.
Mara learned to stand still, to touch nothing, to keep from shifting on the crate though her legs went numb, to keep a firm grip on the hammer. It seemed absurd, that the noise of a hammer on a deck could carry through the hull to anyone, but she could not be sure it would not, and Sera’s counting had a quality in it, a tightness, that made her not want to find out.
After a long time she called forward, keeping her voice down: “How often do they sweep?”
“Ask me after the ring,” Sera said.
Mara did not ask again.
Later, much later, the engine’s chord changed. It dropped and steadied, and the ship turned, and through the small port in the bay’s side Mara saw something she could not make sense of at first: a great dark curve, enormous, sliding past, so close it seemed she could reach out and touch it. A wall. A curved wall of black metal studded with old fittings, sliding past the port at walking pace.
She went forward to the cabin door and looked through it into the cockpit. Sera did not stop her.
Through the cockpit glass, the curve went on and on, up and over and away in both directions, a vast black ring, its surface pitted and scarred and hung with the stumps of old docking arms. It was the size of a district. It was the size of the whole Low Brace.
“Cargo ring,” Sera said. “Founder work. Used to move freight between the lamps, back when there was freight worth moving. Dead now. The Compact stopped maintaining it before I was born.” She eased the controls and the ship slid closer to the ring, into its shadow. “Its shadow blocks half the grid’s sensors. There’s a gap in the coverage along this face. The rescue service used it in drills, to practice getting in and out of a system without being logged. I flew it six times.”
“And now?”
“Now I haven’t flown it since I left the Directorate.” She paused. “And the Directorate hasn’t moved its grid to close it.”
“Why not?”
“Because closing it would mean admitting it’s there.” Sera’s voice was dry. “Go back aft.”
Mara went back aft.
They were in the ring’s shadow for a long time. When they came out of it, the light through the port changed: Hearth’s light, which had been behind them all night, a warm faint glow on the bay’s starboard frames, was gone. The port showed only stars.
And then the link speaker in the bay crackled.
“Salvage hauler on bearing three-one-four, this is Directorate patrol eight. You are outside the logged lanes. State your manifest.”
It was a man’s voice, young, bored, flattened by the speaker. Mara stood up off the crate. Her heart was going hard. She had a reply ready. She had rehearsed one in her head, without meaning to, all night, waiting in the cold: We’re a licensed salvage hauler bound for the far rings, we lost our lane in the ring’s shadow, we’re correcting now. It was a good reply. It was plausible. She opened her mouth.
Her throat closed on it.
Nothing came. She stood in the cargo bay with the hammer in her hand and her mouth open and no sound in it at all, and she understood that the speaker in the bay was only a repeater, that the patrol could not hear her, that Sera was the one who would answer, and still her throat had closed as though a hand were on it.
From the cockpit, Sera’s voice, through the same speaker, a half second later:
“Patrol eight, this is salvage hauler, registry on your board. Manifest follows.” A sigh. A long, bored, irritated sigh, the sigh of someone who has been flying for eleven hours and has been asked a stupid question. “Contaminated pump parts, Cinder municipal surplus, for disposal at far ring nine. Item one, pump housing, cast, cracked, serial four-four-seven-two-dash-B. Item two, pump housing, cast, cracked, serial four-four-seven-three-dash-B. Item three, impeller, bronze, corroded, serial—”
“Salvage hauler, that’s—”
“—serial four-one-one-zero. Item four, impeller, bronze, corroded, serial four-one-one-one. Item five, valve body, cast, cracked—”
She went on. She read every item. She read serial numbers, every digit, in the same bored voice, with a little sigh between items, as if each serial number were a personal injury. Mara stood in the bay and listened and realized that Sera was reading the actual crate, Tavin’s reject crate, the one lashed down beside the parts crate. The numbers were real. Sera must have memorized them before they lifted, or read them off a list she had made.
“—item eleven, valve body, cast—”
“Salvage hauler.” The patrol officer’s voice had changed. It was not bored anymore; it was pained. “Salvage hauler, we have your manifest. That’s sufficient.”
“Item twelve—”
“That’s sufficient. It’s not worth the shift. Proceed. Correct to your lane.”
“Correcting,” Sera said, and the link clicked off.
Mara sat down on the crate. Her legs were shaking. She put the hammer on her knee and her hands over it.
After a while she went forward again and stood in the cabin door.
“Why does a list of dead pumps get us through?” she said.
Sera kept her eyes forward. She was looking at the instruments, and her shoulders, Mara saw, had come down a little, the way a person’s shoulders come down after holding something heavy.
“Nobody inspects bad pumps at the end of a shift,” Sera said.
She said it without smiling. That was simply how the Directorate worked: a patrol officer eight hours into a cold watch, a hauler full of contaminated scrap, a choice between boarding a ship and spending three hours in a hold full of broken castings, or letting it go. Of course he let it go. Anyone would. Sera had known he would, and had known exactly how long to read before he gave up.
Mara stood in the doorway and understood that she had a great deal to learn about this pilot.
Sera reached out and tapped the fuel gauge on the console, once, and watched the needle. It had moved. Not much. A hair’s width past where it had been at the grid. The ring’s shadow had cost them; holding the ship still between sweeps had cost them.
“Don’t spend the way back on a bluff,” Sera said, half to herself.
She looked at the needle a moment longer. Then she reached under the console, came up with something, and tossed it over her shoulder without looking. Mara caught it. A valve key: a short steel bar with a square socket at one end, worn bright, the kind every ship carried for opening manual valves when the powered ones failed.
“Every manual valve on this ship,” Sera said. “You learn them all. Their names, what they do, how many turns. Then we talk about Lorn.”