The ash gate did not look like a gate.
They came on it after six hours’ flight from the dome dock, out along the edge of Lorn’s corona, where the dim orange glow of the failing lamp thinned to a haze and the stars came through it faintly, reddened, like coins at the bottom of a muddy pond. Sera flew by the courier’s coordinates, the ones she had read off his console and carried in her head, and as they closed on the point the coordinates named, Mara pressed her face to the cockpit glass and saw nothing.
The corona had a texture this close. It was not a glow so much as a weather: slow currents of dim light moving through the haze, thickening and thinning, and every few minutes a ripple running through all of it at once as the lamp behind them breathed. When the ripple passed, the Tern’s hull ticked, and the graft gave Mara a long low groan, the whole ship flexing as the heat on its skin changed.
Then she saw it. A lump.
It hung in the haze ahead of them, turning very slowly: a rough irregular mass, dark, pitted, about the size of the Low Brace’s melt shed. It looked like slag. Like the cold grey crust of the slag pit at the back of Tavin’s yard, the waste of a furnace dumped and left, except that it was floating at the edge of a sun. Industrial waste. Spent scrap. The kind of thing you would steer a ship around without a second look.
“That’s it?” Sera said.
“That’s where he said.”
Sera eased the Tern closer. The lump turned, slowly, showing new faces, all of them the same: pitted, crusted, dull. Sera ran the ship’s scanners over it, and the console showed her what the scanners saw, and Mara read it over her shoulder. Mass: slag, mixed. Composition: iron oxides, silicates, trace metals. No power signature. No structure.
“Waste,” Sera said. “The scanners say it’s waste.”
“The scanners are supposed to say that.”
Mara asked her to bring the ship alongside. Sera did, carefully, matching the lump’s slow turn, until the Tern’s port side hung a few meters off its surface and the pitted crust slid past the cabin window at a crawl. Mara suited up in the cooling suit Sera had found for her, a rescue-service suit, patched at the elbows, too long in the leg, and went to the airlock with the strip in her gloved hand.
She was not sure what she was looking for. She looked anyway. She had spent three years sorting salvage; she knew how to look at a thing that pretended to be something else.
The lump’s crust was uneven, lumpy, random. Except along one face. There, if she looked at it a certain way, with her eyes half closed, letting the shape come to her rather than going to find it, there was a line. Straight. Too straight for slag. A seam, a little longer than a hand, running across a flat patch of crust, so fine that it might have been a crack.
She looked at it through the airlock port. She looked at the strip in her hand. Black, straight, a little longer than her hand.
Sera brought the Tern in until the airlock’s outer door was almost against the crust, and Mara cycled the lock, sealed the inner door behind her, opened the outer and leaned out, tethered by a safety line from the airlock ring clipped to her suit’s belt, and reached across the gap with the strip.
She laid it against the seam.
It fit. It fit the way water fits a channel. She laid the strip’s edge against the seam and the seam opened, very slightly, to receive it, and the strip slid in without force, the whole length of it, smoothly, until only a finger’s width of black showed above the crust.
It was cool through her glove the whole time. Cool as shade.
The lump moved, and this time it was more than its slow turn. The pitted crust around the seam began to fold back, in plates, like the petals of a flower opening in the wrong direction: the slag plates lifting and sliding over each other and retracting, revealing beneath them a smooth dark surface, metal, seamless, and in the metal a ring. A docking ring. A circle of pale grey alloy, the size of the Tern’s airlock, with a soft light coming on around its rim, one point at a time, until the whole ring was lit.
The graft woke.
A word came through it, spoken, in a voice that was not quite a voice, directly into the bone behind her ear:
Witness.
She held still in the airlock with the line taut at her waist.
“What,” Sera said over the link from the cabin. “What is it? What’s happening? Your face just went white.”
“Did you hear it?”
“Hear what?”
“It said a word.” Mara kept her back to the cabin, her eyes on the ring. “It said witness.”
“I didn’t hear anything.” Sera’s voice was sharp. “The scanners don’t hear anything. Venn. Talk to me.”
Mara said the word aloud.
“Witness.”
The ring answered. At its edge, on either side of the opening, two shapes rose out of the smooth metal: handholds. Two of them, side by side, curved bars of pale alloy, the kind a person grips to pull themselves through a hatch. Two. Not one. Placed so that one person’s left hand and another person’s right hand could grip them at the same time, standing shoulder to shoulder.
Mara looked at them.
She reached out and gripped the left one. Nothing happened. The ring stayed lit. The opening stayed closed. She held the handhold and waited, and the ring waited too, and the right handhold stood empty beside her.
“It wants two bodies,” Sera said. She had come to the inner door and was looking through its port, past Mara’s shoulder, at the ring.
“It wants a witness.” Mara let go of the handhold. She pressed her gloved hand to the suit’s thigh pocket, where she had sealed notebook I before the airlock, though there was no need. She knew the first page by heart. “The first page. The witness. It’s her rule. The gate’s following her rule.” She heard her own voice and it sounded strange. “It won’t let me in alone.”
She found the thought reassuring. Something here knew the rule her mother had written on the first page of the first notebook. Something here was not going to let her walk into the heart of a dying sun without someone beside her who could pull her out. She also found it deeply inconvenient, because the person beside her was Sera, who had a school full of children waiting on a dock, and who had promised one flight and no more.
“I could go back,” Mara said. “Get Nemi, or the technician—”
“Six hours each way. No.” Sera was already pulling on her own suit, the rescue-service one with the picked-off insignia, fast, practiced, every seal checked by touch. Her eyes stayed on her seals. “If it wants a witness, it’s got one.”
“Sera, the school—”
“The school has Nemi.” Sera sealed her collar. Mara pulled back and cycled the lock, and Sera came through the inner door, and let it seal behind her. She reached down to her belt and took the rescue line, the coil she had worn around her wrist since the day she landed in the yard, and uncoiled it, and tied one end to the ring on Mara’s suit belt with a knot Mara had never seen, quick and tight, and the other end to her own. Two meters of line between them. She tugged it, hard, once, to test it.
“Don’t say alone in here again,” she said.
They went to the ring together. Sera took the right handhold. Mara took the left.
The ring opened.
It did not swing or slide. It went soft. The pale metal inside the lit rim turned grey, then transparent, then simply was not there, and through it came a breath of air, very cold, colder than the dock at Lorn’s Reach, and it drew them in the way a draft draws a curtain. They went through the ring side by side, holding the handholds, and the cold closed around them like water, and for a moment Mara could not see.
Then they were standing on a deck. A bay. A long low room of grey metal, dimly lit, with the ring behind them, glowing.
The ring went dark. Behind them, with a deep heavy sound that Mara felt in her teeth more than heard, the outer lock sealed.
A voice spoke from the ceiling, a real one this time, out of a speaker, crackling, old, thin, the voice of a machine that had not spoken to anyone in a long time and was not sure it remembered how.
“Inspection code, please.”
Mara had none.