Sera did not believe in locked doors. She believed in doors that had not been opened yet.
She said so, more or less, when Mara asked what she was doing. She was standing at the gate bay’s wall beside the ring with a piece of chalk from Mara’s apron, drawing. She had already checked the Tern’s fuel again, through the readout on her suit, and read the figure aloud, and Mara had written it down. She had already gone to the dock release, a heavy lever set into the wall beside the ring, under a guard, which on an ordinary dock would release the clamps by hand if the powered release failed. She had lifted the guard and pulled the lever three times. Each time it had gone down with a long iron groan and come back up, and nothing had happened. Each time she had counted the seconds it took. Each time she had written the number on the wall in chalk.
1: 4 s. 2: 4 s. 3: 4 s.
“It moves,” she said. “The lever’s not seized. It’s connected to something. It’s just not connected to the clamps anymore.” She tapped the chalk against her chin. “Or it is, and something’s holding the clamps against it.”
