The ship came down in the middle of the morning, out of a clear sky, on one leg.
Mara heard it before she saw it. A low roar from the south, rising, and under the roar a thin metallic shriek, the sound of something under load that should not have been. She looked up from the sorting bin. Every head in the yard came up with hers.
It was a freight ship, small, patched, dull grey with a faded blue stripe down its flank where some long-ago owner had painted it. It came in over the dormitory roofs low and slow and slightly crooked, nose high, engines straining, and it was obvious from the angle that the pilot was holding it level by force. Three landing claws hung beneath it. One was folded wrong, half extended, locked at an angle that made Mara’s teeth ache. The other two were down and straight.
It landed on the forward claw and the rear hull at once, on the cleared lot beside the yard where the wagons turned, and the whole frame rang like a struck pan.
The sound went through the ground and up Mara’s legs. The graft woke and gave her a long jangling chord, every part of the ship shouting at once, and she put her hand to her ear without meaning to. Dust rose in a sheet. The engines whined down. The ship rocked once on its one good leg, settled, and was still.
“Founders,” said Arlo, softly, from the next bin.
The side hatch opened. A woman climbed out. She was tall and lean, in a flight jacket with dark patches on the shoulders where insignia had been picked off, and she had a coil of rescue line wrapped around her left wrist, three turns, its end tucked under the coil. She jumped the last meter to the ground, landed easily, and walked straight to the folded claw on the near side of the hull.
She looked at it. Then she kicked it, hard, with the side of her boot.
“Whoever built this,” she said to the claw, in a clear carrying voice, “hated couplings.”
Mara put down the plate she was holding and walked across the lot.
Up close the claw was worse than it looked. It was a heavy telescoping leg, three sections nested inside each other, with a hydraulic ram along one side and a broad pad at the foot. The upper section joined the hull at a cast knuckle. Somebody had welded a plate across that knuckle, a long time ago, to stop it flexing, and the plate had done its job: the knuckle no longer flexed. Instead, the strain had gone down into the leg and found the weakest place it could, which was the joint between the upper and middle sections, and it had bent that joint sideways until it locked.
The woman turned at Mara’s step.
“You work here?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I need a brace on this leg. Rigid. Steel. From the knuckle to the second section, so it can’t do that again.” She pointed at the locked joint. “I can pay for it.” She paused. “I can pay for some of it.”
Mara crouched beside the leg. She took a moment to answer. She laid her palm on the upper section, then on the welded plate across the knuckle, then on the bent joint below. The metal was warm from the landing. Under her palm, through skin and bone, the graft gave her the leg’s whole complaint: a dull grinding ache in the bent joint, a high thin strain in the plate, and, running between them, a line of tension like a wire drawn tight.
“Rigid,” the woman said again. “I pay for rigid.”
“Rigid breaks at the joint you can’t see,” Mara said.
The woman looked at her. Her eyes were grey, narrowed against the light. “Explain.”
Mara took the chalk from her apron. She drew on the leg, quickly, a line that started at the welded plate on the knuckle and ran down the upper section and bent at the locked joint and ran on toward the pad.
“This is where the load goes,” she said. “When you land, the leg wants to give a little. Here, at the knuckle. That’s what the knuckle is for. Somebody welded it stiff, so the give has nowhere to go, and it travels down the leg until it finds something weaker. It found this joint.” She tapped the bend. “If I put a rigid brace from the knuckle to the second section, the give still has nowhere to go. It’ll travel further. Past the brace. Down here.” She drew a small circle on the lower section, below where any brace would reach, at a seam in the casting that looked perfectly sound. “That’ll go next. You won’t see it until it goes.”
The woman bent and looked at the circle. “That looks fine.”
“It’s fine now.”
“How do you know it’ll go there?”
Mara hesitated. She could not say I can hear it. She could say the other true thing.
“Because that’s where the next weakest seam is,” she said. “The cast seam. It’s thinner than the rest. Anyone can see it if they look. Nobody looks, because the leg looks fine.”
The woman straightened. She studied the chalk line, then the circle, then Mara.
“So what do you want to do?”
“Cut the plate off the knuckle. Put the knuckle back to flexing. Straighten the joint you bent and fit a flexible coupling there, a pliant seam, so if it has to give again it gives where you can see it and it comes back.” Mara stood. “The leg will move when you land. That’s the point.”
“That’s a bargain I didn’t ask for,” the woman said.
“It costs about the same.”
“It costs more. Flexible couplings always cost more.”
“It costs less than a leg.”
The woman studied her. Then something shifted at the corner of her mouth, not a smile, more like the place a smile would go if she allowed one.
“Sera Dain,” she said. She did not offer her hand. Her hands were busy, one on the hull and one on the line at her wrist.
“Mara Venn.”
At the bench across the yard Tavin had stopped working and was watching. He kept his distance. When Mara went back for tools, he handed her two hardened pins out of the tray without a word, the right size for the coupling, and the long cutting bar, and then, as she turned away, he said, “Count the bolts before you torque them.”
“I always count the bolts.”
“Count them anyway.”
She worked through the middle of the day. She cut the old plate off the knuckle with the bar, a slow job, the plate thick and stubborn, and when it came free the knuckle groaned and shifted and settled a finger’s width lower, as though it had been braced against that for years. She jacked the leg and heated the bent joint with the torch, slow, even, until the steel glowed dull red, and then she drew it straight with a long lever and a block, a little at a time, letting it cool between pulls. She fitted the coupling. She counted the bolts. Twelve. She counted them again.
Sera stayed. She sat on a crate in the shade of her own hull with her back against a landing pad and watched, and when Mara needed a second pair of hands to steady the lever she was there without being asked, with the rescue line still around her wrist. She said little. When she did, it was to the ship.
“Hold still, you ungrateful scow,” she said once, when the hull shifted on its jacks.
Between passes she looked at the sky. Mara noticed it the third time. Sera’s eyes went up over the fence, toward the south and east, and tracked something Mara could not see, and then came back down. She did it again a few minutes later.
“Patrol lanes,” Sera said, when she saw Mara noticing. “The Directorate runs a sweep over the Low Brace every forty minutes. I like to know when it’s coming.”
“Why?”
Sera let that pass. She said, “I can’t sit in an inspection queue for a week. A ship sitting on one leg in a scrapyard is the kind of thing that gets an inspector’s attention.” She looked at the coupling. “How long?”
“The coupling’s in. I want to load-test it before you fly.”
“How?”
“Jack the hull off the pad and let it down on the leg. Then lift it and let it down again. Ten times, at full weight. If the coupling flexes and comes back every time, it’s good.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“Then it’s not good, and I’ll find out why.”
Sera stood up and came over and looked at the coupling for a while, at the new pliant seam where the upper section met the middle, at the knuckle that could move again. She put her hand on the leg the way Mara had, palm down, and Mara watched her face and saw her feel nothing at all.
“What do I owe you?” Sera said.
“I’ll tell you when it holds under load.”
Sera turned and looked at her properly for the first time, an assessing look, as if Mara were a part of uncertain origin.
“A smith who waits to charge until it holds,” she said slowly. “That’s either very honest or very stupid.”
“It’s practical. If it doesn’t hold, you won’t pay.”
“I wasn’t going to pay anyway, if it didn’t hold.” Sera’s mouth did the thing again at the corner. “Dusk, then. Load test at dusk, when the patrol’s gone home.”
“Dusk,” Mara agreed.
Sera went back to her crate in the shade. She sat with her back to the hull and her eyes on the sky, the line wound around her wrist, and she waited. Mara went back to the bench to clean the torch. Behind her the ship stood on its one good leg and its one new one, and as the afternoon light slanted across the lot she could not help glancing back at it, wondering whether the pilot’s patience would outlast the coupling’s first real load, or whether she would be gone by morning with a leg Mara had promised and not yet proved.