Salvage Across the Sundering Dark

Drill Day

The last anchor screw caught on its third try, and the whole tug shuddered along its thirty-four meters. Joss felt it through the soles of her boots before Dov's voice came over the bridge loop.

"Four of four seated. Tension's even on all of them. Merrow's not going anywhere, and neither are we."

"Larkspur?"

"Hanging off the towline like a sack of wet laundry. Sixty tonnes of dead ship, turning about once every eleven minutes. Leave it. It'll settle."

Joss pulled herself to the forward port and looked out. Merrow filled half the view, a black, lumpy nucleus with the dull gloss of old tar where the sun caught it. Nothing about it looked like ice. Dust and frost had cooked into a crust over longer than anyone had been counting. Past the terminator, thin and bright against the stars, the coma haze fanned out from the far side, where the active jet lived. She could not see the jet itself from here. She had made sure of that when she picked the anchorage.

Beyond the haze, a few kilometers off, the cutter Gannet held station with her running lights steady. Orsolya Pike had been polite on the approach. She had been polite when she asked for the tug's drilling plan, too, and the politeness had felt like a hand laid flat on a table.

"Message to the yard went out forty minutes ago," Dov said. "Anchoring report, Larkspur's attitude, the lot. They'll get it in another ten. We'll hear back in an hour and forty, if anyone there is awake and feels chatty."

"Nobody there can tell us anything we don't know."

"Never stopped them trying."

She left him to his gauges and went aft, hand over hand along the spine rail, down through the ring corridor to the lab. The air smelled of cold metal and the lemon wipes Tamsin used on everything. The lab was a narrow compartment, racks on both sides, a sample collar bolted to the forward bulkhead where the drill's feed sleeve came through from the dorsal arm. Tamsin floated in front of it with a titanium cylinder braced against her hip, turning it slowly under the work light.

"You're checking it again," Joss said.

"I machined the seat myself. If the gasket crimp is off by a hair, I want to find out before there's a core in it." Tamsin ran a thumb along the lip. The canister was a little longer than her forearm, dull gray, with a fine spiral of tool marks she had left on purpose, because she liked to see the work. "It's clean. It holds vacuum on the bench, it holds pressure on the bench. Nobody's tested it against four hundred grams of something that wants to outgas."

"Then today's the test."

"Today's the first test." Tamsin slotted the canister into the collar. It seated with a quiet click that Joss felt in her fingers more than heard. The cylinder sat open-mouthed, facing the feed sleeve, waiting. "I've got the rig warmed and the arm braced against the anchors. Surface scan says the crust here is dense, probably two to three meters before the rig's stroke runs out. We'll get the upper layers. Dust mantle, the first annealed band, maybe a trace of the next one down."

"Maybe."

Tamsin glanced up. She was twenty-nine and looked younger, with a habit of tucking her hair behind one ear and then forgetting it had come loose again. "You've got a look."

"I'm thinking."

"You're thinking something I won't like."

Joss hooked a foot under a rack bar and let herself settle. She had practiced how to say it and none of the versions had come out right. "Merrow's layered. You've said so since the survey data came in. Every pass of the sun laid down a skin, and every skin is a year the comet remembers. Nobody has ever pulled a clean section through all of it. Not on a comet this active, not with the jet carving it open."

"I know what the jet does." Tamsin's voice had gone careful. "It's why the vent wall is the only place the whole stack is exposed. Thin crust. Six meters, maybe less, and you're through every layer to the old ice."

"Full depth."

"Full depth. And right beside a vent that throws gas and grit at a few hundred meters a second." Tamsin let the canister collar go and turned to face her fully. "Joss. We are not drilling at the vent."

"Not today."

"Not at all. I'd call that a proof-of-concept core, today's. Shallow, good enough for a paper and a footnote."

"It isn't good enough for the prize."

The word sat in the compartment. Tamsin looked at the open canister, then back. "The authority bounty. The one for the first continuous section through an active comet."

"Eleven months of dock fees, the lien on the Kestrel, and a stake in the next survey contract. And your name on the first record of what Merrow is made of, all the way down. Not a footnote." Joss kept her voice flat. "I'm not asking you to take it. I'm telling you why I picked this comet and why I'm still thinking about the vent."

"You told me you picked it because the Larkspur was parked next to it."

"That was true too."

The intercom clicked. Dov's voice came through the lab speaker, slow and patient, the way he talked to engines. "I'm not listening, but the bridge loop's open and I've got ears. Can I say something unwelcome?"

"You will anyway," Joss said.

"Nine days to the capture window at Tern Yard. Not nine and a bit. Nine. The burn to shed our approach is a hundred and forty meters a second with sixty tonnes behind us, and I've done that sum a dozen ways and none of them leave me spare. Air for five of us is twelve days if nobody gets ambitious. The vent's on the far side of the nucleus. A chord past it is a long swing, a hard bend, and a lot of propellant we haven't got."

"I haven't asked for the chord."

"You've got the voice of someone who's about to." A pause, and the faint creak of Dov shifting in his harness. "Not saying no. Saying it's got a price, and I'd like to see it written down before anyone signs."

Tamsin stared at the speaker, then at Joss. Her mouth worked on something and gave it up. "Start the shallow core first," she said at last. "Let me see what's under the crust. If it's mostly dust and fines, none of this matters."

"And if it isn't?"

"Then we'll talk again. Not now."

It was more than Joss had expected and less than she had hoped, and she nodded as if it were the whole of what she needed. She pulled herself to the console beside the collar and brought up the rig's feed, watching Tamsin settle into the harness at the sample station.

"Arm's braced," Dov reported. "Anchor tension green on all four. Drill head is warm, bit's at seven degrees below the surface frost point. Go when you like."

Tamsin laid both hands on the controls. "Descending. Two meters per minute until contact. I want to feel it before I commit."

On the external camera, the dorsal arm unfolded across the black like a patient insect, the drill rig at its tip, steel welded by yard fabricators years before anyone on this tug had touched it. It reached down to the crust and hovered a hand's width above, so close the head cast a shadow no larger than a dinner plate. Joss watched the shadow tighten and wondered how many hours the weld had spent in vacuum, shrinking and swelling with every orbit, and how many more it would take.

"Contact," Tamsin said. "Spinning up. Four hundred rpm. No sound out there, but listen." She rested a palm flat on the bulkhead. "There."

Joss laid her own hand beside it. The vibration came up through the structure, a low hum that traveled through the rig and the arm and the hull, faint as a sleeping animal's breath. A pale plume of dust lifted from the bore on the camera and drifted away in a soft fan, grain by grain, nothing to stir it but its own small push. A slow ribbon of frost followed, glittering where the sun touched it.

"Torque's climbing," Dov said. "Eighteen percent. Twenty-two."

"It's the dust mantle. Should clear."

"Twenty-six. Thirty."

"Hold." Tamsin eased the feed back. The hum thinned, caught, and thickened again, and on the camera the bore wall flaked and sent a little burst of ice grains out in a clean arc. "There's a hard band. Something annealed. It's biting, but slowly."

"Thirty-five," Dov said. "I'm not keen."

"Pulse it. Back off and strike." She worked the control with her fingertips, a small, deliberate rhythm, and Joss could feel the rig answer in the bulkhead like a pulse in a wrist. Once. Twice. A third time, and the pitch of the vibration changed, deepened, found a groove.

"Through the band," Tamsin breathed. "It's cutting clean. Feed's on automatic."

Joss turned to the collar. The feed sleeve, a slim cold tube lagged in silver, had begun to glow faintly with the sensor ring around its throat. Inside, something was moving, a pale shaft of ice pressed up by the bit's advance and sliding through the sleeve toward the lab. It reached the lip of the collar, crossed the gap, and slipped into the waiting titanium mouth with a soft shushing contact. The first core of Merrow slid into the canister.

The Fast Chord

The Gannet's docking collar met the tug's forward ring, and Joss felt the contact in her boots before the board confirmed it. Latches closed in sequence along the hull, a ripple of small knocks running aft. Dov watched the pressure readout creep up on the lock and said nothing, which on Dov was an opinion.

Orsolya Pike came through the hatch with a slate under one arm and her helmet clipped at her hip. She was lean and gray at the temples, and she looked at the cramped galley as if she were already counting what was missing from it. She nodded once to Joss, once to Dov, and gave Tamsin a longer look, as if she'd noticed the frost still melting off the lab's sleeve.

"Day three," Orsolya said. "I've read your drilling log. It's tidy work."

"Thank you."

"I'm not here to compliment it." She set the slate on the galley table and woke it. "I'm here because the capture window at Tern Yard closes on day nine. Six days from now. That's the ring's schedule, not mine, and it doesn't bend for a tug with sixty tonnes of hulk on a cable."

Joss poured herself a bulb of tea and didn't offer one. "I know the window."

"You know the date. Look at the margin." Orsolya turned the slate. A curve climbed across it, and a line cut the curve, and between them was a sliver of pale color. "The capture burn is a hundred and forty meters per second, with Larkspur on the hook. Your tanks cover it with very little to spare. Every day you sit on this rock, you give up phasing, and the burn gets more expensive. At some point the cost isn't glory, it's the ring. You miss it, and you drift past Tern Yard with a dead ship and a live crew."

"Twelve days of air," Dov said, from the corner. "We're not drifting past anything."

"Twelve days if nothing leaks, nothing breaks, and nobody gets sick." Orsolya didn't raise her voice. "I'm inspecting a salvage claim, Mr. Halloran, not auditing your optimism. You've got a shallow core. Tamsin's proof band is real, and the authority will accept it. Pull the anchors tonight, take the long skim around the coma edge, and you make the window with a day in hand."

Tamsin shifted against the lab hatch. "A proof core proves the ice is old. It doesn't show the layering underneath. Nobody has ever pulled a full-depth section from a comet this size. If we leave with the shallow core, the survey stays a rumor."

"I understand that." Orsolya met her eyes. "I do. I'd like to see it too. But I read the numbers for a living, and the numbers say go."

Joss had expected the argument, and she'd expected it to be fair, which was harder to push against. She slid the slate aside and brought up her own chart on the galley wall. The comet turned slowly across it, a dark knuckle with the anchorage marked on the quiet flank, and across the terminator a thin white thread that was Merrow's active jet.

"Your skim," she said, and traced it. The line swung out wide, far above the coma's brightest haze, looping back only when the departure vector lined up. "Long way round. It's safe because it's empty. It also burns more than it looks, because we have to haul sixty tonnes out and around, and then bend back in."

"It's a known quantity."

"So's this." She drew another line, short and low, a flat curve that ran down the lee side of the comet and past the vent wall. "The chord. We lift off the anchorage, drop through the shadow, and pass the wall beside the jet. That's where the full section is exposed, the only place on Merrow where the crust has been cut open to depth. We hold station at the wall for the core, then fall away on the departure line. It's shorter than your skim by a day and a half and it saves propellant."

Orsolya looked at the thread of white for a long moment. "That's a gun barrel."

"That's what Dov said."

"Dov's correct." Orsolya touched the slate and brought up a second record, the jet's own trace, three days of it scrolling in jagged peaks. "I pulled this from the Gannet's sensors. Your quiet interval assumes the jet keeps its cadence. It skipped a pulse yesterday. Then it came back harder. I can't tell you why, and neither can you."

"It skipped once in three days."

"Once is enough to break a model."

Dov unfolded himself from the corner. He was a heavy man who moved as if every joint had been priced and found worth keeping, and he stopped beside the galley table with one thick finger on the chart where the chord met the wall. "Joss. Look at me, not the line."

She looked.

"I've been inside that dorsal mount for two days. The weld's good. It's yard work, it's honest. It's also years old, and it's been fighting thermal cycling the whole time, and I haven't seen it take a side load." He tapped the wall. "A plume hits a rig on an extended arm, that's a side load. You'll want it folded, and then you can't drill. You'll want it out, and then you're a sail."

"The jet's gas and dust. Thin as breath at that range."

"Thin gas at that speed, with grit in it, will take paint off a hull." He paused. "I'm not saying don't. I'm saying write down what it costs before we choose. Propellant. Margin. What happens if the mount goes."

"You've said that since day one."

"Because the lien doesn't care how we got the bounty. It only cares whether we got it."

That was the sore spot, and everyone in the galley knew it. The Kestrel Wake carried a debt older than most of the crew's careers, and the salvage prize for a full-depth core would clear it, every last line. Joss had signed that lien herself, standing in a yard office that smelled of cold coffee, and she'd promised the tug would be hers someday.

"Do the figures," she said.

Dov pulled his own slate and worked for two minutes while nobody spoke. Tamsin drifted to the lab hatch and back. Orsolya watched the jet trace, her jaw working once as if she were chewing something she couldn't swallow.

"Chord's cheaper than the skim by a clean margin," Dov said at last. "Call it eleven hours of thrust and a good slice of the reserve. If nothing goes wrong, we reach the departure line with the burn in hand and room to breathe." He turned the slate. "If we take a plume, I can't price it. Nobody can."

"And the skim?"

"Makes the window. Barely comfortable. No full core."

Joss nodded slowly. She could hear the hum of the galley fans, and under it the faint ticking of the Gannet's latches cooling against the ring. Fifty minutes to the yard, fifty back. She could send them the question tonight and have an answer after the tug had already made its choice. Nobody out there would decide this for her. Nobody had ever really decided anything for her.

"Orsolya. If I commit to the chord, can you stop me?"

"No." The answer came without delay. "I can log an objection, and I will. I can hold the Gannet at the anchorage and not follow. I can't hold the tug." Her expression tightened. "I'd rather not watch it. That's not a threat."

"I didn't take it as one."

"Then take this." Orsolya pressed her thumb to the slate and sent a file across to the galley wall. "My trace of the jet, every pulse. Run your window against it before you go. If the next quiet interval doesn't open when you need it, abort."

Joss accepted the file, and it sat on the wall beside her chart, jagged and honest. She read the intervals twice. The jet was irregular, and she knew it. She also knew the next quiet gap fell inside the window she needed, with room to spare if she left now, and with none if she waited a day for Dov's doubts to cool.

She turned to Tamsin. "Canister."

Tamsin pulled the lab hatch wide. The titanium cylinder sat in its collar, frost-rimed along the seam, half filled with the shallow core, a pale length of ice and dark grit stacked against the gasket. "Proof core's sealed and crimped," she said. "Half the volume's empty. I can take two meters of deep section without swapping anything. Joss, I can have the rig cold and folded for the move in ten minutes."

"Do it."

"Joss," Dov said.

"I heard you." She faced him squarely. "I heard every number. I'm taking the chord."

He held her eyes for a moment, then nodded once, the way a man closes a ledger. "Then I fly the mount. If it flexes, I tell you, and you listen."

"If it flexes, I listen."

Orsolya gathered her slate. At the hatch she stopped, one hand on the frame. "The Gannet will hold at a distance. I'll watch the jet from outside, and I'll call a plume if I see it, and you'll have eleven seconds at most. I hope you never need them."

"So do I."

The inspector went back through the lock, and the latches released in reverse along the hull, each knock a little fainter. On the exterior camera the Gannet backed off the ring on small puffs of gas, sliding away along the dark until it was a spark against the stars.

Joss went forward and strapped in. Tamsin's voice came over the loop, calling the dorsal arm to its folded cradle, the drill head tucked against the spine. Dov called the anchors, one line, two, three, each one reeling in and going slack. The tug floated free of Merrow for the first time in two days, and sixty tonnes of Larkspur drifted at the end of its cable, patient and hard to move.

She laid her hand on the thruster ring. On the forward display the vent wall waited beyond the terminator, a pale scar in the dark, and beside it the jet stood like a thread of white wire.

"Commit," she said.

Her palm came down. Through the deck the thrusters fired, a low shudder climbing the frame and into her spine, and the Kestrel Wake began to fall toward the wall with the dead ship dragging behind.

Plume Strike

"One point six meters," Tamsin said over the loop. Her voice was flat and careful, the voice she used when something was going right and she didn't trust it. "Barrel's turning clean. Two more and I'm into the full section."

Joss kept her eyes on the forward display. The Kestrel Wake lay against the vent wall with two harpoon anchors set in the rim, and the dorsal arm stood out from the spine with the drill bit seated in the face. Sixty tonnes of Larkspur hung off the stern at the end of its cable, tucked in the rim's shadow. Beside the wall the jet stood as a bright thread, thinner than yesterday and quiet. On the status board the lag to the yard read fifty minutes and falling, the ring swinging nearer along its orbit. Nobody there could tell her anything she needed in the next hour.

Nikolai's suit lamp glowed at the arm's elbow. He had gone out forty minutes earlier to free a latch on the spare barrel rack, because the arm's own gripper couldn't do it and the barrel was due in the next change. He was clipped to the rail by his short line.

"Nikolai, how's the latch?"

"Stubborn," he said. "Another minute. Joss, your jet's quiet. Stop looking at it."

"It's the one thing out here I'm allowed to look at."

"Kestrel, Gannet." Orsolya's voice came in clipped and fast. "Plume. Base is swelling, it's coming off the wall. Eleven seconds."

Joss was already speaking. "Nikolai, in, now. Tamsin, retract the arm."

"Bit's seated," Tamsin said. "It's holding. I can't pull it clean."

"Then pull it dirty."

The lamp at the elbow swung toward the lock. Eight meters of spine, a man in a bulky suit, and a short line to unclip. Joss counted. Nine. The jet on the display had swollen from a thread to a bright wall, and the grit ahead of the gas glittered in the sunlight like thrown salt. Eight. Tamsin ran the arm's winch in reverse, and the drill bit gripped the ice and held the whole arm out in the open. Six. Nikolai's lamp reached the lock hatch. His glove found the frame.

She could have fired the thrusters and torn the tug off the wall, anchors and all. She thought of Larkspur's cable snapping taut across the rim and of the harpoon lines parting, and she kept her hand off the ring. Three. Two.

The plume hit. There was no sound outside, only the hull taking it. A hard ticking ran through the frame, then a rising drum as grains the size of sand struck the dorsal plates in their thousands. Under it came one deeper blow, a single shock that she felt in her teeth. On the display the arm bent. The weld at the mount, laid years ago in some yard by someone she would never meet, opened along its length in a bright line of gas and chips. The arm folded sideways against the bit still pinned in the wall and whipped back across the spine.

Nikolai's lamp went out of the frame.

"Nikolai!" Dov's voice, from the engine bay, already moving. "Joss, he's off the rail. His line parted."

"Tamsin, cut the bit loose. Now."

"Cutting." A pause, a pyro thump through the deck. "Bit's free. Barrel stayed in the hole, Joss, I've got a stub only."

"Keep what you've got."

The grit thinned and the drumming slackened into scattered knocks. Joss counted a further ninety seconds that took far longer than ninety seconds, until the jet on the display fell back to a thread. Then she cut the anchors and fired the thrusters in short, hard bursts, backing the Kestrel Wake off the wall with Larkspur sliding out behind her. The exterior camera found Nikolai tumbling slowly past the aft plates, one arm held wrong against his chest. His short line trailed from his belt, severed three meters from its clip.

Dov went out on a tether and caught him by the harness. It took eleven minutes to bring him through the lock. Joss held the tug steady through all of them and said nothing, because anything she said would have been for her own sake.

When she reached the medical bay he was strapped to the table with his helmet off, grey around the mouth. Tamsin was cutting the suit's sleeve back with trauma shears, her jaw set hard.

"Left forearm, both bones, I think," Nikolai said. He spoke in short pieces, the way a man speaks when each breath has a price. "Ribs on that side. Three, maybe four. I can feel them move."

"Don't talk," Tamsin said.

"I'm the medic. Somebody should." He turned his head and found Joss in the hatch. "Hello. You held her steady."

"You came off the rail because I held her steady."

"I came off the rail because the line was old and the arm swung. Don't do that." He closed his eyes for a moment. "Tamsin, splint first, then the ribs. Strap, don't tape. Don't let me lie flat."

She and Tamsin worked while he told them where to set their hands. Joss held his shoulder steady against the table's rail. His pulse beat in the cords of his neck, quick and shallow, and each time he breathed in, the left side of his chest lagged behind the right. She knew it was the wrong shape and said nothing about it.

Dov came in with frost still melting on his suit cuffs. He did not look at Nikolai first. He looked at the aft bulkhead, where the scrubber housing ran behind a service panel, and set his palm against the panel and held it there.

"Grit went through the aft plates," he said. "Holed the housing on the number two bed. It's venting into the bay behind this wall, slow, but it's venting. The bed's soaked with it and I'll lose the whole bank if I can't get a patch on."

"How slow?"

"Slow enough to fix. Not slow enough to ignore." He pulled a slate from his thigh pocket and ran figures with his thumb. Joss watched his lips move. "Say I seal it clean and the bed recovers half. Nikolai's going to need extra oxygen, a lot of it, for as long as those ribs take to hold. Call it ten days of air. Ten, down from twelve."

"Ten," Joss said.

"Ten if I'm good and the patch holds."

She did the rest of the sum without wanting to. The chord had been meant to save a day and a half, and the strike had eaten that and more. A coma-edge skim would be the longer way home on thinner air, and the chord now meant another approach to the wall with a crippled arm. Neither road had room in it for a second mistake.

"Joss." Tamsin had come to the console beside the bay, her gloves still red to the wrist. "The trace is on the main board. The strike came with a pre-pulse nine seconds ahead of the main burst, a little spike in the gas column. Orsolya's jet skipped one pulse two days ago. If I'm reading this right, it's been storing that pulse up. The second outburst could be bigger and could come soon. I need you to look at the timing with me. If we're going to try the wall again, this is the data we'd do it on."

Joss looked at the board. The trace ran across it in one clean ridge, the best record anyone had ever taken of a comet drawing breath, and Tamsin was right that it mattered. It would decide whether the tug went back, and if it did, how much of the full section she could carry home. Somewhere in that ridge was the prize.

The sedative Tamsin had given had not yet reached him. Nikolai's hand lay open on the strap beside his hip, the fingers twitching. His eyes were open and fixed on her.

"Go," he said. "It's good data. Go and read it."

"Tamsin can read it."

"Tamsin can read it better than you can," he agreed. A breath caught in him and he waited it out. "But you'll want to be the one who decides. I know you."

"Then I'll decide when I've had it explained to me." She took the stool at the head of the table and strapped her foot under the rail. "Tamsin, run it twice, flag the pre-pulse, and read me the number when you've got it. I'm staying."

Tamsin looked at her for a moment. Then she nodded and turned back to the board. Joss slid her hand under his good one, and his fingers closed around hers with more strength than she had expected.

"You'll hate this later," he said.

"Probably."

"Send the yard a note. They'll want it before they see it on a chart."

"Already queued. Thirty minutes out, thirty back." She kept her voice level. "They'll tell me what I already know, an hour from now."

Tamsin left the console for a minute. Joss heard the lab hatch and the clank of the canister collar, and when she came back she had her gloves off and the canister in both hands, rimed along the seam. "The stub's in," she said quietly. "Shallow core and the first of the deep section, up to the lip. It's full. It's proof, Joss. It isn't the full depth." She set it in the bay's rack with great care. Then she went back to the board, and her shoulders were rigid.

Behind the service panel Dov had the housing exposed. The crack ran a hand's length down the number two bed's casing, ragged at the edges, with a faint frost forming where gas escaped into the bay. He cut a patch from a sheet of composite with quick strokes and ran a bead of sealant along its edge from the gun.

"Hold still, you," he muttered to the casing. He pressed the patch home with both thumbs, leaned his weight against it, and began counting seconds under his breath.

Joss kept her hand in Nikolai's. His grip eased as the sedative took him, and she did not let go.

The Cut

Dov had written the numbers on a strip of tape and stuck it across the airlock rim, because he did not trust the board to keep what he told it. Joss read them upside down while she seated her helmet ring.

"One-forty for the capture burn," he said. "Shed the four tonnes, drill and mount and both spare tanks, and the tug makes one thirty-one. That's nine short."

"Nine."

"Nine is the difference between the ring and a long look at the ring going past." He tore a second strip off the roll. "And I wrote the price of the skim down before you picked it, like I said I would. It's worse than the chord by a lot. I'm not telling you to change your mind. I'm telling you what you're buying."

"I know what I'm buying."

"You know the glory part." He did not look up. "I'm doing the lien part. The bounty was the lien, Joss. Without it Kestrel Wake stays on the yard's books."

She took that without answering. Behind him Tamsin stood in the lab hatch with the canister held against her chest in both arms, the rime on its seam gone to beads of frost under the warm lights. She had not spoken since the board settled.

"Comm's live," Tamsin said at last. "Gannet's been on for ten minutes."

Orsolya Pike's voice came up in Joss's helmet already in the middle of a thought. "...so I'll say it again for the log. The window is real. Six days of slack when the strike hit. Skim the coma edge, pay for Dov's repair and the slower geometry, and you're down to two days. Two is not a margin. I told you the skim was the sound call and the arithmetic hasn't changed."

"It hasn't," Joss said. "You were right about the arithmetic."

"I'd rather not have been right about the rest of it." A short silence on the line, no more than a breath. "How is he?"

"Sedated. Arm's splinted, ribs are strapped. Nikolai says to tell you the pre-pulse data was good."

"It was." Orsolya's voice stayed flat. "I'm logging my objection to the delay, Teverell. It stays logged."

"Log it. I'd think less of you if you didn't."

The yard was thirty minutes away now, and the note Joss had sent at dawn was still crossing that gap. A reply would arrive after the cut, and nobody at Tern Yard could make it for her. She had spent most of the night with that, and it had not got lighter.

Tamsin crossed the lock floor and stood in front of her. "The vent wall is two hundred meters from the jet," she said. "One day at the face and I'd have the whole column. I could have it between pulses."

"You could have it between pulses until the jet skipped again."

"I know." Tamsin's jaw worked. "It would have been the best core anyone's drilled out here. I know that too."

"I know you do."

Tamsin held the canister out, not quite to Joss, more toward the open lock. "I can send this along with the rest. If the rest is going, it should all go."

"It's a few kilos. It doesn't change the burn."

"Then it's only for show."

"Then keep it." Joss closed her gloved hand over the titanium lid and pushed it gently back against Tamsin's chest. "It's proof, and proof still counts for something. Cycle it into the rack and watch the board for me. If the tank numbers move, tell me what they do and nothing else."

Tamsin nodded once and carried it away without a word.

The dorsal spine ran thirty-four meters from the tug's blunt nose to its drive bells, a ridge of struts and conduit under a skin of old paint. Joss clipped her tether to the rail and went hand over hand toward the arm, and Dov followed with the shear case. Merrow hung off the starboard side, a grey shoulder with the coma faint around it like breath on glass, and far to the left a thin white thread climbed from the nucleus and spread. Beyond the thread the Gannet was a speck, holding station nearer than it had been the day before.

The two spare tanks sat in a cradle ahead of the arm, dry and dead weight, strapped down with four bands. The drill rig stood above them on its steel mount, the weld seam split halfway round where the strike had hit it. The cracked edge was bright and ragged, and a few grains of ice still clung in the gap.

"Tanks first," Dov said. "They're clean. I'll shear the straps, you hold the cradle so it doesn't swing into the arm."

"Go."

The shear closed on the first band and it parted with no sound at all, only the end whipping loose and slowly curling back. Dov moved to the second. Joss braced her boots on the spine and held the cradle frame, feeling through her palms how little there was to feel. Sixty tonnes of Larkspur trailed astern on its cable. Everything this tug had been built to do was dragging that weight to a ring of steel that would close in two days short of ten days of air.

"Joss." Tamsin's voice, clipped. "Tank four. The gauge just moved."

"Moved which way?"

"Up. It's climbing. Four hundred... five hundred liters' worth, and it's not stopping."

Dov stopped the shear with the third band half cut. "That's not possible," he said. "Nothing's feeding it."

"Orsolya," Joss said.

The line stayed open for a moment, only the faint carrier hiss. Then Orsolya said, "I laid a transfer line from Gannet to your aft coupling at first light, while you were still deciding. Your Dov was asleep and your Tamsin was in the lab. I'm sorry for doing it without asking. You'd have said no, or you'd have said yes for the wrong reasons."

"You could have asked."

"I could have. Then I'd have waited for an answer while the window shrank." The voice didn't change. "I don't have your glory, Teverell, I have a ledger. Your nine meters a second is my propellant. I've sent you what Gannet can spare and still coast home on a slow arc. If the jet had skipped, I'd have cut the line, and you'd have lost nothing."

Joss looked at the white thread rising off Merrow, and at the dot that was the cutter, and at the faint hose-line she now saw curving between it and the tug's drive end, almost too thin to catch the light.

"You argued for speed for two days," she said.

"I argued for the burn. If you had picked the chord and lived, I'd have told you to fly it. You picked the skim, so the burn needs fuel, and I have fuel." A pause. "Don't thank me yet. I'll have to explain the shortfall to my own office, and they won't enjoy it."

Dov had gone very still. He pulled the sleeve of his suit back and checked the wrist display, then checked it again. "Eleven," he muttered. "Eleven meters a second, in the tank already. Another few minutes and I'd say we've got margin. Real margin, enough to breathe on." He swallowed. "I'll write it down anyway."

"Write it down," Joss said. "Orsolya, I accept. All of it. The line stays on until Dov says it's full, and I'll put the transfer in the log under your name."

"Put it under the yard's name. They'll pay it back faster."

"Under yours."

A short breath on the channel that might have been a laugh. "Then cut your drill."

Dov finished the third band. The fourth came away easily, and the cradle lifted free of its rail the moment Joss let it go, drifting upward and aft with the two dead tanks turning slowly against the stars. They would pass the cable and keep going. She watched them until they were small, then turned to the arm.

The mount groaned in her palms, though no sound reached her, only a shiver that came up through the spine. Dov set the shear on the last unbroken inch of the weld. The prize was in that rig, the core and the bounty and every sentence anyone would have written about the Kestrel Wake. She thought of Tamsin's face at the airlock. She thought of Nikolai's open hand on the strap.

"Ready," Dov said.

"Cut."

The jaws closed. The steel split along the old seam and the mount came off the spine all at once, the arm still folded against it with the drill head hanging at its tip. Joss set both boots against the rail and shoved with everything her legs had. The whole rig lifted away from the hull, slow at first and then not slow, turning over and over with the frost-white bore glinting on each turn. It crossed the tether line, cleared the cable, and kept on into the dark.

The drill tumbled away from the hull.

Yard Ring

Tamsin held the empty canister against her chest with both hands, as if it still had something in it. She had machined it the same week as the first, crimped the gasket the same way, and bolted a beacon into the cap. The titanium shell was too clean. No frost had ever touched it.

"Seal's good," she said. "I checked it three times. It holds nothing perfectly."

Joss steadied the sample lock with one palm while Tamsin set the canister in the ejector cradle. Behind them, in the rack, the real canister sat in its foam with the shallow core inside, a few hand-lengths of dark banded ice. It had cost a deep rig, a day and a half of margin, and a prize that would have carried every pilot's name in the yard ledgers for a decade. It looked smaller than it had any right to.

"Say the word," Tamsin said.

"You made it. You say it."

Tamsin thought about that. "For Merrow," she said. "For whoever comes back with a better rig and a quieter jet."

Joss pressed the release. The spring let go with a shiver in the deck plates and nothing else. Through the port the canister slid out, turning once, its beacon a small amber blink against the dark. It would drift on its own slow orbit around the sun, patient and findable, a marker where a hole in the knowledge of the system had been left open on purpose.

"Gannet has it," Orsolya said on the channel. Her voice was dry and exact, the way it had been since the first day. "I've logged its position and the beacon code. Someone will fetch it. The salvage office keeps lists of things left floating, and this one will be on the list in my handwriting."

"Thank you."

"Don't. It weighs nothing, so it saves you nothing. Fly your burn."

The bridge smelled of recycled air and the faint sourness of Scrubber Bed Two's dead half. The air meter read ten days, steady, with the yard well inside that. Nikolai was strapped into the left couch with his forearm splinted against his chest and a band of tape across his ribs. Each breath he took was shallow and planned. He had insisted on the couch.

"You look like a woman waiting for a verdict," he said.

"I'm waiting for a burn."

"Same face." He shifted, and winced, and covered the wince with a grin that did not quite work. "Joss. Stop apologizing at me with your eyes. I can feel it from here."

She settled into the pilot's couch and did not answer, because he was right. Every time she looked at his arm she saw the plume come up out of Merrow's throat, eleven seconds late in her memory though it had been on time. She had chosen the chord and he had paid for it. Nothing she flew today would change that, and no one on the bridge pretended otherwise.

"Tank pressures nominal," Dov said from the engineering panel. He read the numbers out in a low mutter, the way he always did, as though the machinery might overhear. "Feed lines warm. Cable's reeled to the short hitch, Larkspur's riding sixty tonnes behind us and doesn't look unhappy about it. Margin in the tanks is eleven meters a second over the burn, give or take what I can't see."

"Light lag to the yard?"

"Thirty minutes, one way. Fifteen when we're on final." He glanced up. "Which means nobody there can help us for the next hour."

"They never could," Joss said. She laid her hands on the controls. "Gannet, we're lighting in sixty seconds."

"I'm holding two kilometers off your port quarter," Orsolya said. "Good burning."

The engine came on gently. The stack began to move, and Joss felt the push as a slow settling into the couch, the cable drawing taut behind them, Larkspur obeying it. The hull carried a shiver through every strut, a hum she felt in her teeth rather than heard. The velocity readout began to climb. Forty meters a second. Sixty. Dov called the figures aloud.

At ninety-eight the engine stuttered.

The push fell away and came back, fell away again, and the whole stack shuddered. A red field lit on Dov's panel. "Feed pressure's dropping on the transfer tank," he said. "Gas in the line. It's the fuel Gannet gave us, it sloshed in the lines during the transfer and now it's coming through in slugs."

"Cut it," Joss said.

"Cut. Cutting." The engine died. Silence settled in, and with it the thin weightlessness that meant the stack was coasting again at ninety-eight meters a second faster than before. Behind them Larkspur's cable went slack and began to drift in a long loop.

"How long?" Nikolai asked quietly.

"Depends," Dov said. "The propellant's loose in the tanks now. Nothing's pushing it toward the outlets. I need an ullage kick, a short push from the small thrusters to settle it against the drain before I relight. Then the engine gets a clean feed." He rubbed his jaw. "It'll cost margin. Two meters a second, maybe three."

"Of eleven."

"Of eleven."

Orsolya's voice came in, flat and quick. "Your cable is slack and your window has two days in it. If you relight cold and the line gulps again, you could snap the tow. Do the ullage kick first. Run it long, not short. I would rather you spend four meters a second than gamble on two."

Joss noticed that she had not said the fast thing. She had said the careful thing, plainly, and had meant it. "Dov."

"Long kick. Four seconds, then eight. Watch my gauges." He keyed it. The small thrusters nudged the stack and Joss felt the slack cable draw up again, a soft tug through the frame. The loose propellant settled against the drains. Dov watched a pressure number crawl upward and said nothing for what felt like an hour and was forty seconds.

"Clean," he said. "Feed's clean."

"Relight."

The engine took hold and held. The push grew firm and even, and the readout climbed past a hundred, past a hundred and twenty. No one spoke. Tamsin had come up behind the couches, one hand on a rail and the other pressed to the foam case clipped at her hip. At a hundred and thirty-eight Dov said, "Two to go," and then, a long moment later, "Cut."

The engine stopped. The stack coasted. Dov let out a breath that fogged the panel glass. "A hundred forty-one. One over. We spent most of the margin, and we've got a little left."

"A little is what I asked for," Joss said.

Nikolai laughed, and it hurt him, and he laughed anyway.

The ring came up slowly over the next hours, first as a faint arc against the stars and then as a great pale circle of docking arms, running lights, and fuel racks. Tern Yard's capture ring was far wider than the tug was long. The tug was thirty-four meters from nose to nozzle. The ring could have taken ten of her end to end and still left room for the dark. Joss trimmed the approach with the small thrusters, one cautious pulse at a time, while a message from the yard crawled in at the speed of light and arrived fifteen minutes stale.

"Kestrel Wake, ring has your telemetry. Capture sequence is yours to accept. Welcome in."

Tamsin had pulled up her spectrometer trace on the small bridge screen. The jagged line crossed the display in three distinct steps. She tapped it. "Here, the hard annealed band at the top. Here, the porous layer under it, and this is the start of the deep section. The grain's different again. Three layers." Her voice had a catch in it. "It's not the full depth. It's proof that there is a depth."

"I've read it," Orsolya said from the cutter. "My office will accept layered ice on this evidence. I'll sign that myself. The prize committee will not. The prize wanted the full column, and the full column is in the dark behind you."

"I know," Joss said.

"I wanted you to hear it from someone who argued the other way." A pause on the channel. "I still think the chord would have saved a day. I'm glad I wasn't right."

The ring's arms were close now, pale structures swinging out to meet them, each tipped with a soft contact pad. Joss gave the stack one last pulse and then let it drift. The arms closed on Larkspur first, along her long dead flank, and the survey ship slowed and stilled in their grip. Then the tug's own collar slid into the ring's cradle and the stack stopped moving.

A tremor ran through the deck and ended. The proximity readout fell to zero. Joss unbuckled and pushed off from the couch, and her hand found the rail by the docking collar without her looking. Dov came up on her left, wiping his palms on his thighs. Tamsin took her right, the foam case held in both arms. Nikolai had come out of his couch as well, slow and gray-faced, his good hand on the strap above him and his splinted arm tucked in against his ribs. He floated in beside her and said nothing.

On the channel Orsolya's voice came, level and close. "Gannet is matched at the neighboring cradle. Five of us counted, Teverell. I have all five."

The latch lever was a plain steel bar on the collar bulkhead, scuffed from years of other hands. Joss closed her fingers around it. Dov laid his palm flat beside hers, Tamsin put the case against her hip and rested two fingers on the bar, and Nikolai's good hand came down over all of them. She pulled. The latch came home with a solid knock she felt through every wrist at once, and the indicator beside it went green.