Ivo Brenner had marked the damage photos in three colors. Red meant unusable, yellow unchecked, green fine. Only a single component was green: the quantum drive. He held the display to the camera so that Rina saw mostly the yellow markings.
"Could be done," he said.
Nadia Serrat pulled the display toward her and wrote under his list what it would cost: two jumps, a day's delay on the supply run to Orison, and workshop time on the hangar deck that only Ivo himself could put in. Ivo leaned back. He did not like it when Nadia completed his lists. Especially not when she was right.
We were sitting in the Goodwill's ready room, the one room on the ship where everyone met in the morning, because it was heated and because Alice made fresh tea and coffee there. Two days had passed since Jalen's operation. Alice had changed the dressing that morning and was satisfied: fingers warm, swelling going down, patient impatient. He had asked her at five whether he could get up, at six whether his ship was still there, and at seven whether anyone was flying into the belt. To the third question Alice had told him that she did not decide that. Then she had told me in the passage what she wanted out of the Kestrel if we went: anything personal from the cockpit and the bunks, things Jalen would like to have around him. A patient with his own things around him lies quieter. She had seen it at a thousand beds in Orison and had said it without any emphasis, as if she were giving a dosage.
The Kestrel was still drifting in the belt. Rina had asked us to recover the data module behind the pilot's seat: on it were the contract confirmations of the last two years and the photos of every repair Jalen had done himself. Without those records she had nothing to show the lender; she had pledged her share of the ship, the larger one, to him as security for the loan. She had obtained his consent to the salvage within two days. She had not spoken of a repair. She had only asked twice what Ivo thought of the pictures.
Ivo's Estimate
I had met Ivo in a small workshop in Lorville, under the towers of Hurston Dynamics, where the air tastes of metal. At the time he was taking apart a cooling unit whose replacement had already been billed to the owner. He found a faulty connection and insisted on a correction to the invoice. For two hours, against his own boss. Since then I had known that he stayed stubborn even when it was about decency and not just about machines.
I had promised Rina that he would look at the Kestrel without asking him first, and had only told him on the morning after the rescue. He had looked at me as if considering whether to be annoyed about it, and then only asked: "When?"
With the Kestrel, too, he was convinced there was more to save than the photos showed. A Freelancer was a tough hull, he said, MISC built them so that you could still make it home after taking a hit. He wanted to examine the ship himself before anyone wrote it off for good.
"One hour at the wreck," Nadia said. "That's how long we need for the module and the containers. What you see in that hour, you see."
"An hour isn't an examination. That's a look through the door."
"Then look carefully."
Ivo agreed, with the expression of a man who had just been forbidden a proper examination. I knew that expression from myself. Alice knew it from both of us; she looked up from her tea and smiled.
We flew in Nadia's MAX, because the Red has no room for tool containers and because Nadia would not have allowed anyone else to steer her ship into the belt anyway. Craig took the turret above the cargo hold. Myra and Alice stayed on the Goodwill; someone had to staff the emergency channel, and Alice would not leave her patient without a doctor two days after surgery. The MAX lay at the Goodwill's docking collar; she does not fit into the landing bay. As Nadia cast off I saw Myra standing behind the window of the ready room, with the headset, already talking.
Two Ships at the Wreck
I was with Ivo in the cargo hold going through the container list when Craig said over the intercom: "Contact. Other side of the Kestrel. No transponder."
Nadia did not answer. I felt the MAX change course under my feet, a long arc instead of the direct approach. When I came into the cockpit she had placed the MAX so that the wreck lay on one side and the way back stayed clear. On the scanner was a second contact: a ship, smaller than the Kestrel, close behind her. It did not answer Craig's calls.
The belt of Yela belongs to nobody. Crusader Security patrols the main routes; between the rocks the Nine Tails are at home, and whoever out there does not answer when someone calls with a call sign seldom has a good reason. I heard the weapons spin up in the turret above.
Craig had called twice, short, in the tone you learn in the Navy for contacts without a transponder: identify or turn away. I had worked on mining stations as a contract physician long enough to know how people there answer that tone: not at all. They wait to see whether anyone shoots.
"Craig," I said, and waited until he said "Here." "Weapons ready, no shot unless they fire one. Nadia, you talk. You're out here more often than the rest of us put together."
Nadia nodded without taking her hands off the controls.
Then the strange ship turned. Its engines lit up, and the nose swung slowly around toward us.
"They're turning in on us," Craig said. His voice had gone calm; with Craig, that was not a good sign.
"I'm holding distance," Nadia said. "But I'm not turning away. Whoever turns away shows them the drive."
Nadia opened the channel. She gave our registration, her name and the contract, asked no question, and then said that we came for the owners and did not want to take anything from anyone. Ivo had come into the cockpit behind me. Nobody spoke. I counted the seconds in which a shot could have been fired.
On this third call someone answered. A Drake Vulture, two people aboard, salvagers. They had found the Kestrel six hours earlier, without drive, without transponder, without answer, and had taken her for abandoned. Could we prove we were here on behalf of the owners?
We sent our registration and the contract. Rina sent the papers into the channel, and on the Vulture's feed you could see one of the two reading them. There was no exchange of fire. What there was, was a strip of starboard plating they had already stripped. They did not give it back, and we did not demand it; nobody in the belt would have helped us with that. They cleared their work area.
"Two days with nobody aboard," the man on the feed said before he closed the link. "In the belt, a ship like that counts as abandoned."
Craig took the weapons off standby. Over the intercom I heard him breathe out.
When the Vulture was out of sight, Nadia opened the channel once more and thanked the two of them for the information. Craig asked over the intercom what for.
"So the next ones answer us too," Nadia said. "In the belt, people talk about each other."
The Compartment Behind the Seat
The airlock's inner door still stood open the way Myra had spread it two days earlier. Beyond it the Kestrel had frozen. The frost on the deck crackled under our boots, and the readout in my helmet showed minus forty degrees. From outside we had seen where the Vulture had stripped the plating, and what lay beneath it: a rib, not bent but cracked. Inside, Ivo looked for the spot, lit every weld on the starboard wall and said nothing.
In the cargo hold Jalen's workstation still stood. A workbench, lashed to the wall with cargo straps, above it labeled boxes for fuses, seals, screws by size. On the wall an order list, half of it checked off, the other half waiting for a bigger delivery. Ivo stopped in front of it and read all of it.
"He knows what he's doing," he said. "He just never had the material for it."
I went through Alice's list while Ivo worked. In the bunk lay a blanket of his own, not one from ship's stores, and under it a book, a printed one, with dog-eared pages; on the wall above the head end was taped a note with frequencies in Jalen's handwriting. I took the blanket, the book and the note. It felt like clearing out the apartment of someone who had only stepped out and might come back any moment.
The cockpit door was still jammed; since the impact Jalen had not been able to get into the cockpit. Ivo set the spreader and opened it in two minutes. In the cockpit it was silent and dark; through the canopy the rocks drifted past, slowly, with every rotation of the hull. The pilot's seat was adjusted for a man smaller than Ivo. Taped to the console was a photo of Rina, younger, in front of a ship that was not the Kestrel. Ivo peeled it off carefully and handed it to me without my having asked. Then he worked his way to the seat and stayed there, silent, longer than I knew him to. One screw was missing from the data module's mount; the other was secured with a piece of wire. I would not have noticed the makeshift fastening. Ivo photographed it at once.
Rina explained over the comm that Jalen had secured the mount himself after an earlier damage. The spare part was supposed to come with the next bigger order. Ivo listened without interrupting her. Later he showed me where the wire had chafed through. In the impact the module had hammered back and forth in its mount; that it was still there was luck.
"That's not the only thing," he said quietly, once Rina was no longer listening. He pointed to the starboard wall, to the rib, to two more places where Jalen had fastened fittings with means not meant for it. Clean work, with what was there. For a workshop, every one of those places meant extra work that was in no estimate.
"My estimate," Ivo said, "assumed a ship that had been maintained with proper spare parts."
We took the module and two labeled tool containers out and carried them along the line to the MAX, together with my bag of Jalen's things. For everything else, the workbench and the boxes, we would have needed other gear. Ivo would have liked to open the wall paneling further. When Nadia announced the remaining time over the comm, ten minutes, he sent her the new pictures and ended the examination himself. I had expected to have to call him back.
On the flight to Grim HEX I saw his draft for Rina on the display. Under the old estimate he had added two sentences: "I set the effort for the provisionally repaired components too low. That is my mistake, not Jalen's." Beneath it stood his name.
Grim HEX
Nadia set the MAX down on one of the pads of Grim HEX that are cut into the rock. From outside the station is an asteroid with lights; inside, the noise starts at once. Before the ramp was even down, a man with a data slate stood at the pad and named a parking fee that was posted on no board. Nadia paid without negotiating and had the amount receipted. The man looked at the receipt as if he had not issued one in a long time.
Rina was waiting behind him, in a work jacket too big for her, and took the containers off us before anyone could ask her to. I saw her for the first time without a screen between us. She was smaller than her voice suggested, and she looked at Ivo, not at me.
Ivo delivered the bad news himself. The rib was cracked, and a cracked rib is no job for a hangar deck; that takes a shipyard, and until then the ship has to be towed. He proposed first putting together a proper parts list, asking two yards, and finding out at the same time what individual assemblies would be worth if the repair did not pay off. He promised nothing, and he laid no claim to the wreck either.
"What did they take?" Rina asked.
"Plating. Replaceable." Ivo shook his head. "The problem is the frame. It already was, before they came."
"And the drive?"
"The quantum drive is the only thing I'd leave green. Somebody will want that."
Rina nodded as if she had expected that answer and had hoped for more anyway. The lender, she said, had given her thirty days. After that he wanted to know what would become of the ship that served as security for the loan. She asked whether the module still worked. Ivo handed it to her in a padded sleeve. She plugged it into her mobiGlas right there on the pad and waited until the link came up. Then she breathed out, for the first time since I had known her.
I gave her the photo from the console. She looked at it for a long time and handed it back. "That hangs with him," she said. "Not with me." Then she asked whether she could come along to the Goodwill. Nadia had already cleared the seat behind the pilot's seat for her before Rina had finished asking.
What We Bring Back
On the approach to the Goodwill I saw behind her the silhouette of the Dauntless: the Idris we had bought second-hand half a year earlier and had not moved once since the transfer. Two hundred forty meters of ship, dark except for the position lights. Rina saw her too and asked whether that one was ours as well. Nadia said: "She's ours. We just can't crew her yet." It was the most accurate description I had heard so far.
Then Rina wanted to know where the name Stonehearst came from. I told her about my grandmother's house in Prime, an old stone house with the only open hearth in the whole street, and that at her place anyone who stood at the door got a seat by the fire, whether she knew them or not. Nadia looked out of the window while I did. Two years earlier I had told her a different story about the name: about a mining station where I had been the only doctor for a whole winter. Both stories are true. I just rarely tell both at once.
Alice met Rina at the airlock and walked with her to the medical module without a detour past us. I saw the siblings later through the window of the recovery room: Rina on the chair beside the bed, Jalen sitting up, the blanket from the Kestrel over his legs, the book with the dog-eared pages on the table, the photo on the wall beside the bed until it could go back to its cockpit. Alice stood in the doorway and left the two of them the room. She usually slept in the recovery room, because her cabin was not heated. As long as Jalen was there, she slept on the bench in the ready room, that night too.
In the MAX I stayed with Craig while he adjusted the seat in the turret after the flight. He showed me on the recording what I could not have seen from my place behind Nadia: Nadia had kept the MAX's nose toward the Vulture the whole time, and our drive was never in their line of fire. "Her flying protected us," he said, "not my guns."
"On the first two calls I was too sharp," he said then. "That's how you call in the Navy. In the belt you don't talk like that to anyone you don't know. Good that you gave Nadia the channel."
Then we went through how people speak in the cockpit and in the turret in moments like that: the name first, then wait until the other answers, then the instruction, and never two people on one channel at once. He wanted to go through it with everyone the next morning, as a fixed rule for every flight. At six. I had the impression he had chosen the time deliberately.
