Chapter 13: The Shard Speaks to Arak

The dust-cloud was not on any chart Farro kept, which was the point of it.

Gander had identified it during the Thornwall transit — a dispersal field of ferrous particulate left by some industrial failure two or three generations back, the kind of debris that accumulated at gravitational waypoints and was too diffuse to harvest and too dense to navigate through at speed. The Maren sat in it now at one-quarter thruster output, holding position in the brown-gray murk while Samwell and Borrus worked the hull damage from the Mordaxian engagement. On the exterior cameras the ship was invisible past thirty meters. On anyone's passive array she was a slightly unusual rock.

Farro had been awake for twenty-two hours. He had assigned himself four more.