Chapter one
The Telling
The last inspection of the shift took Rin less than a minute.
She walked the length of Pod Twelve with one hand resting on the hull, the metal cool the whole way down. The docking collar sat flush against its seals and the manoeuvring nozzles were clean, and somebody off the shift before had already wiped the fine grey dust from the forward quarter, the way somebody always did.
Good.
She crouched beside the forward strut and put her palm flat on the maintenance panel.
“Shipmind.”
A chime answered.
