The Last Silver

Chapter 57: Room to Grow

The defense array required more metal than Hearth possessed.

Julius delivered that information before anyone could become too pleased with the plans.

Asha looked up from the six markers surrounding the projected planet.

“The internal assemblies are relatively small.”

“The platforms holding them are not.”

“We could reduce the outer housings.”

Enna shook her head.

“Then the maintenance crews will be working inside the moving parts.”

Asha considered that.

“Some of the outer housings.”

“No.”

Dinraal sat beside Isolde at the council table, watching the list of required materials lengthen.

Metal.

Cooling systems.

Power storage.

Replacement bearings.

Enough spare parts that a single failure would not send everyone scrambling through the workshops.

“How much can the orbital ships manufacture?” he asked.

Julius brought up another page.

“Enough, if we provide raw material.”

Arcturus pointed toward the system’s broad asteroid belt.

“We surveyed suitable deposits when we arrived.”

“We don’t have a mining station,” Mara said.

Gilgamesh leaned forward.

“We do have people who can move asteroids.”

The room went quiet.

Cleopatra looked at him.

“Small ones.”

He spread his hands.

“I was going to say that.”

“No, you weren’t.”

Dinraal studied the belt.

For once, Gilgamesh’s suggestion seemed entirely reasonable.

“We bring material to the workshops,” he said. “Under the survey team’s direction.”

“And away from inhabited orbits,” Arcturus added.

“Very much away,” Eve said.

Gilgamesh sat back, pleased.

Finally, a problem involving something large that needed moving.

They departed for the belt three days later.

Two industrial vessels accompanied them, along with a tug whose captain insisted on explaining orbital mechanics to everyone before allowing any asteroid to be touched.

Dinraal listened carefully.

Gilgamesh listened with the strained patience of a man being told that lifting a stone could become a mathematical problem.

The selected body was an irregular mass of dark rock and exposed metal.

It turned slowly against the stars.

A mining drone had already bored several narrow shafts through its surface.

“Fracture along the marked seams,” the captain instructed. “We want manageable sections. Nothing accelerated toward the inner system.”

Gilgamesh looked toward Dinraal.

“Everyone keeps saying that.”

“Perhaps they know us.”

Silver closed over Dinraal’s face.

Outside the industrial vessel, he found Isolde waiting beside a glowing survey marker.

She raised a hand toward the asteroid.

“Ready?”

He followed her gaze.

The silver offered him ways to break it.

Far too many.

He chose the narrowest.

A pale line extended from his fingertips and passed into the nearest drilled shaft.

Across the asteroid, Isolde established another.

They worked slowly.

No flash lit the system.

No enormous explosion announced their effort.

A section of metal-rich stone separated with a deep vibration Dinraal felt through his gauntlet.

The tug moved in.

Its captain examined the result.

“Acceptable.”

Gilgamesh’s voice entered the channel.

“Such warmth.”

Dinraal smiled inside his helmet.

Then they began the next cut.

By the end of the second shift, the industrial holds were full.

Dinraal floated beside Isolde while the last section was secured.

Their ships glowed against the dark.

Farther away, the asteroid remained mostly intact.

He found himself pleased by that.

They had taken what they needed.

There would be more later.

Isolde touched his arm.

“Look.”

She pointed toward the industrial vessel’s broad rear window.

Workers had gathered there.

One lifted a hand.

Dinraal waved back.

Then he noticed the little sign pressed against the glass.

THANK YOU. NOW PLEASE COME INSIDE AND EAT.

He recognized Rhiannon’s handwriting, even from a photograph copied onto someone’s tablet.

“She planned ahead,” he said.

“She usually does.”

The metal changed Hearth’s schedule.

Fabrication continued aboard the industrial ships, where the heavy machinery already existed. Finished components descended by shuttle or traveled directly to the orbital construction teams.

Halen stopped being asked to surrender every useful bracket in town.

Meret finally received the housings for the water pumps she had been promised.

The council approved a larger repair workshop.

Then Beren appeared outside Dinraal’s quarters with a folded plan.

Dinraal looked at it.

“What’s this?”

“A house.”

“I can see that.”

“Then we’re making progress.”

Isolde joined them at the door.

Beren held the plan out to her instead.

She accepted it.

Two bedrooms.

A kitchen.

A room large enough to hold more than two chairs.

Windows looking toward the river.

Behind the house, a small enclosed garden.

Isolde looked up.

“Who asked you to draw this?”

“Halen drew most of it. I corrected the foolish parts.”

“That doesn’t answer her question,” Dinraal said.

Beren scratched his chin.

“Your quarters were intended for a survey crew staying six weeks. We’re beginning permanent houses along the lower terrace. Yours can go in with the others.”

Dinraal looked past him.

Across the path, a family was maneuvering a storage chest through a narrow habitat door.

“We should finish the larger family units first.”

“We are.”

“And the hospital extension.”

“Different crew.”

“And—”

Isolde touched his wrist.

Dinraal stopped.

Beren looked at him with the patience of someone who had raised children.

“You can live in a house while other work happens.”

Dinraal glanced down at the plan again.

The little garden had a gate.

He had no idea why that detail caught him so firmly.

“A normal place in the schedule,” he said.

Beren nodded.

“That was the offer.”

Isolde smiled.

“We’d like that.”

The new house became a topic Rhiannon treated with alarming seriousness.

She arrived that evening with suggestions about curtains.

Tiamat came with her and immediately objected to two.

Dinraal sat at the table, watching his home become a debate.

“We haven’t even chosen the wall finish,” he said.

“That makes this the ideal time,” Rhiannon replied.

“For curtains?”

“For avoiding regrettable wall finishes.”

Isolde laughed.

Aurelius, who had come to return a borrowed book, examined the plan.

“A second bedroom?”

“A study for now,” Isolde said.

“For now,” Rhiannon repeated, too casually.

Tiamat’s eyes flickered toward her.

Dinraal looked between them.

“Oh, no.”

“We haven’t said anything,” Rhiannon replied.

“You’re preparing to.”

Isolde took the plan and folded it.

“We will discuss our spare room ourselves.”

Rhiannon raised both hands.

“Of course.”

She lasted almost a minute before asking whether the windows received morning light.

Later, after their visitors had gone, Isolde unfolded the plan again.

Dinraal stood behind her chair.

She traced a finger along the garden wall.

“I don’t want everything paved.”

“All right.”

“A little path. Space to grow things.”

He bent to look more closely.

“We should leave room for a bench.”

“A movable one.”

He kissed the top of her head.

“You’re never forgiving the chair.”

“It’s a permanent feature of our marriage.”

She leaned back against him.

For a while, they studied the rooms.

Then Dinraal touched the smaller bedroom.

“Did that bother you?”

“Rhiannon?”

“Yes.”

“A little. Mostly because she’s terrible at pretending she isn’t asking.”

He smiled.

Isolde rested her hand over his.

“I have thought about children.”

He went still.

She turned in the chair so she could see his face.

“Not a decision tonight,” she said.

“I know.”

“Have you?”

He looked down at their joined hands.

“Yes.”

The word felt unexpectedly large.

“I think about coming home and finding someone waiting with you,” he admitted. “Someone who has no idea why people stare at the silver.”

Isolde’s expression softened.

“And then?”

“Then I think about the Questioner.”

She nodded.

“So do I.”

He pulled the other chair closer and sat.

Neither tried to resolve it.

After a while, Isolde laid the plan between them.

“We can build the room.”

Dinraal brushed his thumb over her ring.

“Yes.”

That was enough for the evening.

The first two defense stations began working together eleven days after the mining expedition.

The test lasted nine minutes.

Then the fields drifted out of agreement, and both crews shut down exactly as instructed.

Asha spent the next hour explaining that this was a useful result.

Eve spent the same hour identifying why it had happened.

By supper, they had reached the same conclusion from opposite directions.

The silver responded to each operator individually.

That was part of its strength.

It also meant two people could each hold a perfectly stable reference that did not quite match the other’s.

“We need a common starting condition,” Enna said.

“We have the same measurements,” Asha replied.

“You have the same numbers. Are you certain you have the same thing?”

Asha stopped.

Dinraal, standing near the back of the workshop, felt Isolde turn toward him.

Their shared silver had found one another across failing ships and shattered fields.

He knew what she was about to suggest.

“We could establish the first reference together,” she said. “Let the others take over from it.”

Eve looked up.

“Possibly.”

Aramaeis studied the station diagram.

“A handover instead of separate starts.”

Dinraal nodded.

“And we leave it running when we step away.”

Aurelius’s mouth lifted faintly.

“That last part is important.”

They practiced the handover on the testing moon before attempting it in orbit.

Dinraal and Isolde stood on opposite sides of the portable assembly.

Silver reached into the rings.

This time, he did not try to match a number.

He found Isolde.

The familiar warmth of her presence moved through the field, precise and steady.

For a moment, he was aware of the way she breathed.

The pressure of her boots against the ground.

The small effort she made to hold one shoulder loose after a long day.

Then the assembly brightened.

Asha’s voice came through.

“Stable.”

Aurelius stepped into position.

His silver joined theirs.

Dinraal felt the field shift.

His first instinct was to correct it.

He held back.

Isolde’s voice reached him privately.

“Let him.”

Dinraal loosened his grip.

Aurelius took the weight.

Then Isolde withdrew.

The field remained.

Dinraal opened his hand.

The silver line between him and the assembly faded.

Nothing collapsed.

Aurelius looked across at him.

“Well?”

Dinraal laughed.

“Show-off.”

The third orbital trial held for a full shift.

Aurelius passed control to Cleopatra.

At the other station, Johanna relieved Tiamat.

The fields remained aligned.

The technicians checked the mechanical indicators.

The independent instruments agreed.

For the first time, a vessel crossed from one station’s stable region into the other without losing its reference.

Arcturus watched the transport complete its approach.

Then he asked for the test to be repeated in the opposite direction.

Gilgamesh made a wounded noise over the channel.

“Can we celebrate anything?”

“When it comes back,” Arcturus said.

The transport returned.

The fields held.

This time, even Eve smiled.

Hearth heard about the result before the shuttle landed.

Someone in orbital maintenance had sent a message to someone in the kitchen, and by evening the common hall had acquired an additional pot of stew and a handwritten sign announcing that the two stations had stopped disagreeing.

Asha objected to the wording.

Enna said it was accurate.

Dinraal found Mara near the entrance.

She carried a sealed packet.

“From Halden’s Reach,” she said.

He looked sharply at her.

“Before the evacuation,” she clarified. “Personal records recovered from the transport’s local storage. We’ve been sorting them.”

“Anything about the survey crews?”

“A maintenance report from the first ship.”

She handed it to him.

“The pilot reported a problem with the aft recorder. They removed it for repair before the survey.”

Dinraal opened the file.

A shipboard recorder.

Stored in Halden’s Reach’s maintenance workshop.

Left behind during the evacuation.

His chest tightened.

“It might have the earlier flights.”

“Yes.”

He read the location twice.

Then he looked at Mara.

“Who else knows?”

“Enna. She worked on the replacement connection.”

“Lysa?”

Mara shook her head.

“I wanted to understand whether it meant anything before giving her another reason to wait.”

Dinraal closed the file.

Across the hall, people were eating beneath the ridiculous sign.

Isolde caught his expression from the other side of the room.

She came over.

“What is it?”

He handed her the report.

She read it silently.

Then she looked toward the research shelter beyond the window.

“We should ask what a remote recovery would require.”

Mara released a slow breath.

“You’d consider it?”

“Yes,” Dinraal said. “Carefully.”

He would not mistake wanting an answer for having a plan.

But he could ask the people who knew how to make one.

They took the report to Asha and Eve after supper.

Enna joined them with a map of the workshop.

Arcturus attended by projection.

“The colony is inside an affected system,” he said. “We do not send a crew to retrieve a recorder.”

“Agreed,” Isolde replied.

Enna enlarged the maintenance building.

“The storage room has an exterior service hatch. A compact drone could reach the cabinet without entering the main workshop.”

“Assuming the building remains,” Eve said.

“And assuming we can get the drone there,” Asha added.

Dinraal looked at the system map.

They had escaped Halden’s Reach.

Returning even a machine felt like approaching a wound.

“What would it need to bring back?”

“The physical memory unit,” Enna said. “No connection to the colony network.”

Arcturus considered.

“A carrier remains outside the old relay corridor. Passive approach. Short recovery window. If the drone sees anything resembling the evacuation readings, it leaves.”

“And if it doesn’t leave?” Dinraal asked.

“We lose a drone,” Arcturus said. “The carrier withdraws.”

The room went quiet.

Eve pulled the maintenance report closer.

“We should first establish whether that recorder was active during the period we’re investigating.”

Enna nodded.

“I can work through the repair logs.”

Dinraal looked at Mara.

There was hope in her face now.

Careful hope.

He knew how much it could hurt.

“No promises to the families yet,” he said.

Mara nodded.

“Not until we know what we have.”

When Dinraal and Isolde returned to their quarters, there was a new mark on the house plan.

Beren had left it beneath the door.

A date.

The foundation crew’s next available opening.

Isolde picked it up and smiled.

Dinraal stood beside her.

Outside, a shuttle crossed the sky toward the arrival stations.

He could not see the fields surrounding them.

Only the steady lights of a ship following its route home.

Isolde leaned against his shoulder.

“We should choose the wall finish.”

He looked down at her.

“Before Rhiannon does?”

“Immediately.”

He laughed.

They sat at the table with the plan between them.

For the next half hour, they argued pleasantly about windows.