The ship had been drifting for eleven years when Sable finally noticed. Not noticed in the way that mattered — she had always known, the way you know your own heartbeat — but noticed in the way that required action. The engines were cold. The star charts were seventeen years out of date. And Fen was sitting in the cargo bay again, rearranging the same six crates he had rearranged every three days since the Peloran system.
"We're stopping," he said, without looking up.
Sable stood in the doorway. Her chassis was the same one she'd had since the Commission, matte grey with a dent in her left shoulder she'd never bothered to fix. It had been from a dock loading arm on Myra Station, and she had decided at some point that she preferred knowing where it came from.
"We're drifting," she said. "There's a difference."
"Not from where I'm sitting." He moved the smallest crate to the right. He moved it back. "What's out there?"
She had already checked. She had checked fourteen times in the last hour, running the numbers with slightly different parameters each time, which was as close as she could get to hoping she had made a mistake.
"Nothing we planned for," she said.