Geth Marr planted his thick thumbs onto the parchment, leaning his entire six-foot-two frame over the table until his bearded face was twelve inches from Len Vey’s. The smell of blasting powder, stale pipe smoke, and cold limestone dust drifted from his clothes like the air from an old mine drift.
“I told you on the platform, and I tell you again with fifty witnesses listening,” Geth said, his voice rolling like thunder through the timber rafters. “The limestone beneath the second bench has four level joint-planes running parallel to the fault. If the heat shaking from the steam discharge sets up a ringing wave, the rock will shear like shale. I want the stop condition written in ink that can’t be scraped out with a clerk’s knife.”
Len didn’t argue. He turned his head to Ivara Quill. “Write it, land-mapper.”
Ivara took the iron dip-pen in her sound right hand. She didn’t need to consult a manual. Her thirty years of transit counts and deep-rock mapping were etched into her memory like lines on a copper plate. With her single hand, supported by the crutch under her left shoulder, she drew a crisp, double-ruled box beneath Article Three and wrote in her sharp, sharp-angled draftsman’s script:
