The first hour of the ninth day smelled of ozone, dry mountain snow. The cold, bitter-salt reek of fractured granite.
Len Vey stood beside the ammunition crate on the cooling court terrace. He watched Ivara Quill trace the final approach curve of the morning sun with a heavy brass drafting compass. The instrument’s hardened steel points scratched faintly against the yellowed rag paper of Ansett Rill’s ephemeris, describing a slow, sweeping curve that climbed from the bottom of the grid toward an inked level line marked TRUE EASTERN RIDGE CREST: +14°22’.
Above them, the castle dynamos kept their relentless, high-pitched whine. But the southern wind was growing stronger with every passing minute, whipping the canvas edges of the tool rolls and whistling through the empty iron brackets of the low roof wall derrick.
“Six hours and twelve minutes,” Len said, checking the silver turnip watch resting in the palm of his sound right hand. The hands showed five minutes past midnight. “That’s the total working hall.”
“Six hours and twelve minutes,” Ivara confirmed. She lifted the compass and setting it into its velvet-lined dark wood case with a single, deliberate movement of her right hand. “At zero six seventeen, the true sky-high solar disk will clear the notch between the twin peaks of the Sentinel Crags. At that precise fraction of a second of angle, unpolarized solar heat wave will strike the quartz prism of the Dawn Registrar on the eastern turret.”
