The clock on Len’s pocket watch crawled to two fifteen in the morning.
In the raised instrument gallery twenty feet above the pit floor, Ivara Quill stood behind a narrow watching slit of heavy salt-glass. Through the swirling clouds of white steam, her single right hand moved with calm, clockwork care across the signaling levers of the side telegraph.
She reached for the manual shutter control that linked the Star tower to the western rim of the Quarry pit four hundred yards away. With three sharp pulls of the counterweighted wire, she dropped the clockwork shutter, showing a single, solid white rectangle against the dark granite wall.
Two seconds later, through the sight telescope mounted on her brass stand, she saw the answering pulse from the quarry rim.
A single white shutter snapped open on Geth Marr’s signal tower: Quarry pre-flood confirmed. Two feet of gravity water over the salt-glass floor plates. The sump is primed.
Ivara leaned through the watching slit, her voice cutting through the roar of the water nozzles below: “Quarry is clear! The floor plates are flooded! We have fifteen minutes before the main steam cooler bypass trips!”
Down in the pit, Melli Dorn and Urel were already executing the first shift rotation.
