Ivara Quill stepped back from the watching embrasure and walked directly to the central math table. There, three independent pressure indicators stood mounted on an oiled oak plank.
Proof was the main law of the survey service. In the high passes of the western rim, an unchecked benchmark was a collapsed bridge. In the steam vaults of the central lens, an unchecked reading was forty thousand tons of blazing bright dark rock raining down upon sleeping families.
She drew her brass sliding measuring tongs from her leather vest pocket and laid the hardened steel tips against the main liquid silver column.
The reading was five hundred and eighty-four units.
She moved three paces to the left. There, the backup high-pressure chest muscle gauge was plumbed directly into the third-stage steam bypass. The circular brass dial, tuned in royal sea-weights of water head, showed twelve point six pounds of pressure. A drop of eighty-eight percent from the four-hundred-pound peak recorded. Just then, the first solar discharge had breached the dark rock chimney pipes at two thirty.
She crossed to the third instrument. The remote spark balance wire that ran four hundred feet down the mountain into the Quarry Ward heat sink. The balance needle, suspended on a polished sapphire jewel between two magnetic coils, rested motionless within the green limit band etched into the ivory scale.
