Iven let the stored impulse go into the starting brace.
The timber gave a short, solid knock. Nothing flew. The little reserve he had paid to hold was spent, and the gauge did not pretend he had earned it back by changing his mind.
Vela looked down the course.
A loose dog had crossed the white landing cloth and gone into the grass beyond it, pleased with a world in which everyone stopped to watch.
“Good reason,” she said.
Iven smiled and waited for the owner to lead the dog away.
The course lay on the firm upper ground outside Bracken, thirty-five meters between the prepared start and a broad, sound landing. Its runout was clear. The current work did not ask him to leap a hidden floor or trust a moving gantry because a number looked attractive on a page.
It was the morning of day fifteen hundred and fifty-nine.
