The technical meeting began at the third hour, in the guild hall, among the bedrolls.
The shelter was still running. The guild had cleared the far end of the hall, by the long table, and hung a curtain of blankets on a rope across the floor so the people sleeping on the near side would not be woken. But the curtain did not reach the roof, and the stoves still burned, and through the gap at the top Mara could hear the shelter breathing: a low murmur of voices, a child coughing, someone snoring by the door.
On the far side of the curtain, the long table had been pulled out from the wall again and set with chairs.
The guild leaders sat along one side. Five of them, in their grey coats, the spokesperson who had withdrawn support among them. Halvek at the table’s end, with a Directorate clerk beside him. On the wall above the table, the guild’s old projection screen had been unrolled, and on it, by remote link through Meridian’s relay, the Compact panel: three figures at a long desk, grey, small, flickering when the relay dropped a packet. Caldris in the center. An engineer on her left, a woman with close-cropped hair and a slate. A clerk on her right.
