Sen’s crew wired the Sable transmitter into the well’s old service bus while Sen was still on the cage with the pin.
The relay was the Sable transmitter itself: the portable unit that had stayed connected at the station after the Tern pulled away, carried Ysol’s greeting to Nemi, and come home in the Tern’s hold. It was a box the size of a tea tin. Eshel had keyed it on Cinder, before the Tern left, to the old outbound line through the bridge, so that anyone carrying it could reach Ysol. Mara had carried it in the Tern’s cargo. It had three cables coming out of it and a patch of cloth tape over one corner where Eshel had dropped it on the yard floor and cracked the casing.
Breda, the cable crew woman Habitation had named, took it from Mara and found the service bus: a panel at the chamber’s edge, beside the bench of oiled tools, with a row of old sockets behind a hinged cover. The Founders’ maintenance bus. Every system in the well spoke on it once.
Breda fitted the box’s cables to three sockets. She taped the connections with cloth tape from her own belt.
