The deep water reserve reached the stop temperature at the twenty-third hour of day twenty-one.
Mara was at the shared gauge. She had been watching the reserve’s line all day: rationed to the pulses, the valve opened at each surge and closed between, Sen’s crews at the return valve and the sill gate turning wheels every few minutes since the twenty-third minute of the first sink. The east half of the basin had taken heat from every pulse. Its line had crept up the screen toward the red stop on the plate, pulse by pulse, a little at a time.
Now it reached it.
The line touched the red. Mara saw it on the screen: the basin’s temperature, read by the independent technicians at the boundary and by Sen’s crews and by Eshel on the freight relay, all at once, every neighborhood representative seeing the same figure at the same moment.
It held there. For a moment. At the line.
Mara heard the chamber go quiet. Sen at the manifold with her hand on the return valve’s wheel. Breda at the cage. The crew chief in the passage’s mouth, who had stopped tapping. Tavin was upstairs with the third rib; she could not see him, but she knew he would be watching the same line on the control room’s screen.
