The first growth came out as a ridge.
Mara watched it form on the six gauges before she saw it through the shield. Probe one rose, and probe two, and the others lagged, and then all six jumped together at the step’s end and stayed high. On the seven-point map the grey went a hard dark band along the seed ring’s root side and nowhere else.
Through the glass, when she looked, the seed ring wore a lip of new metal along its inner face. Narrow. Sharp-edged. Standing up off the roughened surface like a weld bead somebody had laid too hot and too fast.
“Read it,” Anwen said, on the Lorn link.
“Ringing dull,” Sen said. She had a probe arm on it, the seventh arm, the one with a small hammer tip instead of a gauge, and she had tapped the ridge once. The sound came back through the arm into the chamber’s speaker. It was a short flat clack, like a cracked pot.
“Dull,” Anwen said. “Touch it.”
Sen reached through the shield’s port with a wooden stick. A length of ash from the crew chief’s bag, the kind they used to clear sand from a valve seat. She laid its end against the ridge’s edge and pressed, lightly.
