The collar grew in twelve sections.
That was the Founders’ design, from the records, and the crew had kept it. Twelve linked sections, each grown on the seed ring’s face in turn, and each allowed to settle before the next began. Between them, sliding seams: narrow joins where one section met the next, built to open a hair under pressure and close again when the flow slowed. So the collar could breathe. So the boundary’s push, when it came, would move the seams instead of cracking the metal.
Mara recorded each one by its number.
On the slate, in a column beside the growth record. Section one: grown, settled. The time. The probe readings at the end. Section two: grown, settled. Then three.
Each section took about an hour of calling. Call, answer, move, eight seconds at a time, half a degree and then one. Then the settling: an hour with the ring still and the heat held, while the new metal found its shape and the seam between it and the last section closed. Eshel watched the seam’s gauge through the settling, and called it when it stopped moving.
By the middle of day twenty-five they had six.
Six thin bands on the seed ring’s face, side by side, curving with the ring. In the settling hours, when there was nothing to call, the crew drifted to the glass to look at them. Nobody said much. Breda, on her first sight of them, said only, “Well,” and went back…
