The last five sections went in through the night.
Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. Each one called step by step, eight seconds a cycle, Tavin’s ring turning one quarter in three. Each one settled, an hour still, Eshel calling the seam closed. The crew changed at the two-hour marks: Breda on the seam set’s witness line, the crew chief on the root set’s, the young fitters bringing tea that nobody drank before it went cold. Mara slept for an hour on a folded tarpaulin by the bench and woke because the calls had changed voice, and lay listening until she was sure they were right, and got up.
At the fifth hour of the morning, Eshel called the twelfth seam closed.
The collar was complete.
Through the glass it did not look like much. A ring of dull grey metal, the width of a forearm, curving round the seed ring’s face and out of sight into the depth where the boundary was. Darker on its inner edge. Paler on its outer. Twelve faint lines across it, where the seams were.
It hung from the boundary by a neck.
A narrow stem of raw metal, ungraded, where the growth had begun: the first half-degree steps, before the crew had found the gradient, where the metal had condensed onto the seed’s root face and not yet learned to grade. It ran from the collar’s inner edge to the seed ring, a finger thick, and it carried the whole collar’s weight against the…
