The jacks came down from the pump hall stores on two trolleys, wrapped in oilcloth.
Six of them. Emergency jacks, the kind the guild kept for a burst main: squat hydraulic cylinders the height of a forearm, each with a broad steel foot and a screw collar for fine advance. Sen’s crew chief unwrapped them on the interface chamber’s floor and laid them in a row, and Sen went down the row and checked each one’s seal with her thumb.
“Old,” she said. “Good. Old ones don’t leak.”
The crew chief grinned at that, briefly, and went on unwrapping.
They went in round the collar through the lower ports. Six of them, evenly spaced, between the collar’s outer face and the growth chamber’s wall. Each jack’s foot against the collar’s lowest band, its base braced against a bolted shoe on the wall. When they advanced, they would push the collar down and in, onto the old ring, and take the load off the crack.
Mara numbered them on the plate. One to six, clockwise from the north.
Then she set the order.
“One and four first,” she said. “Opposite each other. Then two and five. Then three and six.” She drew it, lines across the circle. “No jack in a pair advances until the one opposite has reported its load.”
