The council sat in the gallery above the engineering hall at the eighth hour of the evening.
Not all of it. Half the seats were empty, and on the long wall behind them, the link screens: Pell from Cinder, Nemi from Lorn’s Reach, Bren’s crew room at Tal, a delegate from the outer ring with a scarf over her mouth against the cold of her station. The rest sat in the gallery’s chairs. The Board clerk. A Meridian engineer from the district works, grey-haired, with a folder on his knees. The Tal delegate, a broad man in a miner’s coat who had come on the morning freight. Sen, for the guild. And at the gallery’s front, at the plate, Mara.
She had not changed out of her work clothes. There had not been time. She stood at the plate with the day’s readings on it, copied up from the interface chamber by Eshel an hour before, and waited for the clerk to open the record.
“Entered,” the clerk said.
Mara looked out at the gallery before she began. She had stood in front of councils before: at Lorn, in the shelter hall with the lamps half lit; on the Tern’s display; at the yard gate. She had never got used to it. She still wanted, every time, to say the figure and sit down. Nemi had told her once, after a Lamp Council, that the figure was the easy part. The hard part was saying what the figure did not…
