The remote viewer came down from the dock office at the first hour of the next shift.
It was a camera on a jointed arm, the kind the dock crews used to look inside a cargo hold’s ducts without crawling into them. Eshel had spent the night fitting it to the shielded port’s sleeve. Now it hung through the sleeve into the dark below the lowest chamber, with its own small lamp, and its picture came up on a screen beside the port: grainy, grey, but steady. And it could turn. A dial on its control box swung the camera left and right; another tilted it; a third moved it along its arm, a hand’s width at a time.
Mara sat at the control box and studied the remains.
Not the housing this time. The lines. She followed them out from the housing, one at a time, with the camera. Where they ran across the well’s floor. Where they met the wall. Where they rose.
And as she followed them, she began to see the shape.
It was the seven channels.
She had built them at Hearth. The Hearth heart: seven channels in a circle, six of them feeding an outlet, each with its own governor, the whole thing balanced so that no channel could take more than its share. Her mother’s stub, Ysol’s seventh channel, the one that fed no one, the relief.
