The manifold needed eight modules, and the old design hid every joint.
Mara spread the drawings across the bench in the interface chamber at the start of the morning shift. The station record’s drawings of the old manifold heart, run off on the dock office’s machine; Eshel’s model from the gauges, with its branches and its UNVERIFIED marks; Anwen’s housing dimensions, with an error on every figure. And on top, her own first sketch of the new heart.
Eight modules. One for the trunk, where the flow entered from the reservoir. Seven for the branches, one each. Each module a self-contained piece: a housing, a governor, a channel lined with mirror iron, and the joints where it met the trunk and the branch lines.
The old heart had been one piece. Cast whole, or grown, or forged in a way nobody could now tell. Its joints were inside it. Hidden. Ground smooth and sealed over, so the flow passed through without a ripple, without a seam to catch on.
“Better flow,” Tavin said, looking at the old drawings. “Not a single edge in it. Beautiful.”
“And when it cracked,” Mara said, “nobody could find where.”
She had seen the station record’s account of it. The old heart had begun to fail, slowly, over decades: a few percent of flow lost here, a governor sticking there. The Custodian had logged every symptom. It had tried every adjustment it could reach. It had never found the fault, because the fault was inside…
