The doctor had allowed one bench test, and Mara took it on the morning the second module’s frame went up.
It was not a field entry. She had been clear about that, and so had the doctor, and so had Sera. Nobody was going through the shield. Nobody was going near the boundary. The test was at the bench, in the bay beside the interface chamber where the old operator cradle stood empty under its dust sheet: a listening test, at low power, to hear how the first module’s ring carried through the bench and into the second module’s frame.
The gauges could read the ring. Eshel had a probe on the bench and another on the frame. But the gauges read the ring as a trace, a line, and Mara wanted to know whether the line was right. Whether the stepped joints she had heard in the first module, faint and uncertain through the bare graft, were the joints the gauges saw.
For that, she needed the coupling.
The doctor had refitted it herself, that morning, in the clinic. The clamp behind Mara’s left ear. The lead to the band at the back of her skull. The dial at its lowest setting, and a strip of tape over the dial so it could not be turned.
