The trial ended at the seventh hour with every load answered, and the record of joint judgment went up on the plate before anyone sat down.
Mara wrote it. Standing at the plate in the interface chamber, with the twenty loads and their crews’ names down one side and the heart’s responses down the other, in the crew’s words: Anwen’s calls, Mara’s explanations, the fitter’s slow log. At the bottom, the revision history. Every change made to the heart since the first module’s frame went up, each with its date and hand and reason.
The newest entry was the lag fix. Governor four: spring eased three-eighths turn. Lag corrected. Found in the written log. Hand: crew chief. Witnessed: Mara, Eshel, Sen.
Then six lines for names.
Six. The same number the trust’s witness list had held. Mara had not planned that.
When the plate was done, Eshel copied it fair onto the well’s sheet: a long roll of heavy paper from the engineering hall, the kind the Compact had used for maintenance authorities, with a margin ruled for signatures.
It took him most of an hour. Nobody hurried him.
The crew did not leave while he worked. Breda brought tea from the pump hall in a can and poured it into the probe box lids, which had become the chamber’s cups. Tam sat on an upturned bucket by the rack and fell asleep sitting up and woke when his cup tipped. Sen went through the trial’s written log page by…
