The modules joined round a hollow center, and the hollow center was the well.
Mara stood at the inspection frame’s edge as the crew drew it in. The eight modules on their rollers had come together over the shielded port, the trunk at the center and the seven branches round it, and now the crew was locking them. Each branch set in its seat on the trunk’s flanges. Each seat closed with common bolts. And beneath the whole ring, through the port’s opened sleeve, the grown collar: twelve sections on their jacks, holding the crack, waiting for the heart to come down and give its pressure somewhere to go.
Each branch, as it seated, was locked by a witness mark. Aurel scratched it with a scriber where the branch’s flange met the trunk’s: a cross inside a circle, the Cinder yard’s mark. Then he called it, and Anwen read it back, and Sen wrote it on the plate.
“Branch one. Seated. Marked.”
“Branch one. Seated. Marked.”
The words went round the frame like the count during the growth, and Mara found her lips moving with them.
The first seam was between the trunk and branch one.
An open seam, as Mara had drawn it: a flanged join, bolted, with a gap at its outer edge where a feeler gauge could go in and a small window in the flange for a lamp. The gap had to be right. Too wide, and the seam would leak more than the flexible middle…
