The manifold hung over its seat a little before midnight, and it looked like a pump house.
Mara stood at the edge of the lowest chamber and looked up at it. The powered lift had taken it off the rollers an hour before: a gantry crane bolted across the chamber’s ceiling, its cable running back through a sheave to the lift motor in the relay room beyond the chamber’s north wall. Four slings from the hook to the inspection frame’s corners. The whole heart lifted, slowly, a hand’s width at a time, until it hung clear of the floor over the shielded port, which the crew had opened all the way: the glass plate unbolted and swung aside, the port’s sleeve widened to the well’s mouth.
Beneath the heart, the well. The grown collar on its jacks, round the crack. And at the collar’s center, the seat where the heart would go down and lock.
Above the well, the heart. Eight modules in one frame, joined by open seams, shimmed where they needed shims. Every valve with its hand wheel on the outside, where a hand could reach it. Every seam with its feeler window and its lamp bracket. Every governor with its tag.
