In the dark, Mara stood at the lift’s manual gantry and did the arithmetic aloud.
The gantry had a manual mode. Every lift the guild had ever built did; Sen had made sure of it before the heart went up. Four screws, one at each corner of the gantry’s frame, each with a square head that took a hand crank. Turn the screws and the frame lowered, a fraction at a time, the catches taking each stop. Slow. Very slow. But it needed no power.
The crew’s lamps stood in a ring round the port. Their light was yellow and uneven, and it stopped short of the ceiling; the heart hung above the port at the light’s edge, a dark shape with its tags glinting where a lamp caught them.
On the wall by the bench room door, a manual lamp hung beside the dock clock. Someone had put it there so the clock could be read. Its hands showed the collar’s window. A little under ninety minutes.
“Seating needs the time the screws take,” Mara said.
She said it to the crew. They stood round the port with their lamps, waiting.
“Four screws. Each turn lowers the frame by this much.” She held up her thumb and forefinger, a hair apart. “From where it hangs to the seat, it’s this many turns.” She gave the figure Sen had worked. “In the light, with the lift, that would have been twenty minutes. With the screws, in the light, forty.”
