The powered lift had been dead since Eshel’s cut at the junction, and the manifold hung on its four catches over the well, and the only way down was by hand.
Sen’s crews went to the screw heads.
Four corners of the gantry’s frame. At each one, a square-headed screw as thick as a wrist, and a hand crank fitted to it, and a crew of two. Aurel and Pask at the first. Breda and Tam at the second. Hollis and Joren at the third. Ilse and one of the young fitters at the fourth. The lamps round the port threw their shadows up the frame, long and wavering, so that every crew seemed to have twice as many hands as it did.
Mara walked the frame with a spirit level.
A long one, a bricklayer’s level, borrowed from the dock stores. She laid it on the inspection frame’s top rail, on each side in turn, and read the bubble by lamplight. Level. Level. Level. Level. Then she went round again, because the first round had been before anyone turned anything.
Tavin had handed the first crank to Aurel and Pask and gone round behind her with the feeler gauge, checking the catch pins one more time before the first turn, as he had before he called the first mark. Four pawls, four pins. He gauged each pin’s seat and said its number aloud.
