The overheat came on the ninth stroke of the second sequence, and she felt it in her palm before the gauge moved.
She had built the full load sheet by then: every room Nemi and the children had counted, every crop dome the technicians had read, the dock with its one ring and its broken crane, the weather engines that Nemi said were running at a quarter. She had turned it into a long sequence of strokes, one per load, and she was running it through the coupon on the test bench, start to finish, to check the whole design before she harvested another crystal. The first run had gone clean. This was the second, for confirmation.
She held her left palm flat on the coupon’s free end while she struck, the way she held her hand on a pipe to feel what it did. She liked to feel the work as well as hear it. The graft told her one thing; her skin told her another; when they agreed, she trusted them.
At the ninth stroke, the dock crane, a small load, her palm went warm.
Warm. A sudden warmth in the metal under her hand. And at the same moment the tone of the stroke went sharp. A load too big for the design would have sounded flat; this was the opposite, a thin shrill note that climbed as she listened, like a kettle starting to whistle.
