The argument started at the control room door at the fifth minute, and it was loud.
“—because you’ve had a guard on my ship’s ramp for a full day,” Sera was saying, “and in that day nobody’s checked the cooling loop, and if that loop freezes with the ship docked at a gate that can be locked under me, I’ll have a dead ship, and you’ll have two people and a school with no way off this lamp. So either your guard checks the loop or I go up and do it myself.”
She had not been at the door a moment before. Mara, kneeling by the clamp with the fourth block on its frame and her eyes on the needle, had not seen her come. But she heard her now. Everyone in the room heard her. Sera’s voice was pitched to carry, the way it had been on the link in the yard when she read the patrol twelve serial numbers, loud enough to fill the room without shouting.
“The guard on the ramp has his orders,” said one of the guards in the corridor, a voice Mara could not place.
“His orders don’t include my cooling loop. I asked him. He said ask the auditor. I’m asking the auditor.” Sera’s voice rose a notch. “Auditor.”
