The instruments spiked at fourteenth bell, and Hald's coffee went cold before he could pick it up.
He'd been on monitoring duty since twelfth bell. It was a four-hour rotation that the garrison treated as light assignment because the instruments never did anything. Three dials, two pressure gauges, a thermal strip that measured subsurface temperature at five-metre intervals down to forty metres. The thermal strip was Mechanist-standard, installed Year 466, calibrated quarterly. It measured temperature. It did not measure what he felt through his boots.
