The variance appeared on the fourteenth day of the quarterly calibration cycle, and Oren almost missed it.
He'd been running the standard sequence, impedance checks on the primary trunk line, Ashenveil to Korthane relay station four, the segment that carried seventy percent of commercial telegraph traffic between the two powers. The procedure was documented in the Mechanist Telegraph Office's operations manual, page forty-one, section three: "Quarterly Signal Integrity Assessment, Trunk Lines, Priority One." He'd performed this procedure eleven times. It took four hours. He had never found anything.
