The monitoring board was new.
Halsen noticed it the way a man notices a stranger in his own house: not with surprise but with the slow, disorienting recognition that something fundamental had been replaced. The old board was gone. The cracked gauge faces, the torn needle pivots, the tarnished brass knobs that Denn's hands had worn smooth over eleven years were hauled out by the reinforcement column's engineering detail and replaced with a standardized military-issue monitoring panel. New glass. New needles. New handwriting on the threshold value in block capitals in fresh ink, written by a signals officer whose name Halsen did not yet know.
The yellowed parchment was gone. Two hundred years of unquestioned authority, removed with the broken instruments and disposed of as debris.
