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I have been replacing fixings for nineteen years.

"It doesn't need those four," I say. "It needs four. Any four, in the right geometry, rigid enough not to creep."

"Can you⁠—"

"Yes."

What we have is Marr's own equipment, which his people anchored to a wall untouched by any fixing until this week, and which is therefore the only fixing stock within nine kilometers. Cutting rig stanchions. Platform legs. Sixteen expansion anchors and a torque driver.

I take his platform apart to build the thing that saves the machine he came to kill, and I will admit that some part of me enjoys it.

Nineteen minutes is not enough time to do this properly, so I do not do it properly. I do it the way you shore a live bore with people underneath: fast, symmetric, and over-specified, because the only true rule of emergency work is that you cannot check what you have not built with a margin. Four legs at ninety degrees. Anchors doubled. Diagonal bracing off the platform rail, because a rectangle is a hinge and a triangle is not.

Claire calls the geometry off the commissioning plate and I set it, with no number spoken between us, and she is holding the driver ready before my hand comes off the last anchor.

At sixteen minutes the anchors run out.

At seventeen I pull the last two from behind Marr's rack, which requires me to be within reach of him, and I do that, and he lets me, and no word passes.

At eighteen minutes and forty seconds it is done, and it is ugly, and it will hold.

"Custodian. Boundary check."

A silence I have no interest in ever experiencing again.

BOUNDARY PRESENT. GEOMETRY IRREGULAR. TOLERANCE IS ADEQUATE.

"Resume?"

NO. RESUMPTION WOULD COMPLETE THE TRANSFER. I REQUIRE A CANCELLATION, AND CANCELLATION REQUIRES A REASON CODE.

Claire laughs, once, harsh and delighted. "Give me the list."

SEVENTY-ONE CODES EXIST.

"Read me the ones about fixings."

CODE ELEVEN. TASK RAISED AGAINST A DEFECT SINCE RECTIFIED.

"That one. File it. The defect was four cut retainers. The defect is rectified. There is no longer any reason for you to go anywhere."

FILED.

And then Elys Marr, who has watched all of this from four meters away with his hands empty, walks to the socket rim and puts a boot against my shoring.

He does not get a second attempt.

Claire says, without turning round, "Custodian. The socket is a live work area with crew present. Log a lockout."

LOCKOUT LOGGED. HANDLERS ARE EIGHTY SECONDS AWAY.

They come up the drop in a line, three of them, low and broad and entirely uninterested in any of us. They pass me without a glance and they pass Claire, because we hold the roster and this is our work area, and they lift Marr off the platform with the same patience they used to clear a collapse I condemned nineteen years ago, and they carry him ten meters back down the walkway and set him on the deck and stand over him.

Nobody is hurt. I have never watched anything more humiliating happen to a man.

I go and stand in front of him, and this bit I want written down accurately, since a hearing is coming and I mean to give evidence.

He is sitting on a walkway with his coat off and his hands loose, and he raises his head, and his face holds nothing at all.