“Nailed that one,” Cally said, trying not to grin.

“Hush,” the monsignor said, suppressing a chuckle. It wasn’t a moment for humor. “If you see less than a ten hour day the whole trip, praise God for the break.”

Cally took the opportunity to grab her grandfather in a tight bear hug, loosening up when he grunted from the pressure of her Crab-upgraded muscles.

“Good luck in the lion’s den,” she said.

“Good luck to you in the hot seat. See you when I get back. If you get a chance, hug your sister for me.”

In the hall, she watched him walk away, O’Reilly’s deputy at his elbow, until they turned and were out of sight.

The first thing Michelle noticed when she entered her construction bay an hour before Adenast’s nominal start time was the unaccustomed emptiness of the bay. A lone employee sat at the far end of the bay, headset engaged, holding the existing products static. She recognized him as one of the Sohon masters. Below adept level, the masters were the middle managers whose coordination skills, paired with their technical competence, glued each project together by mutual communication and ensuring everybody knew his or her assigned tasks. Everything from starships to the enormous building control machines grew whole in a single tank, a massive endeavor regarding years of effort by a single family — “family” for Indowy could encompass generations of an older breeding group — and it all had to be coordinated by the masters. Mental visions of the project had to remain in tune, and across multiple work shifts. Apprentices had to feed the great tanks with needed raw materials on a precise schedule and at precise input loci to support local control of the necessary reactions. In the rare but inevitable case when one of the experts found an engineering issue in the design, it was the masters who coordinated with the adepts to design a fix and communicate the revised design image to every member of the production team.