The fourth and fifth formations went faster than the first three.
Not because the content was simpler, it wasn't, the accumulated distress of the membrane's later years denser and more urgent than the earlier layers, the Record architecture's distress signal louder in the more recent material, the way a patient's chart became louder the closer it got to the present. Faster because the Hollow class was running at a capacity it hadn't had three hours ago, the first three absorptions having opened something in the architecture that the previous six months of shell imprints had been building toward without being sufficient to complete.
The class knew what it was doing now.
That was the only way he could describe it. Not him knowing, him being a reasonably capable person applying a system he
