Engineer-Prime Konstantin Vorderhall

House Vorderhall has held the foundry seat at the Confederacy's largest reactor-yard for nine generations. Konstantin is the ninth to wear the prime engineer's brass collar. He inherited at thirty-two, when his father walked into a venting boiler to free a stuck valve and did not walk out. The family records call the death honorable, and instructive.

He pinned the soot-stained collar over his formal uniform the same week and has worn the two together since. The Pressure of Inheritance runs a quarter above the Confederacy's posted safe line, because he does not believe in posted lines. He believes his ear, his gauges, and his engineers, in that order. He closes to ramming distance at full thrust, forward batteries in a sustained roar: nine generations of Vorderhall boilers, audible a long way off. He does not announce himself. The pressure does.