The cold at eight thousand meters was an iron bar pressed against the temples. Outside the heavy watching bay of the heavy assault dirigible Gorgon’s Bane, the sky was a bruised expanse of violet and slate grey, streaked with frozen cold air and the jagged orange discharges of the Anatolian Aero-Fault. Far below, anchored to the rift floor by chains as thick as city viaducts, hovered the Sovereign Splicer Citadel. It was a monstrous floating mountain of dark stone and grafted steel plate, bristling with heavy flak turrets and jagged perches carved from the ribcages of dead sea-behemoths.
Arthur Vance adjusted the strap of his ARC-7 Mag-Carbine. He felt the familiar heft of the heavy dark metal-core sabot magazine resting against his left ribs. Next to the rifle hung his main instrument: the Vance Cryo-Pneumatic Transfixer Mk. IV, its rotary metal tube loaded with high-pressure glass ampoules of neuro-cool and coagulant enzymes. At his collar, the cryo-heat-powered shunt hummed with a low, cyclic shaking, venting excess neural heat away from his main neck blood vessels before the cold air outside could freeze the exhaust ports.
“Wind shear is gusting ninety knots off the dorsal cliffs,” Grand Marshal Evander Sharpe said, squinting through the frosted quartz pane. The old commander had not touched his double-barreled four-gauge trench cannon. It rested in the crook of his greatcoat sleeve like a sleeping dog. The brass pocket watch pinned to his lapel clicked steadily against the dull drone of the diesel turbines. “Their defensive…
