Four miles to the north, high atop the granite bluffs where the mountain wind blew thin, freezing, and relentless, the Central Star tower of Rookvale stood like an iron castle pinned against the black sky.
Before the Twelve-Year Night had been sealed over the province, the structure had been the crown jewel of northern sky-high building. A huge round hall of dressed gray granite blocks. It was flanked by twin spirit vein towers and crowned by a hemispherical copper dome eighty feet in width. In those days, astronomers in wool coats had climbed the spiral stairs to track the orbits of the outer planets through a thirty-inch brass refractor, their logs recording the clean, cold mathematics of the sky sphere.
Now, the brass telescope was gone, dismantled and melted down during the first winter to forge high-pressure pipe fittings and high-pressure valve stems. In its place, the center of the round hall was pierced by a massive, sixty-foot sky-slit of hardened salt-glass—the main solar collector lens of Project Aurora.
For four thousand three hundred and eighty days, that glass had held back the sun.
Beneath the spirit vein floor, dropping three hundred feet through the solid granite core of the mountain ridge, lay the main claimant vaults. An underground complex of six-sided galleries blasted from the living bedrock, heated by bare steam pipes, and smelling of transformer oil, sulfur fumes, and boiling copper salts.
