The final engagement of the internal stops echoed through the weir chamber like the closing of a tomb. For five seconds, the only sound was the harsh, ragged panting of Corin Petch and the hiss of boiling foam beneath the narrow high walkway.
Then the bypass engaged.
Deep inside the southern bridge pillar, sixty feet below the waterline, the main high-pressure diverter gates slammed into their bronze seats with a bone-shaking shock that rattled the teeth in Len Vey’s jaw. The sudden redistribution of pressure was terrifying in its physical size. The massive roar of fifty thousand gallons of river water tearing through the intake water gates didn’t merely lessen. It shifted its sound register. It dropped from an ear-splitting, bone-shaking scream into a dull, hollow underground rumble that shook through the riverbed.
Inside the cast-iron claimant cabinet, the counterweighted dashpots dropped three feet through their cylinders of stone oil. He exhaled a long, air-powered sigh of trapped air. Behind the thick heat-proof glass watching ports set into the pipe hub casing, a flare of pure, blinding white light lit up the sulfur vapor. It wasn’t fire or magic. It was the raw, unshielded discharge of twelve years of piled up solar heat energy, suddenly shunted from the country grid into the cold, deep water chutes of the underground bypass.
