The broken-sun governor pit was a cathedral of black iron and tortured stone.
Len stepped through the shattered doorway into a vaulted cave eighteen meters long and six meters wide, carved directly out of the living granite core of the Star tower pinnacle. The ceiling rose thirty feet above their heads, lost in dense, swirling clouds of oily gray steam that escaped through upright exhaust angled slats cut into the mountain’s north face.
In the center of the chamber stood the machine that held the fate of Rookvale.
It was an iron giant statue seven feet tall, anchored to the dark rock floor by eight four-inch foundation bolts. The main body was a ribbed, tube-shaped housing of cast pig-iron four feet in width, enclosing four balanced butterfly valves that controlled the discharge from the central solar steam cooler directly into the upright quarry chimney pipe four hundred feet below.
Rising from the left side of the casing was the main running wheel. It was a massive spoked ring of forged iron, two point two meters in width, its outer rim wrapped in tarred hemp rope that had rotted and cracked from years of dry heat. The hub of the wheel was coupled to a heavy bronze spindle through a triple-reduction world-size gear-set, designed to multiply the worker’s leverage against the huge high-pressure back-pressure of the trapped solar star-fire.
