Two blinding pillars of blue-white soft glow carved through the freezing midnight sleet.
High atop the engineer’s cab of The Iron Bastion, the twin carbon-arc searchlights struck an electric arc.
The hissing electrodes released two thousand four hundred candlepower of radiant white bright glare, focused into searing parallel beams by eighteen-inch silvered curved reflectors.
Master Borin Bronze-Lung stood on the cab roof, his heavy leather apron shielding him from the cold spray as he adjusted the carbon feed screws.
Beneath the cab floor, the backup steam dynamo hummed with a high-pitched sixty-cycle whine.
“The commutator brushes are riding smooth on the copper segments,” Borin called down through the roof hatch. “Delivering twenty-four volts at eighty current units.
The Mangin reflector shape eliminates ball-shaped aberration. That beam will pierce fog for a mile and a half.”
The beams swept across the dark expanse of the Riverbend flats.
