When Giles Croft pulled the master air-powered lever, the continent didn’t merely shake. It hummed.
From the sixty-foot summits of the four Weather Pyramids, four titanic columns of white-hot, four-hundred-and-fifty-degree underground steam blasted skyward.
It wasn’t a chaotic explosion.
Guided by the internal copper ringing chimney pipes, the roaring columns of hot, dry air shook with a deep, bone-rattling bass hum that registered at exactly forty cycles per second.
The sound was too low to be a roar. It was a rhythmic, oceanic thrum that rang in the chest cavity of every living creature within thirty leagues.
High above the valley floor, eight thousand feet up, the stale inversion layer shuddered.
The forty-hertz sound waves shattered the smooth-flowing boundary layer of the hot stall dome.
Like a hot poker driven through a sheet of ice, the four upright steam plumes punctured the ceiling of tightly packed air. That created four huge chimney pipes that vented directly into the cold upper troposphere.
