The copper metal pen on the deep-water drum didn’t lie. It didn’t have the imagination for it.
Giles Croft leaned over the oak table in the deck cabin of the Aegis, tracing the ink line on the chemically treated paper with the flat tip of his wooden ruler.
Outside, the southern ocean was calm as a cellar floor, the twin hulls of the catamaran barely rocking on the long, gentle swell.
“Thirty square miles,” Giles said. His pencil made a tiny, precise cross on the chart grid.
“A grid pattern of paved avenues sixty feet wide, bounded by six-sided outer edge walls and eight hyperbolic paraboloid domes.
The center round hall is four hundred feet across, with an elliptical crown.”
Kenneth Drake stood beside him, his pacing rod tucked under his left arm.
He leaned over the chart, tracing the outer edge lines with a calloused forefinger.
