The night was supposed to be dark. But the southern coastline of the continent had forgotten how to sleep.
Giles Croft stood on the upper narrow high walkway of the Port Haven Lighthouse, looking out over eighty miles of reclaimed shoreline and rolling hills.
His hands rested on the cool brass railing, and for the first time in three weeks, he wasn’t holding a pencil, a stopwatch, or a survey rule.
Across the horizon, from the granite bluffs of Port Haven all the way north to the distant castle walls of Haven-Hold, an amazing, unbroken web of brilliant electric light blazed against the midnight sky.
Ten thousand streetlamps, twenty thousand factory arc-lights, and half a million domestic glow-tubes hummed with clean, radiant, un-flickering azure light.
The great coal yards behind Berth Six were dead silent. The four smoking small roof-dome furnaces had been put out, their chimneys cold. Meanwhile, the new electric power-coil furnaces in the foundry district hummed with clean, smokeless, titanic heat.
Down in the harbor basin, the water itself seemed to glow.
The excess power from the deep-sea Rankine turbine was routed through the underwater floating tube bridge, lighting the underwater avenues of the gulf with a ghostly turquoise soft glow that made the bay look like a vast, polished jewel dropped into the dark earth.
