Moving three hundred and twenty tons of live, wet cephalopod up a five-hundred-foot incline was not an operation described in standard civil building textbooks.
Giles Croft stood at the foot of the cofferdam embankment, inspecting the heavy launch sled that Master Caleb Thorne-Wood had made in twelve hours.
The sled was a huge raft of layered white oak, one hundred and sixty feet long and thirty feet wide, bound together by two-inch wrought-iron through-bolts.
The top deck was deeply dished and lined with eight layers of vulcanized gum rubber, topped with four feet of damp, salted eelgrass to cradle the kraken’s soft belly tissues.
Beneath the deck ran four heavy steel runners, shoe-plated with four-inch cold-rolled bronze plates designed to slide along a pair of parallel standard-gauge railway tracks coated with animal fat and graphite grease.
“Friction multiplier on greased bronze is point zero eight,” Giles explained to Caleb and Toby Karr.
“At a ten-to-one slope, the pull force needed to haul three hundred and twenty tons up the embankment is thirty-eight tons.
Four hundred-ton steam winches on the crest provide forty tons of nonstop pull.”
