The central spire of Haven-Hold rose eight hundred feet above the granite crest of the city.
It wasn’t a castle tower or a religious monument.
It was a lattice mast of load-bearing hard dark metal steel, four-sided, tapering from a hundred-foot base to a slender crown that held the main land-wide power end-post.
Inside the steel framework ran four twelve-inch ice-cold power bars, wrapped in evacuated stainless jackets.
Giles Croft stood on the glass-enclosed watching deck at the seven-hundred-foot level.
His pocket sighting scope was mounted on the windowsill, its spirit level centered to within half an arc-second.
Beside him, the exact timing dials of the land-wide grid flickered with pale blue light.
“Earth-heat mantle wells at Deep-Harrow are locked at eighteen hundred RPM,” Toby Karr reported from the tracking data desk.
