The granite basin of Grey Crag was a tiered arena of solid rock six miles across, ringed by two-thousand-foot fiery palisades.
At the center of the basin, sunk eighty feet into the Archean bedrock, sat the massive underground vault of Node Forty-Two.
Above the circular concrete roof slab rose two huge fine china insulator stacks, thirty feet tall and gleaming white in the eerie twilight.
Between those stacks ran the exposed end-post power bars—solid four-inch bars of oxygen-free electrolytic copper, chilled to four Degrees of star-heat.
The power bars were cold enough that condensing sky air cascaded down their sides in shimmering sheets of freezing liquid droplets.
Across the gravel floor of the basin, thirty sapper teams under Kenneth Drake completed their final security sweep.
Every portable tool chest, iron wheelbarrow, and wooden ladder had been cleared from the five-mile exclusion outer edge.
Sapper Captain Miller walked along the outer edge blast berm. He tested the field telephone lines connected to Bunker One.
