The air at one hundred and five thousand feet didn’t have enough substance to carry the scent of frost.
Giles Croft stepped off the high-speed hoist car onto the apex overhead frame of Mile Twenty, took a slow, measured breath of tightly packed oxygen through his rubber nasal hollow tube. Then he felt the total, ringing silence of near-space.
The sky above was no longer blue.
It was an endless, terrifying dome of pure, glass black, dusted with millions of unblinking diamond stars that burned with cold, razor-sharp bright glare.
Below his steel-toed boots, through the open diamond-mesh grating of the staging deck, the entire curved continent of Aethel-Terra hung like an azure and emerald jewel suspended in the dark, girdled by the glowing golden lines of the zero-pushback power grid.
Ten miles above the apex platform, the Cosmic Rift pulsed with an angry, bruised-violet soft glow. A jagged, three-hundred-mile tear in the fabric of the universe that twisted the distant stars like a carnival mirror.
“Dog-clamps engaged on the south runway girder,” Toby Karr reported through his throat microphone, his voice echoing cleanly inside Giles’s padded earcups.
The young land-mapper crouched on the frosted steel deck. It drove a four-inch hardened alloy locking dog into the overhead frame track with an air-powered sledgehammer.
