A machine was only as permanent as the bolts that held it to the earth.
The five-hundred-ton Harmonic Core rested upon its iron-hard metal detents at Mile Twenty, but in the unforgiving shape of load-bearing mechanics, resting was not enough.
High above the overhead frame deck, the gravity tides of the cosmic rift were already pulling against the sapphire monolith with sixty tons of upward floating force.
Heat swelling between the freezing mesospheric night and the four-hundred-degree heat of the lower stator coils would subject the screen to huge cyclic sideways tearing force.
If the joint between the quartz lower pipe rim and the iron-hard metal collar was not clamped with total, unmoving stiffness, the joint would breathe.
Tiny movement would fret the mating faces, tear the Viton O-ring, and break the empty pocket barrier.
To lock five hundred tons of quartz to the spine of the world, Giles Croft had prepared one hundred and twenty-eight bolts.
Each stud was forged from Grade 5 silver-steel-light metal-vanadium alloy, three inches in width and four feet long, weighing eighty pounds apiece.
