The sky had ceased to be an air. It had become a falling ocean of liquid night.
Four miles wide and boiling with veins of jagged crimson static, the end-post breakdown tsunami plummeted toward the apex of the Spire at Mach twelve.
The sky rift, dying under the stranglehold of the seated core, was unleashing its final, total convulsion.
If that four-hundred-gigawatt wave struck an unenergized tower, it would turn to steam twenty miles of load-bearing steel, shatter the land-wide bedrock. Then it put out fifty million lives in a single second.
On the master pulpit at Mile Twenty, Giles Croft didn’t take a single backward step.
His hands gripped the twin master breaker handles on the central commutation console.
His leather jacket was whipped by the rising magnetic gale, his eyes fixed on the dropping crimson vortex.
“Timed together commutation on my mark,” Giles spoke into the global dispatch channel, his voice cutting through the rising roar of static. “Three...
