The main hangar bay of The Sovereign Eye of Judgment was one mile long and four hundred and twenty feet wide. For three thousand years, it had been dedicated to the dark art of cosmic terror.
Flayed dragon skins had hung from its black-glass walls. Soul-binding chains had dangled above glowing blood runes. At the far end stood the Grand Altar of Cosmic Severing, an eighty-ton slab of void-jade where high judges had once sacrificed heretical nascent souls to feed the Nether-Wyrm engines.
Today, four burly ironworkers in neon-orange vests surrounded the altar with eighty-pound pneumatic jackhammers.
DUG-DUG-DUG-CLACK!
Jade dust filled the air. Vacuum hoses immediately sucked it into Austin’s central dust collectors.
Austin watched from a raised gantry platform. His Shade-14 welding goggles rested on the brim of his white hard hat, and an aluminum clipboard was tucked under one arm. Tie Kuang stood beside him with a six-foot pry bar. Former Grand Inquisitor Xuan Ming clutched a stack of floor plans with wide-eyed devotion.
“Watch the air lines on those breakers!” Austin called. His voice echoed across the vast bay. “Break that slab into six-inch aggregate, and don’t let any of it drift into the crane tracks. I want this entire four-hundred-foot deck clear, swept, and coated with epoxy by fourteen hundred.”
