To test the physical conditions between the three stations, Eren Tal walked along the southern narrow high walkway toward Station Three. Meanwhile, Pella remained at the central junction with a brass signaling horn and a hooded animal fat lantern.
The test was a total failure of ordinary comms. At forty paces, Eren’s heavy lantern—a four-candle whale-oil burner—dissolved into a faint, yellowish smudge in the swirling sulfur fog, and at fifty paces it vanished fully. Pella blew the brass horn with all the strength in her lungs. Then, the sound was swallowed instantly by the roaring bubbling blast of the central water chute, heard to Eren only as a faint, metal click that sounded no louder than a pin dropping on gravel.
Eren returned to the central platform, shaking his head, his wool sleeves dripping with greasy water drops. ‘Nothing. I couldn’t see your light, and I couldn’t hear your horn. If a crew gets into trouble at Station Three, they could all be boiled alive and Station One would never know until the corpses floated past the intake.’
‘Ordinary signals are dead in this vault,’ Korr Var agreed, his face grim. ‘The steam scatters the light, and the rough churning breaks the sound waves into white noise. If we’re going to run a timed together three-point shutdown, we must run a physical copper wire from station to station, isolated inside lead channel, or use clockwork pull-cables like the telegraph lines on the royal railways.’
