“From the mirrors,” Julian Vance said, his voice flat as cold iron. “He got my voice from the glass.”
Lift #00 was rocketing up the center shaft of the dry dock at sixty feet per second, its twin steel hoist cables whining like banshees against the overhead sheaves. Cold grease and pulverized concrete dust showered down through the wire-glass roof of the cab, stinging Julian’s neck as he knelt by the floor grille.
The massive hydraulic counterweights passed them in the opposite direction with a thunderous, metallic WHOOSH that rocked the brass cage on its vertical guide rails.
Through the heavy steel mesh between his boots, the entire subterranean structure was collapsing in real time.
Seven floors of bureaucratic architecture were folding inward like a crushed accordion. The white marble pillars of the courtroom were snapping into powdery white dust, and the printing presses of Sub-Level 6 were grinding into twisted iron scrap. Millions of gallons of black harbor water filled the void with churning, white-crested whirlpools.
And in the center of that rising flood, standing on the shattered concrete pedestal of the central hoist, was the Actuary of Zero-Hour.
The entity wasn’t being crushed by the falling masonry. It stood motionless, its arms extended at its sides like an orchestral conductor waiting for the opening downbeat. And around its head, swirling in a violent, sparkling cyclone of curved glass, were hundreds of shimmering discs.
