The command tent smelled of linseed oil, damp canvas and cedar. Thirty accountants, quartermasters and founders sat around a raised map of the three continents. Their counting frames clicked under the sound of brushes on paper.
Pei Jing took his seat at the head of the table. A quartermaster slid the first stack of balance sheets toward him.
The two-minute clock started when the first tower stopped drawing through its buried feed. The other three teams had to close their feeds and Pei Jing had to cut the junction before the current shifted. If they missed the deadline, the power could spill across fifty thousand square miles. That meant a winch, a ration delivery or a lost order could matter as much as anything Pei Jing did with the blade.
He counted twenty-eight Sky-Piercing Siege Spikes, seven at each front. Every spike had two launchers assigned to it so a crew could keep working if a winch failed. One-Eyed Han had anchored the western mounts into sandstone below the dunes. Cheng Bao’s fourteen launchers had reached their stations on double-hulled junks with heavy ballast to keep them upright.
The medics had one hundred and twenty thousand yards of clean linen, sixty thousand jars of burn salve, eight thousand sets of instruments and twelve thousand stretchers. Pei Jing checked the lists to make sure the stretchers had reached the crews trained to use them.
