The roar of Sluice-Gate Nine dominated the underground air for three entry halls in every direction.
It wasn’t the roar of open water falling through space. It was the strangled, painful shriek of high-pressure salt water forcing its way through a narrowed orifice under two crushing deep-sea pressure of water-pressure head. A sound that shook within the breastbone and set the teeth aching inside their gums.
Qiao Ming stepped onto the wet watching narrow high walkway eighty feet above the water gate pit.
The narrow high walkway was forged from punched holes in cast bronze, its surface worn slick by three hundred years of salt-mist and grease. Beneath his bare feet, the metal decking shuddered continuously, kicking against his soles with a wild, uneven rhythm as the churning vortex in the pit hammered against the foundation piers. The spray rose in thick, cold sheets, coating his eyelashes and running down his cheeks in bitter, salt-laden rivulets.
He leaned over the railing, wiping his eyes with the sleeve of his oilskin coat.
Seventy arm-lengths below, wedged diagonally across the stone water gate-channel, hung the massive slab of Sluice-Gate Nine.
The gate was a giant stone monolith of green-veined dark rock, eighty feet wide, forty feet tall, and six feet thick, weighing more than nine hundred tons. Under normal working cycles, the gate moved with easy, clockwork care, balanced by four titanic lead balance weights suspended in upright stonework shafts within the flanking pylons. When lowered, its polished stone doorstep met the…
