The portal opened onto an awe-inspiring and terrifying heavy-duty cave: Entry hall 691, the Chamber of the Great Lattice. Here, the scale of the spark public works exceeded anything they had seen in the upper foundries. The hall was an eight-sided tiered arena eighty arm-lengths high, its soaring walls faced with glazed baked-clay tiles of dark cobalt blue that gleamed in the yellow light of their horn lantern.
Suspended across the entire span of the ceiling was a massive three-space-folding web of heavy copper conductors: the Great Lattice. Twelve hundred outward feeder cables, each four inches in width, hung suspended from fine china strain insulators the size of beer casks. The cables swooped across the void in curved catenary curves, converging toward a central tube-shaped collector cage of bronze mesh thirty arm-lengths in width.
Qiao Ming walked out onto the central watching platform, his bare calloused feet testing the diamond-tread steel grating. The air in this hall had a sharp, metal prickle that raised the fine hairs on his arms and neck. Even after five thousand years of total shutdown, the massive copper conductors held a lingering static charge. A phantom potential of four hundred and twenty volts, trapped within the baked-clay insulators and the dry, non-current-carrying air.
