The first spire blew up without a sound, bursting into forty thousand needles of crystal that sliced through the air like iron grapeshot.
They had entered Entry hall 834, known in the ancient charts as the Colonnade of the Shattered Spires. Here, the cobalt crystal ceiling rose two hundred and forty arm-lengths above the floor, supported by four ranks of huge fluted columns carved from glass-fused starlight ice. Each column was twelve arm-lengths in width, fluted with eighty sharp upright arrises that narrowed upward toward massive capitals resembling stone-hard lotus crowns.
The danger here was not cold; it was heat shock.
High above the crystal vault, Zhu Heling’s white-hot steam drills were pumping millions of calories of artificial heat into the dark rock mountain. That heat was conducting downward through the rock, warming the upper joints of the ice columns to thirty degrees below zero. Meanwhile, their lower bases, resting in the starlight salt water sheet, remained clamped at eighty below.
The difference in heat swelling across forty arm-lengths of crystal-clear ice created total inner tearing stresses. The ice did not melt. It shattered along its core cleavage planes, exploding with explosive violence that sent jagged spalls the size of broadswords hurtling through the dark at faster-than-sound speed.
