The deep ring of ten thousand frozen wills rose from the depths of the earth as an oceanic hum, steady and deep as the breathing of a sleeping giant beast.
Standing upon the twelfth tier of the dais, Qiao Ming and Yan Zhiqiu held the joined scepter between their palms. Their fingers, bearing the silver-blue lines of the sounding cord and the archival dragon, channeled their vital breath directly into the six-sided shaft of star-fallen iron. The metal responded not with cold heavy rush, but with a deep, rhythmic pulsation that traveled upward through their forearms and settled into their chests.
Through the clockwork linkages of the tiller, their awareness plunged downward through sixty decks of star-sapphire and glass-fused iron. They dropped into the residential cryo-crypts of the deep bottom spine-beam.
There, arrayed across seventy-two thousand clip-on vaults, slept the forty billion citizens of the Third Epoch.
The berths lay in level tiers of cast starlight glass, their forms bathed in the pale green glow of zero-point mid-air fluids. These people did not age. Their hair did not turn silver. Their skin did not wither. Their hearts beat once every sixty seconds, locked in perfect phase with the deepest sixty-four Hertz ground wave generated by the ship’s keel. Each cryo-cell was plumbed with double-walled copper piping. It was wrapped in woven horsehair and sealed with purified pine resin to prevent heat leakage across ten thousand years of cold sleep.
