The void-dredger did not charge; it ground forward with the ice-slow, crushing inevitability of an iron mountain.
Its massive caterpillar treads, each link cast from three-inch void-iron and pinned with hardened steel bolts, bit into the granite paving of the outer avenue with a sound like iron teeth chewing through gravel. Beneath the twenty-ton weight of the chassis, the historic flat stone slabs of Entry hall 380 cracked, buckled, and crushed into gray flour. High above the track-frames, twin upright fire-tube boilers roared under forced draft, spewing plumes of oily black smoke and stinging sulfur vapor against the vaulted ceiling.
At the front of the dreadnought, the cone-shaped black glass drill-head was spinning at eight hundred turns a minute.
The six-foot cone of black fiery glass tore through the humid air with a high-pitched, ringing whine that set the green rust copper rings on Qiao Ming’s harness singing in sympathetic distress. A vortex of displaced air and soot pushed ahead of the drill, carrying the heat of the boilers straight toward the thirty-first gate.
Behind the ninety-arm-length curtain of silver-blue light, Qiao Ming stood unmoving.
His bare calloused feet, stained with the dried black residue of his own lung blood, remained planted in the fluted groove of the green jade doorstep. The bandages around his palms, soaked in the cold mucilage of sea-cucumbers, were tight and stiff. But his swollen, blistered fingers curled naturally around the hemp-wrapped hemp-core of the braided horsehair line.
