The intake tunnel was an iron throat six feet in width, smooth with slime and slick with green algae.
Yan Zhiqiu did not struggle against the current. In an enclosed pipe carrying four hundred carts of water per minute, any try to swim against the stream would merely waste oxygen and exhaust the limbs. She lined up her body with the central axis of the flow, her bare heels trailing behind her, her chin tucked against her collarbone.
Ahead of her in the dark, the roar of the turbine grew into a nonstop clockwork scream.
The main suction impeller of the port intake was an eight-bladed wheel of cast bell-bronze, six feet across, housed within a heavy casing of fire-rolled void-iron. Each blade was curved like a reaper’s scythe, sharpened along its leading edge to slice through kelp, driftwood, and hadal flotsam that might foul the steam cooler tubes. The blades revolved forty times a minute, driven by a compound steam piston on the deck above.
Between the tip of each bronze blade and the cast-iron casing was a clearance gap of less than half an inch.
Through that half-inch gap rushed thousands of gallons of high-pressure salt water.
If she struck the rotating hub, the moving impact would shatter her skull. If she was caught by the leading edge of a blade, the bronze would sever her torso like a butcher’s cleaver.
