The forty-pound bronze seal hovered four feet above the unrolled parchment, held aloft by the high-pressure arms of the clockwork giant statue.
Zhu Heling’s sight lenses spun with a sharp, triumphant click, aligning the engraved base of the seal directly over the central rosette of the map. The sharp-angled point representing the Grand Central Round hall and the Keystone of the Seven Seas.
“Go down, Mandate of Brass!” Zhu Heling bellowed.
The steam pistons along his shoulders groaned as they let loose twelve sea-weights of stored pressure. They drove the massive bronze block downward with the moving violence of a falling pile-driver.
Yet the seal never struck the paper.
Three inches above the surface of the parchment, the downward motion of the forty-pound bronze block came to a sudden, violent halt. It didn’t hit stone or iron. It collided with a dense, elastic cushion of high-pressure air that arrested the strike with a dull, hollow thud that echoed through the floor plates.
The recoil shivered through Zhu Heling’s high-pressure arms, forcing his heavy brass chassis back two paces with a screech of stressed gear-teeth. Steam hissed wildly from the safety valves of his wrists as the unexpected pushback threw his balance off-center.
