The forward mid-air bracket of the Brass Sovereign tore free from the granite ceiling with a sound like a four-pounder naval gun discharging inside a stone tomb.
Three-inch braided steel cables, under thousands of tons of static and dynamic tension, whipped through the upper gloom of the dome with faster-than-sound speed. The cut cable ends sliced through the iron narrow high walkways, cutting heavy bronze steam-mains in half as easily as a butcher’s knife parting suet.
The Brass Sovereign had been built as the ultimate mobile castle of the Iron Bureau. Its hull was four hundred feet long, sixty feet wide, and four decks deep, framed in heavy oak beams harvested from the drowned forests of the Northern Shelf and sheathed in double-layered plates of cold-rolled black steel three inches thick. Its forward ram was cast from solid bronze, weighing forty tons, shaped into the snarling face of a horned sea-serpent with hollow eyes through which high-pressure liquid flame could be discharged.
Released from its forward mooring, the four-hundred-ton armored warship pitched forward wildly. The bow plunged twenty arm-lengths toward the floor of the High Dais, the massive black iron ram swinging down like the blade of a huge guillotine.
