Seventy leagues below the upper galleries, resting directly beneath the breathing mouths of the Seven Tidal Veins, lay the beating heart of the Primordial Ark: the Core Engine Keelson.
This was the central stone-built spine of the vessel. A huge, unbroken girder of cast star-bronze, sixty leagues long, five leagues wide, and three leagues deep. It wasn’t a hollow hull. It was a fine, detailed, solid-state machine bay containing the main world-size gear-trains, flywheel governors, and high-pressure turbines designed by the First Sovereign to convert the moving driving force of cosmic tides into propulsive force.
For three full epochs, this amazing machine had remained dead and silent, its sixty-league spine hanging nine arm-lengths above its foundation bed, suspended in cold empty pocket like a corpse in a tomb.
Now, with the ten thousand old family souls pouring their spiritual mass down through the astral cordage, the bottom spine-beam was ready to make contact with its foundation caisson.
Qiao Ming and Yan Zhiqiu stood upon the main thrust-bearing platform at twenty-eight thousand six hundred deep-water lengths. He watched the huge bronze machinery slowly fill with warm, emerald seed-water.
The chamber was overwhelming in its clockwork majesty. Towering world-size gears, each thirty deep-water lengths in width and cast with teeth as thick as city gates, rose through the clear fluid like the wheels of an inverted cosmos. Massive counterweighted balance-beams, forged from star-fallen bronze and tipped with emerald balance weights of sixty thousand pounds, hung poised over deep high-pressure dashpots.
