The air didn’t tear. It burst.
When the Iron Judicator Null-01 discharged its backup rotary battery, the blast didn’t echo across the Caldera of Vulcan-Khorat. It flattened the air. Four thousand yards of frozen mountain air tightly packed into a white blast wave of white-hot fog, throwing Ren Vale against the iron support post with enough violence to drive the breath from his lungs. The slate shingles of the chimney apron crumbled into fine grey flour, carried away on a wall of sound fury that deafened both ears to a high, metal drone.
Through the ringing void, Ren saw the valley below ignite.
The giant statue had not fired at them. Torvald Crane didn’t waste eighty-pound sabot shells on three fleas clinging to a chimney pipe rim. The Judicator had turned its torso thirty degrees to the southwest. He pointed its quad rotary railguns down into the dark, smoke-choked rift of Sector Four.
There, four thousand feet beneath the high overhead frame, the Flue District had been celebrating.
Ren could still see the pinpricks of yellow torchlight where the Un-Grafted and the liberated foundry shifts were dismantling the gatehouses. They had broken the chain-gang locks. They were dragging sacks of meal from Silas Vance’s commissary vaults. They had begun to believe that an audit on paper could dismantle three hundred years of iron law.
