The sound of Unit Ren’s heavy four-jaw chuck driving a three-foot steel wedge into the fiery fissure was like an iron hammer striking an anvil.
CLANG. CLANG. CRACK.
The dark rock shelf—a twenty-foot square of solid black fiery rock, four feet thick and weighing nearly forty tons—groaned under the clockwork leverage. A spiderweb of fractures raced along the stone’s roots, detaching the massive slab from the mountain rim with a sound like tearing parchment.
“Refugees onto the stone!” Ren Prime roared over the roar of the dropping dreadnought’s turbines. “Leave the heavy cargo! Women and children to the center! Hold the guy-lines!”
Three hundred men, women, and children scrambled off the wooden barge, their boots clattering across the dark rock slab.
Unit Ren seized the main steering sweep and jammed it into the central fissure, providing a six-foot iron lever for manual aimed control. Mira knelt at the center of the rock, her charcoal shawl wrapped around two shivering orphan girls. Her glowing quartz arm was held out like a lantern to guide the panicked miners.
Apostate Ren and Ren Prime knelt at opposite corners of the stone.
“Vector formula: forty-two degrees negative mass,” Apostate Ren rasped, dipping his blackened fingers into the pig-iron pot of star-fallen ink. “Ren, you must scribe the friction multiplier. If the stone drops in a pure empty pocket, end-post speed will crush their lungs upon landing. We need the air to bite the rock.”
