The launch terrace was a tiered arena of high-pressure steam and frozen iron.
In the center of the terrace, embedded twelve feet deep into the solid mountain stone, sat the launch trough of the World-Nail. It was a thirty-foot channel of polished dark rock, heavy with four-inch blue-steel plates salvaged from the dead Spire shock troopers. Sitting in the trough was the fourteen-foot harpoon. Its fluted steel shaft shone with cold, violet contract runes, its three-hundred-pound diamond head pointed skyward at an acute angle of fifty-one degrees.
Behind the harpoon sat the forward thrust assembly. Two four-foot steam pistons, connected by heavy bronze pipe hubs directly to the mountain’s earth-heat vent, held back by a forged steel release dog as thick as an oak beam.
Trailing from the rear metal ring of the harpoon was a three-inch braided heavy dark metal-core cable. It lay coiled in a sixty-foot wooden tub lined with beef animal fat, its bitter end clamped to the main Tectonic Anchor pin that plunged twenty-eight feet into the land-wide mantle.
Ten minutes before the firing window, while Marshal Ren was on the upper watching platform taking final windage readings, a shadow slipped behind the main steam pipe hub.
