The twin winch houses straddling the Grand Bypass Channel were cavernous vaults of riveted iron plate and heavy timber beams, perched ninety feet above the boiling rock trench.
Inside each house sat a clockwork monster. A titan lifting winch built eighty years ago by the Royal Naval Yard at Oakhaven. Each winch consisted of a ten-foot width cast-iron cable drum, grooved to carry two hundred feet of four-inch braided Swedish wire rope. It was driven by a quadruple-compound spur gear train with teeth eight inches wide and three inches deep.
When Tomas entered the western winch house with Renn Tal and Jared Vance, the smell inside was choking. Forty years of dried bat guano, coal dust, and stone-hard sheep fat that had hardened into a crust like black asphalt across every gear tooth.
“Look at these journals,” Renn Tal said, thrusting his torch close to the four-foot bronze bearing sleeve that supported the main drum shaft. He scraped the crust with a cold chisel, producing a shower of hard, black flakes. “The animal fat has polymerized. It’s hard as dried horn. If you put twenty-five tons of load on this drum with dry bearings, the friction will gall the bronze in ten revolutions and weld the shaft to the housing.”
