The air above Sector Four didn’t smell of ozone. It smelled of melted glass and boiled away brass.
Three hundred cannonballs struck the defensive curtain every five seconds.
The impacts were so dense that the single thuds blurred into a nonstop, ear-splitting roar like a runaway waterfall plunging into a gravel gorge.
Through the semi-clear amber film of the Seven Star Pass barrier, the incoming ordnance looked like a falling ceiling of green fire.
*
Every second, three hundred newly stamped copper hex tiles reached their heat limit, popped from their brass mounting brackets. Then they dissolved into smoking droplets of molten copper.
Lin Ke sat in his iron wheelchair inside the heavy command bunker behind the curtain wall.
A fresh pot of bitter herbal tea steamed on the table beside him. But his attention was fixed entirely on the pressure tracking data gauges clattering along the wall.
