The silence that settled over Valve Station Delta was deep, vast, and broken only by the rhythmic, musical trickle of clean water draining through the white jade deck drains.
Lin Tao leaned against the cold brass pipe hub, his chest heaving as the chemical numbness of the Breath-Holding Pill finally dissolved from his lung passages. He drew his first deep, unhindered breath of real air in over an hour.
The cold, clean mountain air tasted of alpine meadows and crushed pine resin, shocking Lin Tao’s senses with its total purity. For twenty minutes, his body had functioned under the artificial body-energy frozen stillness of the Breath-Holding Pill. Now, with real oxygen flooding his bloodstream, his heart sped up to a healthy, vigorous eighty beats per minute, his scarred right palm tingling with returning breath flow.
The air was freezing, sharp, and intensely clean, tasting of pure snowmelt and deep-crust stone quartz. It filled his burning lungs like chilled wine, washing away the lingering metal tang of ozone and sulfur.
Lin Tao drew a slow, trembling breath, his left hand moving instinctively to his cuff.
He pulled the four-inch cold-drawn steel land-mapper metal pen from its sheath. The diamond-ground plumb point was slightly blunted from the impact against the transducer housing. The shaft bore faint, rainbow-colored heat stains from the high-voltage arc discharge.
