The armory of the Grand Regional Checker office was flooded with cold mountain sunlight as Lin Tao and Tie Shan prepared their gear for the southern expedition.
On the four-inch-thick walnut workbench, Lin Tao conducted a careful, careful check of their physical hardware.
First was his main test instrument: the four-inch cold-drawn steel land-mapper metal pen. Lin Tao clamped the metal pen into a small brass bench vise and spent forty-five minutes working the diamond-ground plumb point against a fine Arkansas oilstone, sharpening the needle-sharp tip until it could slice a single hair floating in a bowl of water without disturbing the surface.
The four-inch cold-drawn steel land-mapper metal pen rested in Lin Tao’s palm like a familiar, loyal friend. Over the past three months, this simple four-inch rod of cold-drawn steel had served as a transit compass, a circuit breaker, a pry-tool, a weapon of lethal self-defense, and an irreplaceable sanity anchor against the terrifying reality glitches of the cosmos. He ran his thumb down the freshly oiled shaft. Then, he could feel the tiny diamond-ground facets at the tip, sharp enough to score glass without applying pressure.
Beside the metal pen lay their specialized Precursor tooling:
Thirty fresh star-copper grounding shunts, machined with razor-sharp three-sided biting teeth. Five hardened steel posture wedges. Two three-hundred-foot coils of braided mountain hemp rope, newly treated with beeswax to resist acidic river mud. Three sets of brass measuring tongs. And twelve micro-needles of hardened star-iron, designed to seat into Precursor high-pressure and…
