A stench of scorched whale-oil and melting copper wire drifted down from the sky. It blotted out the sweet scent of the blooming clover.
High above the northern pass, the royal sky-dreadnought Heavenly Mandate was beginning to smoke. It wasn’t the clean, white steam of expanding boiler water. It was the thick, acrid, yellow-gray smoke of stone heat padding cooking inside the ship’s main spark raceways. The high-hum back-and-forth swing of the deadlocked control valves was inducing massive eddy currents in the bronze hull plates. That turned the inside framework of the ship into a huge, ungrounded pushback coil.
From the gun deck of the flagship, panicked shouts echoed across the valley.
Royal sailors, their faces blackened with soot and grease, leaned over the bulwarks. They hauled on manual emergency ropes in a futile effort to adjust the stabilizing trim-vanes. But the vanes were bound to the self-running steering arrays. With the control bus locked in an infinite wait query, the high-pressure lines refused to yield an inch to mortal muscle. The heavy bronze steering quadrants remained frozen at forty-degree angles. It locked the fleet into a slow, helpless flat spin.
In distributed cluster management, Lin Tao observed. He watched the formation tracking data disintegrate across his test overlay, the failure of the master node always cascades to the worker nodes if the comms mesh lacks a solitude circuit breaker. The royal fleet was designed to operate as a unified tactical mind, with every escort frigate syncing its flight controls…
