The descent of the Heavenly Mandate didn’t happen all at once.
It happened in three distinct, sickening shuddering drops, each one with the ear-splitting shriek of snapped bronze pins and the groaning of three-hundred-foot cedar beams.
The first drop occurred at midday, when the last reserve of leftover capacitive flux in the flagship’s backup steering vanes decayed to zero. The three-hundred-pace dreadnought dropped ten feet in a heartbeat, the two five-ton star-iron anchor chains snapping taut like bowstrings. A cloud of crushed quartz dust erupted from the cliff-face anchor site five hundred paces up the road, showering the pass in white stone powder.
High on the forecastle, royal sailors screamed in terror. He grabbed the boat sides as the deck tilted twenty degrees beneath their boots.
On the road below, Lin Tao didn’t flinch. He stood thirty paces from the port anchor’s impact crater. His test left eye tracked the clockwork stress vectors rippling through the heavy iron chain links.
In heavy rigging and clockwork mooring, Lin Tao analyzed, his left eye calculating the catenary curve of the shaking cable, an eighteen-thousand-ton suspended load with a safety factor of 1.12 is a disaster waiting for a heat impulse. As the noon sun heats the star-iron chain, the metal expands. An spreading of just a tiny fraction of an inch along the chain’s length increases the sag and redistributes the static load unevenly between the two anchors.
