Five leagues past the shelter of the foundation keel, the upkeep girder met a total collapse.
Lin Tao halted at the lip of a yawning deep gap.
The star-iron narrow high walkway had not merely been cut. An entire thirty-pace section of the Precursor superstructure had collapsed into the void below. Worse, Lin Tao’s augmented left eye detected no invisible crash planes spanning the gap.
Here, the foundational shape itself had failed to compile.
During the First Age, two huge earth-shaking sectors—the Northern Continental Plate and the Western Celestial Shelf—had been stitched together by the world-size engineers. But where the two map point sectors met, the boundary vertices were separated by a thirty-pace fracture where the underlying memory map had never been stitched.
It was an open, unstitched map point seam thirty paces wide. He dropped directly into total non-existence.
Lin Tao knelt at the broken edge, inspecting the anchor sockets on their side of the girder.
The star-iron walkway was heavy with heavy Precursor load-bearing sockets. Six-sided holes four inches wide, drilled into the main load-bearing flanges to allow upkeep crews to mount temporary cantilever bridges.
