The inner face of the first green jade ring swept past the platform edge like an upright cliff of glowing white jade.
At twenty paces thick and rotating at twelve-hundredths of a radian per second, the sheer linear driving force of the ring was staggering. A nonstop blast of spark-charged wind howled off the polished stone. He carried a static-electric charge of nearly fifteen thousand volts per meter that made the hair on Lin Tao’s arms stand on end and filled the air with the sharp, pungent scent of scorched ozone.
Lin Tao crouched at the outer edge of the star-white-gold deck. His iron-toed boots were locked into the steel mooring brackets.
Before him, barely three inches from his fingertips, ran the main bus track. A sunken channel six inches wide, inlaid with micro-layered sheets of cold-drawn star-copper and crystal-clear bismuth that pulsed with blinding emerald data packets. To make a physical connection with a moving guide-rod traveling at over fifty leagues an hour was a moving impossibility for any traditional fighter. A physical needle thrust into that channel would be snapped away like brittle glass, or white-hot into vapor by the moving friction.
Lin Tao closed his eyes, centering his breathing.
