The outer edge around Beacon Seven was laid out in a series of nested defensive kill-zones.
Lin Tao and Tie Shan crouched behind the collapsed low roof wall of a royal granary three hundred paces south of the green jade tower. Through a cracked embrasure, Lin Tao surveyed the open ground with his sight array, mapping the movement vectors, patrol cycles, and sensor radii of the fine china guards.
There were twelve Gilded Harvesters patrolling the outer slate ring.
They moved in pairs, tracing elliptical patrol paths that overlapped at four critical intersection nodes. Their joints didn’t produce the grind of iron or the creak of oiled leather. They drifted across the flat stone slabs with the whisper of fine china rubbing against dry silk.
“Twelve units,” Lin Tao muttered, tracing their routes in his mind. “Each pair maintains an eighty-foot separation distance. Their visual scanning arcs sweep sixty degrees forward, refreshing every forty-one split seconds.”
“They have no blind spots?” Tie Shan asked, his voice barely above a whisper.
“They have time blind spots,” Lin Tao said. “Between the end of one visual sweep and the beginning of the next, there’s a blind window of a split second. An ordinary fighter moving at maximum speed can’t cross eighty feet in that window. But if we time our movement to the global sync burst, their attention is locked onto the carrier beam.”
