Lin Tao grabbed Tie Shan’s leather shoulder harness, shouting over the ear-splitting clangor of iron on bronze.
“Tie Shan! You must hold Tier Four!” Lin Tao ordered. “If they take this landing, they cut our retreat and ground the signal line. I’m taking Old Chen and two tunnel diggers to the apex deck!”
Tie Shan didn’t turn his head. His focus was locked onto three heavy bronze iron-puppets advancing up the narrow incline, their crushing mauls raised. He swung his totem in a short, brutal arc that shattered the lead unit’s bronze shin.
“Go to the sky,” Tie Shan shouted, his voice a gravelly roar. “I hold the gate.”
“Old Chen, Xiao Hu, bring the copper cables and the spare punches!” Lin Tao commanded, turning toward the inside upkeep work frames that clung to the central cooling column.
The two veteran tunnel diggers hefted their heavy wooden crates of copper cable and followed Lin Tao onto the swaying iron scaffold.
The climb from Tier Four to the summit was six hundred feet of upright, open-air ascent. The iron work frames creaked and shrieked in the updraft of hot ozone rising from the coolant moat below. Every ten seconds, an intense magnetic pulse washed down the central star-copper pipe. It shook the iron rungs so wildly that Lin Tao’s teeth ached in his jaw.
