The apex chamber of the Grand Sovereign Relay Tower was a domed hall eighty paces across, open to the crimson heavens through sixteen massive arched openings.
Through the arches, the curdled sky looked close enough to touch. Churning copper and violet clouds spun in a slow, hypnotic vortex directly above the tower, centered upon the sixty-foot bronze receiving dish mounted to the roof outside. Every forty-one split seconds, a thick bolt of violet star-fire jumped from the dish above, arcing down through a padded quartz channel into the center of the chamber.
In the center of the hall stood the heart of the land-wide broadcast network: the Grand Transmission Spindle.
It was a tube-shaped rotor twelve feet tall and eight feet in width, machined from solid, pure-crystal star-white-gold. It spun upon a bed of high-pressure liquid silver at fourteen hundred and forty turns a minute, producing a high-pitched, singing shriek that shook the fluid in Lin Tao’s eyeballs.
Spiraling across the star-white-gold surface were thousands of Precursor logic tracks. It flashed with blinding violet light as the sky payload poured into the rotor from above.
Forty-eight minutes leftover.
Beside the spinning rotor sat the Primary Waveguide Junction—a massive bronze housing the size of a royal carriage, bolted to the floor with twelve cold-iron turnbuckles. Inside this housing, the raw sky data-stream was modulated, amplified. Then he split into the six underground signal feeds that fed the outer country beacons.
