The physical consequences of an emergency world-size rollback were total.
Deep within the upright shaft of the Grand Sovereign Relay Tower, the six main star-copper coolant channels groaned under a massive, high-pressure water-hammer effect. The signal spindle came to an instant dead stop. Then, twenty million gallons of high-pressure liquid jade oil had nowhere to go. The moving driving force of the fluid slammed into the underground valve pipe hubs with the force of an exploding volcano.
THOOM!
The entire twelve-hundred-foot tower shivered wildly, swaying three feet to the west.
“Hold the wall!” Lin Tao shouted, lunging forward to grab Xiao Hu’s collar as the marble deck tilted beneath their boots.
Tie Shan slammed the butt of his twenty-one-ton star-iron totem down into a seam between two marble flags, wedging the pillar like an unmoving anchor pin. With his uninjured right arm, he caught Old Chen by the leather belt. He hauled the veteran miner back from an open archway.
“The tower is shaking apart,” Tie Shan warned, his boots sliding against loose stone.
“The cooling loop has burst!” Lin Tao called out, his sight array reading the heat tracking data bleeding from the floor vents. “The spindle has stopped. But the power-coil charge banks are dumping forty million megajoules of leftover static charge into the foundation!”
