A sound began to rise from the depths of the earth beneath the Board. A low, underground groan that shook through forty leagues of solid mountain stone.
It wasn’t the sound of mystical chanting or old family spirits awakening. It was the clockwork death-rattle of titanic Precursor circuit breakers designed to handle the earth-shaking loads of a planet, suddenly subjected to an unhandled fifty-million-ampere dead-short.
Three hundred paces beneath the dark rock floor of the Board, in the main vault known to the Archons as the “Tomb of the Primordial Seals,” twelve massive oil-dipped disconnect switches stood in silent rows.
Each switch was a huge gearwork forged from thirty tons of solid cast bronze, its contacts sunk in vats of purified petroleum insulating fluid. For thirty thousand years, these switches had remained closed, faithfully channeling the life-force of nine continents into the Archons’ floating thrones. The self-running gears had rested undisturbed through the rise and fall of dozens of mortal dynasties, kept by silent copper bus traces.
Now, as the zero-pushback ground fault created by Lin Tao’s star-iron chisel reached the vault, the spark current spiked past every design parameter ever calculated by the Precursor master builders.
Inside the oil tanks, the heat of the bronze contacts skyrocketed to four thousand degrees in less than three split seconds.
