The three-ton bronze boiler tank stood at the northern end of the greenhouse like a swollen, hissing beast, shaking under five sea-weights of internal steam pressure.
Beneath its riveted belly, the bootleg braided copper cables glowed with an angry, cherry-red heat where forty thousand volts of stolen Precursor current were being forced through crude iron heating coils. The water inside was screaming at a nonstop sound pitch of eight point four cycles per second. It sent jets of scalding white vapor shooting through leaking solder joints. The air in the immediate area of the tank was shimmering with intense heat-rising heat. It smelled of scorched stone lime and burned machine oil.
Tie Shan walked to the edge of the stone base, his callused feet gripping the wet flags.
The giant didn’t rush. He took a slow, deep breath of the hot, humid air, planting his balance point directly over his hips. He gripped his twelve-pound cold-drawn iron pry-bar with both hands. He wrapped three layers of coarse, dry hemp cloth around the shaft to insulate his palms against the massive magnetic-pull voltage humming through the bronze tank. His Peak Iron-Bone thickness gave him extraordinary pushback to blunt trauma and heat. But even a master of the physical arts respected sixty thousand volts of unbuffered Precursor current.
