CHAPTER 15: THE COST OF MOMENTUM
Silas did not try to block the blow.
He let the heavy iron rod strike his injured left shoulder. The agony was blinding—a white flare of pain that nearly knocked him unconscious—but as the Chancellor swung, Silas threw his entire body weight forward, tackling the old man around his waist.
They collided with a brutal crash on the narrow, ice-slicked grating.
Sterling was heavier than he looked, his internal brass framework giving him unnatural density. The two men rolled across the slippery iron, clawing at each other with feral desperation, inches from the sheer drop into five thousand feet of freezing air.
Sterling’s artificial hand locked around Silas’s throat, the cold brass fingers tightening with the mechanical force of an industrial vise.
"You are nothing!" the Chancellor snarled, spatters of bloody saliva freezing on his chin. "A cog! A disposable tooth in an engine built by your betters!"
Silas couldn't breathe. His vision was swimming with black spots; the roaring of the wind seemed to fade into a dull, underwater hum. His fingers scrabbled uselessly against the cold metal plates of Sterling’s throat.
A cog, Silas’s dying consciousness echoed the word. Yes. And what happens when a cog refuses to turn?
With his free right hand, Silas reached down into the snow between their bodies, his fingers finding the handle of his heavy spanner.
He didn't strike Sterling’s head.
With the last ounce of strength in his arm, Silas drove the long steel handle of the spanner straight into the teeth of the hydraulic release winch behind Sterling's back—the very mechanism he had been trying to free.
Then, he reached up with his left hand, grabbed the trip-wire lever, and pulled it down with his dying breath.
The frozen release pin snapped.
The ten-ton hydraulic counterweight, freed from its frozen jam, dropped like a guillotine.
THUNG!
The massive hardened-steel blade of the release mechanism sliced through the first adamantine mooring chain with an ear-splitting crack that sounded like a mountain splitting in half.
The severed chain—under millions of pounds of tension—whipped backward with terrifying, supersonic speed.
The heavy, six-foot-long links of solid metal swept across the gantry like an iron scythe.
"No—!" Sterling’s scream was cut short.
The whipping chain caught the Chancellor across his armored chest. The sheer kinetic energy sheared through his brass-reinforced spine like wet twine, ripping the old man completely out of Silas’s grip and launching his broken body off the edge of the gantry into the roaring vacuum of the sky.
Silas was thrown flat against the grating, the wind of the chain's passage tearing his goggles from his face.
The remaining two mooring chains, unable to bear the asymmetrical load of the firing thrusters, snapped in rapid succession: CRACK! CRACK!
Free of its anchors, the thousand-foot sky-dreadnought Aethelgard surged upward into the heavens with a deafening roar of aetheric plasma.
The massive ship tilted on its axis, caught in the swirling gravitational undertow of the chronal rift. Silas lay on the ice-covered platform, watching through frost-rimed lashes as the white porcelain vessel was dragged into the center of the violet vortex.
For a second, the ship hung suspended in the eye of the tear—its gleaming hull reflecting the golden light of an unseen, ancient sun.
Then, with an implosion of sound that pulled the air from Silas’s lungs, the rift snapped shut.
The sky was suddenly, miraculously clear.
The howling wind died away. The blinding purple lightning evaporated into thin air. Above the summit of Oakhaven, there was only the quiet, freezing vastness of the midnight sky, dusted with ten thousand indifferent stars, and the pale, clean light of the crescent moon shining down on the snow.
Silas lay on his back on the catwalk, staring up at the heavens. He couldn't feel his fingers; he couldn't feel his toes. His breath came in thin, shallow wisps that froze into white crystals on his lips.
The silence returned. But this time, it was not the suffocating, artificial silence of Sector Zero.
It was the quiet of a mountain that had finally ceased to scream.
A soft scrape of boots on iron echoed along the gantry.
Through his blurred vision, Silas saw a silhouette kneeling beside him. A pair of warm, trembling hands slipped beneath his head, lifting him gently from the freezing metal. A face appeared above his—pale, soot-streaked, with cropped silver hair and amber eyes that were bright with unshed tears.
"Silas," Vesper whispered, her voice shaking as she pulled her warm wool scarf from her neck and wrapped it tightly around his frostbitten throat. "Silas, stay with me. The ship is gone. It's over."
Silas managed a faint, cracked smile, his teeth chattering uncontrollably.
"Did... did the mountain... hold?" he rasped.
Vesper looked out over the edge of the gantry.
Down below, piercing through the thick shroud of sulfurous clouds that covered the Low Quarters, a series of long, golden flares were rising into the night sky. One, two, three... dozens of them, launched from the catwalks of the foundries, the gantry towers, and the worker barracks.
The emergency sirens had stopped.
In their place, the deep, resonant tone of the Great Gear echoed from five thousand feet below—not the strained, frantic grinding of a machine being choked to death, but a slow, rhythmic, steady pulse: thrum-click, thrum-click, thrum-click.
The parasite was dead. The engine was breathing on its own.
"It held," Vesper whispered, pressing her forehead against his cold cheek. "The tolerances held, Silas. You fixed the city."
Silas let his head sink back against her arm, his eyes closing as exhaustion finally claimed him.
"Good," he murmured into the dark. "Because tomorrow... we have to rebuild... the whole damn thing."