Chapter 217: Green Sky (1)
It was five in the morning.
Halvers had come out of the Command tent and found 206 people already standing in the fog. All of them were facing the tower.
No order was issued for them. They had just come out.
Three hundred feet above them, at the top of a Star-Iron lattice that had not existed thirty hours ago, four figures moved on the seating platform.
Cole had kept the case safe with him all the time.
He slept with the case, ate with the case and refused to let go it even when asked by his fellow engineers.
It was now the time to open the case. He knelt on the platform to open the case.
The cradle came out into the gray morning light and the Star-Iron caught what little there was of it.
It didn't feel like a part of a machine. The metal ran in overlapping curves that folded inward on themselves, and every surface of it was faintly, constantly moving, on a scale too fine to see and impossible to miss.
