The city of Castra was really cold in December. The air was still and clear that you could hear things really clearly. The sky was a grey during the day and full of stars at night. The city was under a kind of roof.Beneath this roof the city of Castra was a place of big temperature differences. The streets in the parts of the city were dark and wet because of Evanders steam network. The streets were like roads that cut through the big piles of snow. There were clouds of steam rising from the drains in the streets. The steam made the buildings look like they were in a mist.Evander was sitting in a room in the registry keep. The room was warm because of the steam pipes under the floor.. The atmosphere in the room was tense. Master Ovan was sitting at a table that was covered in papers and books. He was working hard.We are getting overwhelmed by our attention to detail Master Ovan said to Evander. The optical telegraph is making us too efficient. The watchmen are sending us a lot of i

The operation to take out the stuff from the northern waste island bunker started out like a surgery, not a big military attack. The big room in the middle of the bunker, which had been completely quiet for over a hundred years was suddenly filled with the sounds of metal hitting metal. Evander had told the people to keep the doors open so the weak sunlight could come in for about a hundred feet.. After that the work was lit up by the warm flickering light of the special lanterns they brought.Silas the carter had brought the two sleds right up to the entrance of the bunker. The big oxen, which were bred to climb hills were standing nervously their hooves slipping a bit on the dusty metal floor. They were. Making big clouds of vapor in the stale air and they seemed upset by the strong chemical smell of the bunker. Silas spent the hour just walking around them talking to them in a calm voice and giving them handfuls of dry oats to keep them calm. If one of the oxen got scared inside th

The second expeditionary column came back slowly not in a rush like the one. Their lead sled, now stronger with dark iron bands moved heavily through the slushy yard of the northern gatehouse. The mid-afternoon sky was a uniform grey. Snow was melting on the limestone faces of Castra creating veins of water that ran down to the cobblestones.Evander took off his heavy leather harness, his breathing steady. His woolen coat was stiff with mud and salt from the marshes. Behind him twelve scouts under Vesperas command quietly took off their crossbows. Started to unload the big cargo.In the center of the timber frame wrapped in oil-soaked canvas were six spools of pure imperial copper wire. Twelve thousand feet of it. Next to the spools was a hardware emulator in a walnut case its green glass plate cooling down.Master Ovan waited at the lower courtyard entrance a woolen shawl on his shoulders and a wooden slate under his arm. He looked at the spools counting the layers of insulation on t

The Gamma Core was a tough project that needed a lot of precision. The people in the workshops of Castra had never worked on anything like it before. The Alpha and Beta Cores were easy to work with because they used low-frequency electricity.. The Gamma Core was different. It needed to work at a high frequency, which was hard to achieve.The machine could not handle the smallest mistakes. If the central rotor was not perfectly balanced it would cause problems. The whole thing could even break apart.Evander was in the workshop looking at the machine. Karl was working on it trying to make sure everything was perfect. The air was cool and smelled like oil and metal.The tolerance is still not right Karl said. The sun is heating up the wall. That is changing the alignment. We are off by a bit Evander. If we do not fix this the shaft will get stuck tonight when it cools down.Stop the machine, Karl, Evander said. We need to insulate it so the temperature does not change. The metal needs t

The Tuesday in June started with a pale light over the salt marshes. The coastline looked very different after the storms that had passed through during the night. The sky was a grey and the air was thick with the smell of ozone and crushed grass.Evander stood on the dock of the northern waste island transit area. His long coat was blowing in the sea wind. Behind him the big train from Castra was waiting. It had twenty-four railcars linked together with strong steel couplings and was powered by six electric tractors. The tractors were making a humming noise.The automated transport ships had arrived. There were three of them sitting still in the deep-water concrete slips that had not been used for over a hundred years. They were huge. Made of black steel and titanium. Each ship was over four hundred feet long. They had no bridges or lifeboats. Their top part was a curved surface that could withstand extreme weather.Karl walked up to the edge of the slip. Looked up at the big hull of