London

	Her fear had made her forget St Paul’s. Now, looking up at Top Tier, she saw the cobra-hood of MEDUSA start to crackle with violet lightning. The hair on her arms and the back of her neck prickled, and when she reached for Pomeroy’s hand pale sparks jumped between the tips of her fingers and his robes. “Mr Pomeroy!” she shouted. “What’s happening?”

	“Great Quirke!” the Historian cried. “What have those fools awoken now?”

	Ghostly spheres of light detatched themselves from the glowing machine and drifted down over Circle Park like fire-balloons. Lightning danced around the spires of the Guildhall. The rushing, whining roar grew louder and louder, higher and higher, until even with her hands clapped over her ears Katherine felt she could not bear a moment more of it. Then, quite suddenly, a stream of incandescent energy burst from the cobra’s hood and stretched northwards, a snarling, spitting cat-o’- ninetails lashing out to lick at the upperworks of Panzerstadt-Bayreuth. The night split apart and went rushing away to hide in the corners of the sky. For a second Katherine saw the tiers of the distant conurbation limned in fire, and then it was gone. A pulse of brightness lifted from the earth, blinding white, then red, a pillar of fire rushing up in silence into the sky, and across the flame-lit snow the sound-wave came rolling, a low, long-drawn-out boom as if a great door had slammed shut somewhere in the depths of the earth.

Chapter 23: Medusa, Mortal Engines, Part 2, pg 98/152

	Vambrace shakes his head. “Fires are still burning all over the wreck. But we circled as low as
we dared and took photographs. The upper tiers have melted and collapsed onto the lower, and it looks as if all the boilers and fuel-stores exploded at the first touch of our energy beam.”

	Crome nods. “Were there any survivors?” “A few signs of life, between the tiers, but otherwise...” The security man’s eyes go wide behind his thick glasses, looking like a pair of jellyfish in an aquarium. His department is always keen to find new and inventive ways to kill people, and he is still excited at the thought of the dry, charred shapes he saw littering the streets and squares of Panzerstadt-Bayreuth, many of them still standing upright, flashed into clinker statues by the gaze of MEDUSA.

Chapter 25: The Historians, Mortal Engines, 105/152