The underground gallery of Trench Sector Four was an underground catacomb excavated forty feet beneath the surface of the Sunken Fissure. Shored up with huge sixteen-inch pine timbers and heavy with scrap locomotive rails, it served as the underground sleeping quarters for eighty commoner infantrymen of the Fourth Battalion.
Now, it had become a tomb.
Arthur Vance reached the entrance of the lower gallery. Then, the scene was one of world-ending chaos.
Clouds of crushed dark rock dust and toxic sulfur vapor billowed from the mouth of the tunnel, lit by the flickering crimson glare of emergency flares. Screams of trapped men echoed from the dark depths, mingled with the terrifying, nonstop shriek of splintering pine and the deep, grinding roar of collapsing bedrock.
Instructor Valerie Koslov was at the tunnel mouth, her uniform caked in mud, desperately hauling on a hemp rope with a dozen soldiers, trying to drag a wounded corporal out from beneath a pile of shattered timbers.
“The retaining wall gave way!” Koslov shouted over the ear-splitting roar of falling rock. “Rask’s deep-core ground-shaking drills in the upper refinery triggered an artificial fault slip between the dark rock roof and the lower shale formation! The entire western stone retaining wall is sliding into the drainage canal! The main support arch in Barracks B is buckling! If that arch falls, twenty tons of dark rock will bury eighty men alive!”
