The low, menacing roar of heavy diesel engines rolled across the lonely mudflats of Sector Four, signaling the commencement of Baron Korgan Rask’s full-scale mechanized ground assault.
Through the rain-streaked watching slits of Sector Three’s heavy fire-step, Arthur Vance surveyed the approaching Royal formation through his brass sight monocle. The morning sky had darkened to a bruised, rotten-egg purple, with freezing drizzle coating the wooden walkway planks and sandbag low roof walls in slick, gray moisture.
Four hundred yards to the north, four medium armored crawlers were churning through the knee-deep clay in an aggressive arrowhead formation.
These were sixty-horsepower, diesel-driven assault tanks armored with two-inch rolled homogeneous iron plating, designed specifically for trench-clearing operations. Mounted within their hemispherical cast-iron turrets were twin water-cooled heavy machine guns capable of discharging six hundred rounds per minute of steel-jacketed ammunition. Behind the lead vehicles, advancing in two loose skirmish lines, were eighty dismounted mercenary infantrymen clad in high-pressure composite blast armor, clutching semi-automatic mag-carbines and heavy fragmentation grenades.
Bringing up the rear was Rask’s assault shock reserve: twenty spliced combat hounds. Heavily augmented mastiffs bred with hard-shelled crawler plating across their spines and silver-steel-capped shearing fangs, held on heavy steel lead-chains by six armored handlers.
