The defeat of his mechanized assault column and the surrender of his vanguard stripped away whatever vestige of high-born sanity Baron Korgan Rask still possessed.
From the crest of the northern ridge, where Rask’s forward command stronghold stood fortified with ten-foot heavy concrete castle walls, a heavy, rhythmic underground shaking began to thrum through the earth.
Arthur Vance stood on the fire-step of Sector Three, his boots planted firmly in the burning lime powder-dusted mud. His brass sight monocle hummed with urgent warning sirens as it analyzed the ground-shaking frequencies shaking through the bedrock.
“Arthur!” Toby Mallow yelled, tumbling out of Dugout Seven with a sound seismograph in his trembling hands. “Look at the needle! The ground beneath our feet is undergoing ringing liquefaction! Rask has fired an underground sonic-drill mortar!”
On the northern ridge, a huge, four-barreled air-powered siege engine had driven four heavy dark metal deep ring harpoons thirty feet deep into the clay stratum.
The harpoons were pulsing at exactly thirty-two hertz. The ringing sound hum of the water-soaked mudflats of Sector Four.
THUMMM-THUMMM.
The deep, nauseating sound pulses traveled through the wet underground soil, breaking the static-electric water’s skin of the clay specks.
