Even with its front chassis crumpled and its high-pressure legs shattered, the Chimera Juggernaut was still an active, deadly weapon platform.
Inside the overturned cockpit, Baron Korgan Rask was thrashing in his neural harness like a rabid animal. His man-made fight-or-flight rush pumps were injecting maximum dosages into his main neck blood vessel, driving his pupils into dilated black circles and fueling a desperate, suicidal hysteria.
With his left hand, Rask bypassed the machine’s shattered high-pressure drive levers and seized the manual emergency fire control handle for the dorsal chemical acid cannons.
“Die! Die with me, you commoner scum!” Rask screamed through the dented loudspeaker horns.
Mounted atop the tilted chassis, the twin high-pressure chemical projectors groaned as their motorized gimbal rings whined into posture. The cannons swiveled downward, their wide-bore nozzles aiming directly at Arthur Vance, Grimm, and Titus in the bottom of the ravine.
A rhythmic, high-pressure chugging sound began deep within the machine’s external acid reservoirs as backup steam pumps primed forty gallons of boiling man-made copper-arsenic solvent.
“Arthur, the acid lines are priming!” Captain Varley shouted from the trench low roof wall. “Take cover!”
Arthur didn’t dive for cover.
