The mud of Trench 3 was not merely wet. It was boiling with sulfuric fury.
Every three yards along the battered stone retaining wall, circular fissures were bubbling open as the sub-surface swarm drove upward like air-powered pile-drivers. everyone could feel the stench of decomposing bog-moss, crushed iron ore. The sharp, eye-watering fumes of stomach acid that curled off the churned soil in pale yellow ribbons. To an untrained conscript, the sense overload was paralyzing: the ear-splitting rattle of distant Vickers machine guns, the shrieking metal protest of buckling stone retaining wall plates, and the wet, rhythmic churning of thousands of underground claws scraping through limestone beneath their feet.
Arthur Vance moved with the cold, economical rhythm of a surgeon stepping into a contaminated running theater.
He didn’t rush. In close-quarters trench warfare, panic was a fatal body-energy tax. He kept his balance point low, boots planted firmly on the sunken timber sleepers beneath the slurry, the stock of the ARC-7 carbine welded to his cheekbone. His breath fogged steadily against the knurled brass housing of his Zeiss magnifying glass.
Through the aligned sight prisms, the anatomy of the advancing burrowers was stripped of its monstrous horror, reduced to pure clockwork vectors. Arthur saw their internal high-pressure fluid channels, the hardened thickness of their hard shell back shells, and the glowing, web-like pathways of their primitive nervous systems.
