The inside of the mobile razor-sharp shelter mounted across Titus’s rear back shell was a cramped, humming pocket of desperate smooth speed.
Titus stood rock-still in the center of the muddy trench intersection, his four massive columnar legs locked into the sub-bedrock, his heavy head lowered to shield the forward access ramp. Above him, his broad dark rock back shell—nearly three meters across—formed a solid, shaking-dampened running platform that deflected incoming acid spray. It fell stone chips, and spent rifle brass with dull, ringing thuds. The great terrapin’s earth-heat internal fire radiated a steady, sixty-degree warmth through the floorboards, keeping the razor-sharp instruments from freezing in the bitter morning air and preventing freezing coagulopathy in the wounded soldiers lying on the zinc slabs.
“Hold his shoulders down!” Arthur shouted, stripping off his blood-soaked leather handling gloves and tossing them into a zinc wash-basin.
Beneath his bare hands lay a nineteen-year-old commoner scout, his uniform shredded by acid-strikers. The boy’s face was the color of skimmed milk. His lips turned a faint, dusky blue as his chest heaved in shallow, painful gasps. Dark, frothy blood bubbled from a jagged puncture wound between his fourth and fifth left ribs. It hissed with every desperate breath as the chest around the lungs filled with sky air.
