The ground beneath Foundation Pier 4 was no longer solid earth. It was a churning, melted sinkhole of gray silt, decomposing drainage clay, and shattered foundation stonework.
Every time an underground blast wave pulsed through the deep rift strata from the southern horizon, the huge sixty-foot pillar groaned like a dying beast. Its massive concrete-and-dark rock mass, weighing over eighty thousand tons where it met the arch of Wall 7-B, tilted another fraction of an inch toward the escape ditch. Forty yards below, in the narrow comms trench that led back to the lower heavy-duty district, more than three hundred commoner militia soldiers, grease-stained foundry workers, and litter-bearers carrying the severely wounded were packed shoulder-to-shoulder. If Pier 4 buckled, the entire central curtain of the wall would shear away in a total avalanche, burying the escape artery under forty feet of stone before a single man could scramble clear.
Arthur Vance didn’t waste breath shouting orders that panic would drown out. Through the Tri-Sync Tactical Mesh, his mental intent flowed directly into Titus’s ancient, unflappable mind: The pier is falling. Anchor the foundation.
Titus didn’t hesitate.
The Continental Basalt Bulwark moved forward with the heavy, slow, unstoppable driving force of an alpine glacier. His two-ton bulk plunged through the muddy slurry at the base of the pillar, his broad, flat claws finding purchase in the crushed foundation gravel beneath the silt. Falling chunks of spalled concrete, loose mortar. Then it spent rifle brass bounced off his dark six-sided armor scales…
