The air in the lee of Titus’s dark rock shell was five degrees warmer than the freezing gale howling through the breach. But it smelled of blood, raw harsh cleaning acid, and the bitter sulfur of burnt cartridge powder.
Arthur Vance wiped the sweat and stone dust from his forehead with the back of his forearm. His fingers never left the brass locking-ring of his air-powered needle glove. Behind him, the breach in Wall 7-B was an eighty-meter wound of shattered concrete, but for now, the rubble ramp was still. The first wave of acid-spitters and razor-scorpions had been broken against the Line of Obsidian and Iron. That left three hundred yards of churned mud choked with steaming black beast-blood and shattered hard shell.
“Set the third running slab here,” Arthur ordered. He pointed with his heavy dark metal razor knife toward a dry patch of flat stone slabs sheltered beneath the overhang of Titus’s left costal scute. “Use the ammunition crates for legs. Toby, secure the zinc sheet with wire so the wind doesn’t lift it.”
“On it! I’m on it!” Toby Mallow yelled back, his breath pluming in white clouds as he wrestled a heavy sheet of zinc-coated zinc across two wooden cartridge boxes. His left pinky finger was taped tightly to his ring finger where Arthur had reduced the out-of-joint. But he moved with desperate, nervous speed. His taped tortoiseshell glasses were fogged with grease. His cadet coat was soaked in mud from collar to hem.
