The staging camp was hidden inside an abandoned storm-surge retention basin. A cavernous, heavy-concrete water tank two miles south of Refinery Fourteen that had dried into a cave of stone-hard lime and rusted steel baffles.
The massive concrete walls, eight feet thick and stained with decades of black heavy-duty runoff, provided complete heat and sound shielding from the self-running radar scanners sweeping the upper air.
Arthur Vance knelt on a rubber mat beside the left front wheel of the scout buggy, his Zeiss-Vanguard monocle connected via a padded fiber-optic cable to a portable tactical end-post balanced on an ammunition crate. On the monochrome monitor, a composite three-space-folding topographic overlay of Refinery Fourteen rotated in clean vector lines.
Kira Jansen stood beside him, her sniper goggles pushed up onto her forehead, a tin mug of lukewarm chicory broth cradled between her grease-stained gloves.
“Three main defensive perimeters,” Kira said. He tapped the screen with the tip of a brass cartridge casing. “First ring is a sound sonar net strung along the canal bed. Any organic shifted weight larger than thirty pounds triggers air-powered depth charges every twenty yards. Second ring is that concrete floodgate wall. Six dual-barreled tiny rotary cannons slaved to passive infrared and aether-spectral scanners. Third ring is the internal guard post: forty spliced shock-troops, an unknown number of discard crawlers, and whatever abominations they’ve got chained inside the cracking towers.”
