The backup storm-water overflow vault was a long, dry gallery of heavy concrete, eighty paces long and thirty paces wide, littered with stone-hard gravel mounds and abandoned cast-iron valve casings.
The air was cool and relatively dry, isolated from the sulfur mist by Titus’s sealed dark rock inner wall.
Arthur Vance stood at the southern end of the gallery, his tactical combat boots planted shoulder-width apart on the rough concrete. Across his chest, the Vance Cryo-Pneumatic Transfixer was holstered in its magnetic back-sword sheath. His right hand rested on the grip of his 9.5-inch heavy dark metal stiletto, his left thumb adjusting the rotating quartz filters of his Zeiss-Vanguard monocle.
Along his neck-chest junction, the cooling-oil cooling rig hummed with a low, turbine-like whine, venting a steady stream of odorless white vapor from the dual copper exhaust ports on his shoulders.
At the far end of the gallery, sixty paces away, Kira Jansen had erected three target dummies fashioned from scrap iron rods. He was wrapped in discarded rubber caterpillar treads and stuffed with wet peat to simulate the mass and moving pushback of armored Cerberus shock-beasts.
Beside Arthur’s left heel stood Grimm.
The black glass dread-hound was coiled low, his broad chest nearly touching the concrete, his new hard dark metal-silver-steel claw-caps resting silently on the stone. His ears were pinned flat, his amber eyes burning with intense, hungry math.
