The sky above the Great Rust-Sea didn’t fall. It boiled away.
Three seconds after High Inquisitor Keith Mercer’s shattered command crawler collapsed into a blazing bright heap of melted alloy, the upper ionosphere turned the color of bruised copper. Arthur Vance didn’t need to consult the tactical tracking data end-post bolted to his chest rig to know what was coming. Through the multi-spectral sight array of his Zeiss-Vanguard monocle, he could already see the sky refraction lines bending. The heat pre-burn of a sky-high moving bombardment satellite calibrating its spinal magnetic rails from two hundred and ten miles above the world-size curve.
“Hammer strike incoming!” Arthur’s voice cut through the whistling desert gale, stripped clean of panic, flat and cold and exact as an emergency room triage order. “Toby, dump the backup ballast! Form the wedges! Drive the convoy straight into the fault line!”
Fifty paces to his left, Toby Mallow hauled wildly on the dual steering levers of the lead hauler. The young supply boss’s face was chalky white beneath a thick layer of axle grease and crushed bitter salt dust. But his hands moved with hard-won clockwork care. The diesel engine beneath his boots screamed as its superchargers pulled in white-hot air, venting dark plumes of exhaust across the salt crust.
