The railway upkeep cave rang with the ear-splitting, rhythmic percussion of heavy air-powered impact wrenches, the hiss of oxy-acetylene cutting torches. The sharp, acrid smell of burning hard dark metal-bronze melted rock waste.
Under Old Thomas’s seasoned direction, thirty commoner mechanics worked in four coordinated crews around the massive steel chassis of the Iron Ark mobile lab. Originally built as an overland armored exploration crawler for surface wastelands, the forty-ton vehicle was undergoing a radical building conversion into a deep-sea-floor underwater craft capable of dropping eight thousand meters beneath the Earth’s crust.
“Double-check every high-pressure seal on the lower pontoon bogies!” Thomas shouted through a haze of grease smoke. He tapped an eight-pound sledgehammer against a heavy mid-air arm. “At eight crushing deep-sea pressure, a pinhole leak in a high-pressure line won’t just cry oil—it will slice through a man’s torso like a heavy-duty water-jet cutter! Pack every grease nipple with high-thickness man-made cooling-oil!”
The standard rubberized road wheels had been removed and replaced with four massive, salvaged hard dark metal-bronze pontoon crawler assemblies taken from Kane’s captured railway supply warehouse. Each track was over two meters wide, featuring heavy chevron-patterned grousers designed to crawl across underwater fiery silt and slick dark rock ledges without losing traction.
