The distance between the charging Gorgon-Stitch and Gate 4 closed from four hundred meters to two hundred and fifty in less than twenty seconds.
The earth beneath the outer trench line was heaving like a stormy sea. Mounds of gravel and frozen mud leaped three inches off the ground with every timed together stomp of the behemoth’s eight iron-shod legs. In the air, the screech of its six nested maws was so ear-splitting that several cadets on the castle wall fell to their knees, blood trickling from their ears. The sound pressure shook their skulls.
Arthur Vance didn’t flinch. He adjusted the earpiece of his tactical comms. His voice dropped into the cold, steady beat of a chief surgeon dictating an operative plan in a crowded theater.
“Toby, record tactical tracking data,” Arthur commanded. “Phase One through Three set. Clock is running.”
“Tracking data recording active!” Toby shouted through the comms, his fingers flying across the console in the safe hall bunker. “Arthur, that beast has sixty thousand horsepower of forward driving force! If the fracture doesn’t take on the first hit, Titus’s shell will have to absorb a direct locomotive crash!”
“The fracture will take,” Arthur said with total cold and exact certainty. “Biology doesn’t negotiate with physics.”
