The four-ton war-rhino hit thirty miles per hour in the span of forty feet, its three-inch baked-clay-plated hooves chewing gouges into the heavy-duty floor of Transit Hub Beta. Every breath from its fungal-swollen lungs sprayed dark, rotting filaments into the circulating air, its lowered horn aimed squarely at Arthur’s chest bone with enough moving driving force to derail an armored freight locomotive.
Arthur didn’t try to dodge. In an enclosed underground concourse. It stepped aside would simply direct the charging behemoth into the civilian shelter gates twenty yards behind him. There, four hundred unarmed office workers and customs clerks were screaming against the locked blast doors.
Instead, Arthur held his ground. His left hand tapped the sound deep ring transmitter on his throat collar.
“Titus. Anchor.”
From the western wall of the concourse, the fifty-ton heavy steel doors of the heavy vehicular freight elevator shuddered under huge internal pressure. The safety interlocks didn’t disengage. They were blown outward off their high-pressure tracks with an ear-splitting screech of snapped hard dark metal-steel pins.
Through the billowing cloud of crushed concrete and drywall dust, sixteen metric tons of tightly packed fiery dark rock surged onto the floor.
Titus didn’t run. Tortoises of the Northern Xuanwu lineage didn’t possess a running gait. Their movement was rooted in earth-shaking mass shifted weight. Instead, the ancient behemoth carried out a short, sliding descent, dropping his massive belly shell directly onto the polished concrete floor like an armored anvil falling from a heavy-duty overhead frame crane…
