The convoy of eight heavy armored transport crawlers churned through the rain-drowned outskirts of Sector 3, their eight-foot air-powered tires throwing plumes of gray mud twenty feet into the night air. Outside the heavy vision slits, the glittering chrome spires and lit up sky-bridges of central Mega-City 01 gradually fell behind, swallowed by the low, heavy-duty sprawl of chemical storage yards, self-running grain silos, and raised irrigation viaducts that fed the southern agricultural basin.
Arthur Vance sat in the command cab of the lead crawler, his forearms resting against the shaking-dampened steering console. The cabin was dimly lit by the green soft glow of tactical tracking data screens and the steady amber glow of his sight type-list magnifying glass. Beneath his charcoal field coat, his trauma harness was buckled tight across his ribs, carrying six air-powered needle magazines, three rolls of sterile blood-vessel gauze. His twin heavy dark metal-hardened carbon-iron stilettos.
Beside him, Grimm lay stretched across the heavy corrugated rubber floor mats. The six-hundred-two-pound direhound occupied nearly the entire passenger floorboard, his massive black glass-plated skull resting flat between his front paws. His single intact ear twitched with every shift of the crawler’s six-speed signal, filtering the roar of the supercharged diesel engine from the deeper sound pulses of the city. Whenever the crawler hit a deep waterlogged rut in the broken asphalt, Grimm’s gravity pull adjusted by a fraction of a percent. He anchored his mass so cleanly that the cab barely shuddered.
