The blast door of Maintenance Station Delta didn’t yield to standard electronic keycards. The biometric scanners had been crushed with a heat cutting torch, their melted copper wiring fused into melted rock waste that dripped down the steel frame like black animal fat.
Arthur didn’t waste time looking for an override panel. He tapped the side of his air-powered needle glove. He set the pressure control valve to maximum, and turned to Grimm.
“Grimm. Clear the threshold.”
The Stygian direhound stepped forward, lowered his massive black glass skull until his nose was an inch from the three-inch-thick hard dark metal-steel plate. Then he released an explosive, bone-shaking pulse of 6G gravity force directly into the door’s locking pins.
BOOM.
The heavy hard dark metal pins snapped with an ear-splitting screech of tortured metal. The double blast doors bowed outward, tore free from their wall anchors. Then it tumbled into the vast underground cave beyond. It echoed into the darkness like thunder rolling across an underground continent.
Arthur stepped through the smoking portal, his ARC-7 Mag-Carbine raised to his cheek, his baked-clay boots crunching across shattered concrete.
The sight that unfolded before him was a breathtaking, terrifying monument to the pre-Cataclysm world.
