The sulfuric drizzle falling across Trench Sector 09 tasted of wet melted rock waste and copper filings. It ran down the corrugated iron stone retaining walls, dripping into the wooden walkway planks where five hundred conscripts of the Rust-Belt outer edge had scraped the clay from their boots.
Inside Forward Garrison Post Delta, Arthur Vance sat on an overturned ammunition crate, a clean linen rag wrapped around his thumb. He was stripping the feed gearwork of the Vance Cryo-Pneumatic Transfixer. The break-action assembly lay in four oiled pieces across a scarred pine board. The twin brass barrels, the spring-loaded rotary metal tube, the pressure valve, and the air-powered pool.
At his feet, Grimm lay flat on the damp planks. The hound had grown to nearly fifty pounds since their days in the academy cellar, his shoulders broad and corded with dense muscle. Beneath his coarse soot-black coat, the jet-black bone osteoderms along his spine caught the yellow glare of an overhead sodium lamp. One of his ears remained a ragged notch, a permanent reminder of the cull pen. But his leftover ear twitched toward the trench hall. He tracked the rhythmic scrape of passing sentries. The boots drew too close. Each time, Grimm let out a quiet, rhythmic huff through his nostrils and leaned his full weight against Arthur’s left shin.
