The two man-made Null-Hounds crossed the concrete floor of the locomotive barn with unnatural, timed together speed. Their silver-steel claws clicked like air-powered chisels against the stone floor, their red sight sensors fixed on the iron wheel assembly where Arthur took cover.
Behind them, the four ApexBio workers kept up a steady drum of suppressing fire. Magnetic-carbine rounds hammered the cast-iron frame of the switcher locomotive, peeling away sheets of rusted paint and sending clouds of crushed rust into the deadened air.
Arthur Vance knelt motionless in the shadow of the steel wheel, his breathing slow and rhythmic. The anti-aether damping field pressed heavily against his skull, but his vision remained clear. He raised his Zeiss-Vanguard Monocle Loupe, clicking the brass dial into third gear. The quartz prisms rotated, projecting internal heat maps and clockwork schematics across his eye nerve.
Every artificial build has a load-bearing compromise, Arthur thought with clean, steady care. Living beasts balance heat through breathing, tiny blood vessel beds, and body-energy regulation. A machine generating high-output anti-aether fields has to dump twenty kilowatts of waste heat somewhere, or its processing core melts.
The lead Null-Hound reached the edge of the central check pit, its high-pressure hindquarters compressing for the leap across the gap.
