The Hard-shelled Bone-Scorpion Empress shifted her massive weight on the fractured lip of the quarry, her basal walking legs grinding the bedrock into fine quartz dust. Her hematite compound eyes, gleaming with dull black glass light, swiveled downward toward the mud-filled trench basin. She could smell the scent of scorched machine grease, the metal tang of fresh blood. The living warmth of forty surviving soldiers pinned behind the collapsed low roof wall.
Her left crushing chela, a five-meter slab of serrated dark rock dripping with mantis beast-blood, lifted three feet from the stone. The internal high-pressure chambers in her pedipalp hissed like a locomotive boiler as pressure built for a sweeping strike that would scour the trench line down to bare bedrock.
Arthur Vance didn’t wait for the blow to fall.
He stepped up onto the forward firing step, his combat boots biting into the slippery wooden walkway planks. He pressed the walnut stock of the Vance Cryo-Pneumatic Transfixer firmly into his right shoulder pocket, resting the heavy eight-sided barrel on a sandbag torn by shrapnel. Through the crosshairs of his Zeiss magnifying glass, the Empress’s left flank resolved into a network of glowing body stress vectors.
Every second was measured in micro-liters of high-pressure shifted weight. Arthur’s pulse remained steady at fifty-four beats per minute, the cold discipline of a trauma surgeon overriding the instinctual human urge to turn and run from an eighteen-meter Disaster.
