The dark rock bedrock of Trench Sector 9 groaned under sixty tons of segmented hard shell.
Arthur Vance planted his steel-capped boots into the churned mud of the stone retaining wall, the recoil dampener of his ARC-7 mag-carbine clicking into battery against his collarbone. Thirty yards down the shattered comms ditch, the Hard-shelled Bone-Scorpion Empress tore through a timber-heavy bunker as though it were paper board. Her front pedipalps, each four meters long and crusted with stone-hard stone ridges, snapped a twenty-pounder artillery chassis in half with a dry, high-pressure crunch.
Beside Arthur’s left knee, Grimm stood motionless. The sixty-two-pound Obsidian Bone-Fang hound had lowered his balance point until his belly fur grazed the muck. His scarred left ear was pinned flat, the right tracking the uneven high-pressure clicks of the Empress’s walking legs. Deep within the hound’s chest cavity, a rhythmic, sub-bass shaking thrummed. A twenty-hertz gravity anchor that kept Arthur’s boots from sliding down the slick dark rock incline.
“Hold position, Grimm,” Arthur said softly through his comm-collar. His voice was steady, filtered through the copper gauze of his rebreather. “Don’t engage the front plates. Her chest back shell is fifteen inches of cross-layered stone-glass. We need the stinger down before we target the ventral cord.”
