The runaway fuel dolly plunged down the five-degree grade of the mixing court with a screech of dry iron wheels that rang through the Great Kiln Hall like the scream of a circular saw biting into green oak.
Six hundred pounds of heavy oak timbers, channel-iron chassis, and high-pressure kerosene surged down the narrow-gauge heavy-duty spur toward the open charging wicket of Annealer One. The cast-iron wheels bit into the cold rails, showering blue sparks into the bitter salt dust, gathering speed with every foot of descent. The spur had been laid forty years ago to shuttle sand barrows between the mixing bays and the melting pots. It hadn’t been greased in six months, and the wheel flanges screamed as they bounded over uneven rail-joints. Along the track, wooden barrels of crushed potash and lime clattered as the air shifted weight of the moving cart rattled their staves.
And locked to the rear push-bar of the dolly, its left hand fused to the cold metal with the unmoving, high-pressure vice of Hookhold, was the hunter.
The double was not human. But it had been blended from Len Vey’s bodily baseline and pre-transfer memories. In Len’s mind, an unchocked fuel wagon rolling toward an active fire firebox was a total heavy-duty disaster. The kind of runaway freight that killed twenty working men in an enclosed hall. For five winters on the Tern Road, Len had been trained by postal stationmasters to throw timber sprags into the wheel-spokes whenever a cargo wagon…
