The dry floor of the drained Sunken Basin made an ideal artillery proving ground.
Across five hundred yards of flat, cracked clay that had been baked hard by three weeks of autumn sun, a dark high-speed target stood waiting.
Master Duncan Stone-Splitter had erected a massive timber testing target backed against the sheer hard speckled rock face of the northern bluff.
In front sat three layered tiny back shells stripped from dead mire-goliaths. A curving black wall of rainbow-bright, stone-hardened hard shell nearly five inches thick.
Directly behind the hard shell plates rested an eight-foot-thick solid baulk of seasoned white oak, bolted together with two-inch iron tie-rods and anchored six feet deep into the clay with upright timber piles.
On the firing terrace five hundred yards away, Rail-Lance Flatcar Number One sat locked to the strap-iron rails.
Four heavy screw clamps anchored the steel chassis to the rails, while two high-pressure recoil buffers—repacked with Giles’s specified seventy-thirty blend of heavy castor oil and beef animal fat—held the fourteen-foot brass launch guide in battery.
Giles Croft stood behind the weapon’s sighting bridge. He peeked through a brass telescopic sight fitted with a crosshair aiming cross.
With delicate quarter-turns of the bronze height wheel, he brought the level wire to bear directly upon the center seam of the foremost hard shell plate.
“Target distance: five hundred yards,” Giles said, his voice calm and cold and exact. “Sky heat: forty-eight degrees Fahrenheit.
Air pressure: twenty-nine point six inches of liquid silver. Crosswind from the northwest at four miles per hour. Apply half a mil of right windage on the fine-scale.”
Master Borin Bronze-Lung and Caleb Thorne-Wood stood at the cocking handles, their boots braced against the steel deck.
They wound the double-reduction winch until the twin leaf-spring packs bowed backward into deep, pre-stressed arcs of trembling steel.
CLINK-CLINK.
The hardened steel sear clicked into the rolling-dog detent with a heavy metal clack.
The crank winch cables were slackened and unhooked. Four hundred thousand foot-pounds of stored clockwork potential energy hung suspended on a two-inch steel pin.
Toby Karr stepped forward, holding the four-piece ash armor-piercing dart by its wooden collar.
He slid the assembly into the brass breech guide. The copper driving shoes seated into the rail slots with an oiled, airtight hiss.
Toby pulled the red safety pin and stepped back three paces, covering his ears with both hands.
Beside the flatcar stood Lady Beatrice of Dunwall. Her fur cloak gathered was tight, her glasses perched upon her nose.
Behind her, twenty ducal guards and fifty Grey Crag pioneers watched in breathless silence.
Kenneth Drake stood beside the carriage with his lanyard cord wrapped once around his gloved right wrist.
“All personnel maintain fifty paces of lateral clearance,” Giles commanded. “Open your mouths slightly to equalize middle-ear pressure against the faster-than-sound muzzle excess pressure. Kenneth, on my mark.”
Kenneth took a deep breath, setting his stance wide upon the gravel.
Giles checked the sight picture one final time. The crosshairs rested dead center on the black hard shell.
“Three,” Giles counted. “Two. One. Fire.”
Kenneth snapped his wrist, jerking the lanyard taut.
TWANG-CRACK.
It wasn’t the rolling roar of black powder, nor the wooden groan of a catapult arm.
It was an explosive, whip-like blast that ripped the sky envelope open along a dead-straight sharp-angled hall.
The faster-than-sound blast wave washed backward over the firing terrace in a razor-sharp cone-shaped wave of excess pressure.
The glass check port on the nearby survey hut shattered into a shower of diamond dust. Borin’s tobacco pipe was sucked clean out of his leather coat pocket, tumbling into the gravel.
Lady Beatrice’s velvet toque flew from her head. Her guards instinctively dropped to one knee with their shields raised in sheer reflex terror.
At the muzzle of the fourteen-foot brass rails, the four wooden sabot petals exploded outward.
Striking the faster-than-sound wall of still air thirty yards out, the ash petals peeled away with a blinding shower of friction sparks, tumbling into the canal water like autumn leaves.
Free of its carrier, the naked needle flew.
A sixteen-inch rod of high-thickness heavy dark metal hardened carbon-iron. It screamed across five hundred yards of open marsh at three thousand one hundred and fifty feet per second—Mach two point eight.
The human eye couldn’t track the projectile.
There was only a blinding white streak of spark-charged air. A straight, glowing line etched across the valley like a stroke of white chalk upon a slate blackboard.
Five hundred yards away, the target didn’t merely absorb the hit.
THWUMP-BOOOOM.
The sixteen megajoules of striking force discharged directly into the black hard shell plates.
The three layered tiny back shells didn’t crack. They burst outward in a total cone-shaped burst of crushed black dust and shattered stone shards.
The heavy dark metal dart punched a clean, circular tiny hole through the front plate, blew out the rear plates in an expanding cone of lethal spall. Then it tore into the eight-foot solid oak baulk.
The eight feet of solid white oak shattered down its center grain with an explosive crack that echoed off the mountain cliffs like a thunderbolt.
Two-inch steel tie-rods snapped like thread.
The heavy dark metal needle punched fully through the eight feet of oak, exited the rear face with a geyser of flying splinters. Then he slammed into the sheer hard speckled rock cliff behind the target.
CRACK.
The needle bored six feet deep into the solid mountain granite. That left a smoking, perfectly round hole surrounded by a starburst of shattered rock.
On the firing terrace, half a mile away, nobody spoke.
Nobody breathed.
The silence was total. It was broken only by the steady, musical chime of the waterwheel pumping air in the distance.
Master Borin Bronze-Lung’s hands were plastered against his mouth, his red eyes bulging as he stared through his fingers at the shattered oak baulk five hundred yards away.
Beside him, Captain Kenneth Drake’s ten-foot pacing rod slipped from his nerveless fingers, clattering loudly against the steel deck of the flatcar.
“Through...” Kenneth croaked, his voice cracking into a thin, scared whisper. “Through three monster back shells... Through eight feet of seasoned oak... And into the mountain’s ribs.”
He slowly turned his head. He stared at Giles Croft as though the quiet engineer standing beside him were an ancient headsman who had reached down from the heavens to snip the thread of the world.
“A single shot,” Kenneth whispered. “No powder. No magic words. Just... An iron string and a needle of star-iron.”
Giles Croft stepped down from the rail carriage, tucking his rule into his pocket.
“Toby, bring the check measuring tongs and the survey tape,” Giles said. “Let’s measure the end-post cavity.”
A procession of stunned observers walked the five hundred yards of dry clay across the proving grounds.
They reached the shattered target. Then, the destruction was even more horrifying than it had appeared through the telescopic sight.
The three tiny hard shell plates had not simply been pierced. They had experienced water-flow spallation.
A neat, circular tiny puncture marked the front face. But the rear of the plates was blown outward in a wide, jagged crater sixteen inches across, stripped of all load-bearing holding power.
Master Duncan Stone-Splitter knelt by the shattered oak baulk. He ran his hand through the explosion of splintered wood.
“Eight feet of white oak,” Duncan whispered. His fingers shook as he touched the fractured heartwood. “Oak that took four oxen to drag from the saw-pit.
It didn’t split along the grain, Lord Giles. The wood fibers were crushed into pale flour!”
Giles crouched by the sheer cliff face behind the target.
He pulled a small animal fat candle from his coat, struck a match. Then he held the flame up to the neat, six-foot-deep hole punched into the solid mountain hard speckled rock.
Deep inside the stone metal tube, glowing with leftover impact heat at the bottom of the bore, sat the heavy dark metal dart.
Its four stabilizing fins were snapped away. But the chisel-pointed nose of the heavy dark metal needle remained fully un-twisted. It was sharp, intact, and unmoving.
“Zero projectile mushrooming,” Giles reported with cold and exact satisfaction. “The heavy dark metal core kept ninety-eight percent of its first mass. Total end-post penetration exceeds fifty-four calibers in solid media. That confirms our moving penetration model.”
Lady Beatrice of Dunwall stood frozen. Her hands grabbed her throat, her high-born composure fully destroyed.
“Eight feet of solid oak,” Beatrice murmured, her voice trembling with sheer, pure terror. “The city gates of Dunwall are only two feet thick.”
Giles, however, was not looking at the destroyed target.
He was standing beside the recoil buffer metal tube at the rear of the rail carriage. He held his wooden ruler against the piston rod.
“Recoil stroke: five point eight inches,” Giles announced, nodding with quiet satisfaction.
“High-pressure damping was fully within design limits. The castor-oil blend absorbed ninety-six percent of the dynamic recoil thrust without blowing the gland seals.”
He tapped the brass rails with his rule.
“Zero rail warping. Height screws kept zero point zero. The Mk. I Runic Torsion Rail-Lance is officially approved for full production deployment.”
A crisp, triumphant chime sounded in Giles’s vision.
Before the pioneers could cheer, a wild figure tumbled from the upper ladder of the tone check tower.
Maeve Swift-Ear, the vulpine scout, came sprinting along the ballast line, her curved brass ear-trumpet clutched against her chest.
Her fox ears were pinned flat against her head, trembling with wild terror.
“Lord Giles! Captain Kenneth!” Maeve gasped, collapsing onto the gravel before the rail car. “The deep marsh! The sound cone... The earth is singing with death!”
Kenneth stepped down from the flatcar, his hand instantly returning to his sword. “What did you hear, Maeve?”
Maeve held up her brass sound trumpet with shaking hands.
“The swarm has formed,” Maeve choked out, tears running down her furred cheeks. “Ten thousand hard-shelled beasts marching in the deep fog...
Hounds, leeches, goliaths. And behind them, the water is turning black as ink.”
She looked toward the southern horizon with wild, feral dread.
Maeve unrolled a leather tracking data map across the hood of the rail car. Her claws tapped three distinct red circles marked in the southern fen.
“Three columns,” Maeve explained, her breath coming in ragged gasps. “The sound signed name shows four thousand light quadrupeds—mire-hounds and leech-crawlers—running in the western reeds. Five thousand heavy armored prowlers moving down the central peat hall.
And in the center... A ground-shaking pulse that repeats every six paces. Something forty yards long, dragging its belly through the muck.”
Kenneth Drake looked at Giles, his face set like cast iron.
“That’s a full hive-swarm, my lord,” Kenneth said, his voice dropping low.
“Hesketh has committed his entire brood to break our levee. When ten thousand beasts hit the ditch, even the rail-lance can’t kill them fast enough if they come in a mass wave.”
Giles adjusted his glasses, his eyes scanning the two miles of completed strap-iron railway stretching between the blast fire and the southern stronghold.
“A single rail-lance can’t defeat a saturation assault,” Giles agreed calmly. “Which is why we don’t deploy a single lance.
We deploy the turntable rail battery. Four mobile flatcars running with overlapping sixty-degree fields of fire, coordinated with the canal hydro-heat channel.”
He turned toward Toby and Caleb.
“Toby, signal the foundry shed. Roll out Flatcars Two, Three, and Four. We have a working engagement to execute.”
“The Three-Headed Rot-Hydra is with them. She’s drinking the peat... And she has smelled the blood of her children.”