The western stone retaining wall of the drainage dyke was not holding as cleanly as the central water chute.
At Mile Marker Zero point eight, a nearby silt vein beneath the outer stone retaining wall had given way under the weight of three thousand charging mire-beasts.
Crashing through the fractured stone coping stones came an eighteen-foot Armored Mire-Goliath. An ancient titan clad in linked, rainbow-bright black hard shell plates five inches thick, supported by eight thick pillar-like legs that churned the granite ballast into dust.
Its massive, armored head was crowned with a curved horn of solid bone as thick as an oak trunk, weeping green rotting acid that hissed against the broken stonework.
The beast smashed through the outer timber stone retaining wall with a splintering crash, its massive bulk lunging directly toward the western spur line that led into the residential insulae quarter.
“Breach at Marker Eight.” Toby Karr’s voice screamed through the copper speaking-tube, crackling with urgency. “The goliath has cleared the ditch! It’s eighty paces from the granary siding.”
Giles Croft stood on the footboard of Rail-Lance Flatcar Number Two, his pocket stopwatch clicked into his palm, his tin snout breathing mask strapped tight across his face.
“A pathfinding glitch caused by nearby terrain shape failure,” Giles muttered. He shook his head with cold and exact annoyance.
“The entity bypassed the main kill-box because the stone retaining wall slope had a loose twelve-degree ramp. Unacceptable builder oversight.”
Beside Giles, two burly timberwrights pumped the wooden walking beam with rhythmic, wild strokes: clack-chug, clack-chug.
The four-wheeled steel flatcar surged down the strap-iron spur line at fourteen miles per hour, its cast-iron wheels singing against the wrought-iron rails.
The wind whipped past Giles’s goggles as the car rounded the gentle curve behind the granary.
“Brakes, Kenneth.” Giles commanded. “Drop the beech shoes at Sighting Stake Twenty-Four.”
Captain Kenneth Drake threw his full weight onto the long ash brake lever.
The beech-wood blocks slammed down upon the revolving iron treads.
A clean, fragrant smell of toasted wood smoke and hot oil rose from the wheels as the flatcar skidded smoothly along the rails, halting exactly at Marker Eight with an eighth of an inch of clearance.
Fifty paces ahead, the eighteen-foot titan had halted atop the shattered embankment.
Its four milky blind eyes twitched in their armored sockets, sensing the sudden shaking of the iron wheels on the track.
The goliath lowered its massive, horned head, its jaws churning with yellow foam, preparing to charge down the rail spur and smash the flatcar into kindling.
“Cross sixty degrees left.” Giles barked, stepping behind the sighting bridge.
Borin Bronze-Lung seized the cross handwheel, spinning the bronze worm gear with wild dwarven strength.
The five-foot turntable ring swung smoothly upon its lubricated bearings.
The fourteen-foot brass launch guide swung forty-five degrees across the track. It pointed its slender needle directly down the center of the rail spur.
“Height plus four degrees,” Giles said, his eye pressed to the crosshair aiming cross of the telescopic sight. “Toby, clear the crank winch dog.”
Toby Karr and Caleb threw the cocking winches.
The two pre-stressed layered steel spring packs bowed backward with a painful, metal groan, storing four hundred thousand foot-pounds of potential energy in eight graduated leaves of cooled spring-steel.
CLINK.
The rolling-dog sear engaged with a heavy, definitive snap.
Toby slid the four-piece ash armor-piercing dart into the brass breech track. He pulled the red safety lanyard and stepped back three paces with his hands clamped over his ears.
Through the telescopic sight, Giles watched the goliath begin its charge.
The massive beast sped up down the track, its eight iron-hard legs gouging foot-deep ruts into the ballast, covering fifteen yards with every thunderous stride.
The range was closing with terrifying speed.
Three hundred yards. Two hundred and fifty yards. Two hundred yards.
Behind the flatcar, twenty militia spearmen held their breath, their knuckles white against their ash shafts, convinced they were watching their own deaths arrive on eight legs.
To them, the Lord Master builder was standing upon the deck of the iron chariot, calculating the cosmic balance of the soul, sighting the invisible thread of fate that bound the titan’s life to the earth.
Giles, however, was merely tracking the relative angular speed of the beast’s central eye plate.
“Slight upright porpoising during galloping cycle,” Giles murmured, his thumb resting upon the bronze release lever. “Wave height about eight inches. Hum one point two Hertz. Sighting for the trough of the stride.”
He waited.
The goliath reached the one-hundred-and-fifty-yard marker.
Its horned head dipped as its forward limbs struck the ground.
At that exact heartbeat, the eye plate lined up dead-center with the level crosshair.
Giles pressed the release lever.
TWANG-CRACK.
The faster-than-sound whip-crack blew up across the spur line.
The blast wave struck Kenneth Drake’s chest like an iron mallet, blowing his cloak straight back and rattling the teeth in his jaw.
At the muzzle of the brass guide, the four-piece ash sabot petals shattered outward against the faster-than-sound air pushback, tumbling into the track ditch with a shower of friction sparks.
Free of its carrier, the sixteen-inch heavy dark metal needle flew alone.
It crossed the one hundred and fifty yards of open track in zero point one four seconds—far faster than the living reaction time of any living creature.
The goliath didn’t even have time to blink its milky eyes.
THWUMP-CRACK.
The sixteen megajoules of striking force, packed onto a needle-sharp chisel tip barely fifteen tiny fractions of an inch across, struck the curved forehead plate directly between the beast’s main eye sockets.
The eighty tiny fractions of an inch of stone-hardened hard shell offered zero pushback to the hyper-speed penetrator.
The heavy dark metal dart punched a clean, circular hole through the front armor plate with a sound like a tailor snipping a thread of silk.
Inside the skull, the faster-than-sound shifted weight excess pressure blew up.
The blasting blast wave melted the goliath’s central neural nerve knot and brain tissue instantly. It turned solid brain matter into high-pressure high-pressure spray that blew out the back of the beast’s skull in a total, expanding fountain of purple gore and shattered bone.
The heavy dark metal needle punched fully through the three-foot-thick skull vault, cut the main neck spinal column. Then it exited out the lower shoulder plates, boring ten feet deep into the solid mountain stone of the levee ditch.
The eighteen-foot titan died while its legs were still moving at twenty miles per hour.
Deprived of all neural coordination, the goliath’s legs folded beneath it like snapped dry twigs.
THUUUUUUUUD.
The eight-ton carcass plowed head-first into the crushed dark rock ballast. He skidded thirty paces down the track shoulder before coming to a dead, shivering halt barely twenty yards from the front bumper of the rail car.
The impact sent a two-foot wave of crushed stone spraying across the levee. It rattled against the blue glassy mantlet of the flatcar like hail.
Silence fell over the western spur line.
Nobody spoke.
Nobody moved.
The massive beast lay motionless in the mud, its shattered skull smoking faintly in the cold morning air, dead before its nerve impulses could register the sound of the gun.
Master Borin Bronze-Lung jumped down from the carriage footboard. His heavy iron measured tongs in hand, trotting over to the steaming carcass.
He knelt beside the shattered head of the beast. He tapped the thick black hard shell plate with a steel cold-chisel.
CLINK.
“Look at this grain, Lord Giles,” Borin called out, his eyes shining with dwarven metalworking greed. “It isn’t single-layer horn.
It’s five alternating laminations of dense, stone-hardened hard shell and cross-linked stringy joint padding, bound together with natural quartz dust glue. Hard as rolled tool-steel on the outside, tough as boiled leather on the inside! An axe would bounce off this plate forever.”
“Natural composite armor,” Giles observed, walking up beside him. “The alternating layers prevent through-thickness crack propagation.
A conventional projectile strikes the hard outer face. Then, the energy is scattered laterally through the flexible inner laminations. It’s an exceptional natural armor solution against low-speed threats. But against hyper-speed moving penetrators with extreme sectional thickness, no organic composite can prevent total shear failure.”
Borin ran his thick fingers over the neat, perfectly circular tiny hole punched through the forehead plate.
“Clean as an auger bit,” Borin murmured in awe. “The needle didn’t even crack the surrounding plate. It just pushed through the stone-hard shell like a red-hot iron through suet.”
Kenneth Drake slowly let out a breath behind his tin snout, lowering his broadsword with trembling hands.
“One shot,” Kenneth croaked, his voice choked with total, stunned awe. “One shot at a running titan... Through the forehead... And dropped it dead in its tracks.”
He turned to Giles, his eyes wide through his goggles.
“My lord... You shot it through the eye while it was galloping at twenty miles an hour.”
Giles Croft was already stepping off the footboard, pulling his wooden ruler from his pocket.
He walked up to the recoil buffer at the rear of the carriage. He measured the piston stroke.
“Recoil shifted weight: five point seven inches,” Giles noted calmly. “Damping orifice performed with zero cavitational hysteresis. The heavier castor-oil blend has fully removed the too much stroke travel we observed on the prototype.”
He looked over at the dead titan lying across the ditch, then glanced at Toby Karr.
“Plus, that carcass is obstructing the right-of-way for the backup supply car,” Giles added. He tapped his rule against his palm.
“Toby, dispatch two salvage squads with crosscut saws. Strip the tiny hard shell plates for future armored vehicle fabrication, and have Duncan haul the meat to the fertilizer digesters.”
Toby scrambled forward, furiously jotting notes on his slate. “Right away, Lord Giles! Hard shell plates secured for vehicle plating.”
Captain Kenneth Drake walked along the strap-iron rail spur. He looked back toward the central gatehouse half a mile away.
“Two minutes,” Kenneth said, shaking his scarred head as he surveyed the distance.
“From the moment Toby’s signal horn blew at Sluice Tower One to the moment the needle left the muzzle was exactly two minutes and ten seconds. In the old border wars, moving an artillery piece half a mile across broken mud took four hours and three teams of dead oxen.”
“A railway reduces transit friction by ninety-eight percent,” Giles noted, checking his watch.
“When you eliminate rolling pushback, speed becomes a function of applied motive force rather than terrain quality. A single mobile battery on rails has the working work of eight static artillery emplacements.”
Kenneth grinned behind his tin snout. “And it means we don’t have to guess where the enemy will attack. We let them pick their ground, and then we bring the mountain to them.”
Before the crew could celebrate the kill, the ground beneath the central canal shuddered with a sudden, sickening violence that nearly threw Kenneth from his feet.
Out on the main channel, a huge geyser of mud and foam exploded into the air.
Through the yellow fog, the Three-Headed Rot-Hydra lunged forward, its three snake-like necks thrashing the water into white foam as Hesketh chanted from its crest. He drove the titan directly toward the mouth of the main water gate!