A steady, freezing drizzle drifted across the railway siding at Milepost Four, glistening upon the dark cast-steel trunnions of what Lord Giles Croft described in town work tickets as a “High-Angle Right-of-Way Ballast Compactor.”
Captain Kenneth Drake stood with his boots planted on the crushed dark rock embankment, his weathered hands resting atop his iron-shod ten-foot measuring rod. He looked at the machine mounted upon the heavy four-wheel rail flatcar. His battle-hardened jaw tightened with deep suspicion.
“Lord Giles,” Kenneth said slowly, pointing the tip of his rod toward the massive weapon. “I have served thirty campaigns in the border wars. I’ve seen royal mangonels, dwarven twisting force giant crossbows. The great bronze bombards of the South. But never in fifty winters have I seen a soil compactor with a fourteen-foot smoothbore Bessemer steel barrel and a height arc of seventy degrees.”
Giles stood beside an oak drafting table set up on the flatcar deck, fully unfazed. He held a ten-inch ivory-and-brass duplex ivory math rule in his left hand. It slid the central runner back and forth with his thumb. Meanwhile, his right hand traced numbers across a printed grid of high-speed flight path curves.
“It’s an air-powered impulse applicator, Kenneth,” Giles replied, his pencil scratching a correction into the wind-bending column. “When we clear railway cuts through fractured fiery dark rock, the upper scree slopes remain structurally unstable. Traditional explosive blasting induces ground-shaking fractures throughout the entire rock layer seam, causing backup rockslides that block the right-of-way. This…
