The shaking at four thousand feet was not drilling. It was blunt-force trauma.
For thirty-six hours, the heavy rotary table on the derrick floor had groaned under maximum torque. It shivered against its cast-iron base. Meanwhile, the tri-cone bit ground helplessly against the grey granite batholith. Giles finally ordered the seventy-ton drill string tripped back to the surface. Then, the floor crew had spent half a day uncoupling three-joint stands of pipe, racking them against the derrick fingers in greasy stacks.
Now, the cut cutting head sat on a heavy oak workbench beside the tool shed.
Master Borin Bronze-Lung leaned over the steel assembly, his sight fire gauge dangling from his leather apron. The dwarf armorer poked at the three cone-shaped steel cutters with the hardened tip of a file.
“Locked solid,” Borin announced, spitting into the wood shavings. “All three roller bearings are friction-welded into lumps of scrap.
The heavy dark metal teeth didn’t just wear down. They snapped off at the root.
The ones that didn’t snap are polished smooth as river pebbles.”
Giles leaned his palms on the workbench, studying the ruined steel. “Forty-two feet of advance in thirty-six hours.
