Civil building in waterlogged terrain is entirely a contest against high-pressure stall.
If surface water has no engineered slope along which to drain, it saturates the upper soil strata, dissolves cohesive clay bonds, and turns agricultural loam into an anaerobic bog.
To a royal court guard, a swamp was a rock-solid curse of nature. To Giles Croft, it was merely an uncompleted grading operation awaiting proper gravity fall.
Giles stood on a raised survey tripod at the western edge of the town outer edge, his brass transit level leveled over the crosshairs.
Two miles away across the black expanse of the peat bottoms, the two Clockwork Trench Crawlers were advancing in parallel lines. Their hard was dark metal-steel caterpillar tracks churning steadily through the wet marl.
Behind each machine, a clean, laser-straight trench eight feet deep and six feet wide opened in the earth like a zipper, cutting cleanly through frozen peat and stubborn willow roots.
The front flail drums spun at sixty turns a minute, their hardened alloy teeth pulverizing boulders and ancient roots into fine grit with a rhythmic, bone-shaking roar. Behind the drums, the said clearlyhigh-pressure ditching buckets scooped the crushed soil, flinging it onto high-speed discharge conveyors that piled the clay into smooth, forty-five-degree counterscarp berms along the northern lip.
