When an enemy vehicle division is locked still in six feet of boiling mud, standard military doctrine suggests waiting for the crews to starve or surrender.
In colony-sim heavy-duty logistics, waiting is a waste of capital depreciation.
Every hour that twenty-eight intact forty-ton enemy war-crawlers sat sunk in stone-hardened mud, water seeped into their bronze journal bearings, rust formed on their care drive sprockets, and hard pipe-crust hardened inside their fire-tubes.
To Giles Croft, those thirty locked still crawlers were not captured trophies of war.
They were twelve hundred tons of high-grade rolled boiler plate, sixty high-pressure back-and-forth steam engines, and fifty thousand feet of hard dark metal-steel track chain waiting to be salvaged, refurbished. Then they integrated into the town earthmoving inventory.
Before salvage could begin, however, a critical tactical threat needed immediate neutralization.
Half a mile to the east, on the raised granite ridge, High Director Harrowgate’s command barge was speeding up the Void-Breaker Core.
On Giles’s system HUD, an alarming crimson test alert was pulsing:
