Where rails couldn’t yet run, tracks had to crawl.
Giles Croft unrolled his latest clockwork assembly drawing across the timber workbench in the main workshop of Karak-Dum.
Surrounding the table stood Captain Kenneth Drake, Master Borin Bronze-Lung, Foreman Corbin Cross, and five senior deep-dwarven mechanists whose fingers were stained with ancient coal oil.
The drawing showed a massive, low-profile tracked vehicle thirty feet long and twelve feet wide. He sat upon twin nonstop crawler treads forged from linked hard dark metal-steel track shoes.
“The Iron Badger,” Giles announced, tapping the profile view with his wooden ruler.
“A heavy high-pressure underground work crawler. It’s designed to navigate raw cave terrain where ballast and rails don’t exist.”
Borin leaned over the drawing, his copper beard bristling as he traced the sloped armored hull.
“Two-inch steel plate on the cabin,” Borin murmured. “Angled at forty-five degrees like a siege mantlet. And a twelve-foot curved steel blade mounted across the front on high-pressure rams.
