A battle tank was merely an agricultural tractor fitted with an occupational safety shield.
In the cavernous assembly workshop behind Underground Bastion Number Eight, the air rang with the ear-splitting clatter of sixty air-powered riveting hammers.
Giles Croft walked down the central upkeep bay holding a check clipboard and a depth hair-width.
Arranged in two neat rows were twelve heavy Steam-Crawlers—the workhorses of Haven-Hold’s underground digging fleet.
Originally built to haul twenty-ton boulders, grade ballast beds, and tow high-pressure shields, the sixty-ton tractors had undergone an astonishing transformation over forty-eight hours.
Master Borin Bronze-Lung’s forge-smiths had stripped the light sheet-metal engine cowlings. It replaced them with linked two-inch slabs of hot-rolled iron-hard metal armor plate.
The plates were sloped at forty-five degrees to deflect incoming moving strikes and high-pressure living acid streams.
Across the front of each machine sat the massive eight-foot-tall, twelve-foot-wide heavy bulldozer blade, heavy with load-bearing box-beams and backed by twin eight-inch high-pressure lift cylinders.
