Tactical shape was merely load-bearing building applied to an active battlefield.
On the dark rock terrace overlooking the Grand Sunless Deep pit, forty feet above the ancient plains, Giles Croft adjusted the leveling foot-screws of his sight transit. The bronze thumbscrews turned with quiet clockwork care beneath his oiled leather gloves.
The air was filled with the rhythmic, timed together thunder of twelve six-hundred-horsepower steam engines.
Steam-Crawlers One through Twelve moved into position across the wide terrace in two staggered, linked wings. Corbin Cross led the right wing in Crawler Number One. Meanwhile, Rathmor commanded the left wing in Crawler Number Two.
The heavy machines clanked over the black glass gravel. Their wide hard was dark metal steel tracks biting into the rock bed. Each tractor weighed thirty-five tons, heavy with sloped two-inch iron-hard metal appliqué armor plates that gleamed dull gray under the glare of the portal lamps.
Giles stood behind the central survey stake with his brass-bound clipboard. He watched the vehicles through the crosshairs of his sighting scope.
“Crawler Number Four, advance six feet,” Giles called out through his brass megaphone. “Unit Seven, correct your heading two degrees south.
Maintain an exact thirty-foot interval between track frames. If you crowd together, your small roof-dome rocket pods will blind each other’s sight sights with backblast exhaust.”
