The Great Western Highway was thirty feet wide, paved with crushed river dark rock, and fully underwater beneath six feet of bubbling black slime.
For three miles along the western valley, the road looked like a sluggish, oily river of melted peat.
Stale marsh gas bubbled to the surface in putrid yellow pockets that popped with wet, sucking gasps, releasing vapors of methane and rotten waterweed.
Giles Croft stood on the hood of an armored steam-crawler, wearing hardened rubber hip waders that reached to his armpits.
He held a ten-foot steel soil probe marked in half-foot increments.
Beside him on the crawler roof, Toby Karr was peering through a brass leveling transit. Meanwhile, Captain Kenneth Drake leaned heavily against his ten-foot pacing rod, his boots caked in cold mud.
“Look at this tracking data,” Giles said, thrusting the steel probe down into the black slurry.
The probe slid effortlessly through five feet of soup-like peat, then stopped suddenly with a sharp, metal CLINK.
