The Ashen Plains were eight hundred square leagues of flat, grey bitter salt dust, unbroken by trees or hills.
In the old days, royal marching legions took three weeks of thirst and blistered feet to cross the waste.
Giles Croft intended to cross it by dinner.
He stood atop the worker platform of the Track-Gandy Mk II. He leaned against the polished brass handrail.
The morning sun hung low over the eastern salt cliffs, painting the white dust in pale copper tones.
The air was bone-dry, smelling of sulfur, warm machine oil, and coal smoke.
Beneath Giles’s steel-toed boots, the massive iron deck of the machine thrummed with rhythmic clockwork life.
The Track-Gandy was a three-hundred-foot steel truss overhead frame mounted on four pairs of crawler treads.
