The Grey Crag rail loop was a twenty-mile circle of heavy nonstop-welded hard dark metal track encircling the salt marshes south of the castle.
It was designed to test the balance of heavy armored rolling stock under high-speed curves.
This morning, it was a testing ground for self-running artillery.
Giles Croft stood on the open roof of Armored Car One. He leaned against the steel rim of the commander’s small roof-dome.
The train consisted of a magnetic-pull electric power carriage, two magazine cars, and the central turret car.
Mounted amidships on the flatbed was a low-profile, rounded turret of three-inch rolled homogeneous steel armor.
Protruding from the turret face were twin seventy-tiny liquid-cooled gun barrels, twelve feet long, machined from forged heavy dark metal-nickel alloy.
Behind the breech gears sat the bronze analog high-speed computer, its internal gears humming in timed together harmony with the train’s wheel axles.
