Down in the southern and eastern channel trenches, the physical aftermath of the third and fourth watches looked like a wrecked foundry after an explosion. Chunks of shattered dark rock, six-foot segments of collapsed blade metal. Then it split bronze socket collars lay tangled together in the smoking three-foot-wide stone troughs, while loose rubble continued to slide down the crater walls.
Commander Keth Or had spent enough years maintaining and dismantling array fortifications in the Aperture Court’s Retrieval Division to know that a cut high-capacity bronze socket is not truly safe until its broken halves are physically separated and removed from the conducting trench. Right now, in both the eastern and southern troughs, the heavy cast-bronze jaws of the three ground sockets were still sitting within inches of their cut silver bus-bars beneath shifting piles of hot rock.
‘Bel,’ Keth called out, his voice raspy in the cold mist. He stepped down into the eastern trench with his left hand and braced his numb, charred right forearm against his belt. ‘If these sliding blade slabs press the bronze jaws back against the trench rails before the sixty-breath mark, we’ll get a ground-arc through the gravel. Help me pry the socket pieces out onto the dead shale.’
