The destruction of the Alpha Hound’s left-rear leg had pinned the beast in the grinding trench, but its death throes were now threatening to destroy the very foundation of the chamber.
Wedged beneath the rolling twelve-arm-length face of the second granite millstone, the four-hundred-and-fifty-pound warmachine was fighting with monstrous, desperate fury. Its three leftover high-pressure limbs—armed with eight-inch heavy dark metal talons—clawed savagely at the surrounding stonework. It tore massive chunks of hard black rock stone from the trench walls and threw them into the churning salt water.
Its twin spirit-furnaces, sensing the total failure of the chassis, had entered an emergency forced-draft state.
The fire chambers were glowing cherry-red through their bronze check ports, their internal pressure gauges climbing rapidly toward sixty-four sea-weights. If the high-pressure spirit-cells burst while sunk in cold salt water, the resulting steam explosion would blast sixty thousand gallons of boiling water into the vault, collapsing the tilted narrow high walkway and shattering the stone lung channels overhead.
Qiao Ming stood on the listing pulpit, his Folded brass star-compass held steady in his hand, monitoring the overload heat readings.
“The boilers are going overload,” he shouted to Yan Zhiqiu, pointing his wooden ruler toward the glowing red angled slats on the beast’s flanks. “If those spirit-furnaces detonate, the blast wave will breach the drain tube pipe behind us. We will drown in forty leagues of water before we can reach the stairs.”
