A machine was not an altar. It was a sentence written in metal, and like every sentence ever drafted by human arrogance, it contained a grammatical error.
Ren Vale climbed the shuddering flank of the Iron Judicator Null-01 with his mammoth ivory awl wedged four inches deep into an overlapping armor seam.
The hard dark metal plate beneath his palms was hot enough to scorch the lambskin of his apprentice apron. Every piston stroke from the machine’s quad-boilers sent a bone-jarring moving tremor through the hull, threatening to shake his boots free from the narrow lip of the cooling angled slats. Five hundred feet below his heels, the flaming melted rock waste canals of Sector Four looked like ribbons of molten gold winding through a canyon of red-hot coke and crushed brick.
Behind him, on the narrow high walkway, the pile-bunker discharged.
BOOM-THUD!
The sound pressure wave struck Ren’s back like a flat shovel. It drove his chest hard against the iron hull. Through the ringing in his ears, he heard the terrible screech of tearing load-bearing steel and the dull, bone-shaking impact of sixty pounds of hardened heavy dark metal striking an iron frame.
He didn’t look down.
To look down was to acknowledge the exact certainty of Unit Ren’s destruction. To look down was to see the machine-man’s chassis split along its spinal armature, his high-pressure lines hemorrhaging oil across the grating.
