The sound of the thumper-engines was not a natural noise. It was a heavy-duty assault upon the sound silence of the desert.
Two leagues ahead. There, the red dunes flattened into a huge expanse of bleached white salt crust, three heavy iron tripods stood planted into the bedrock. Each tripod supported a four-ton steam-driven clockwork pile-driver, powered by a roaring boiler fueled with bituminous coal. Every four seconds, a five-hundred-pound steel ram slammed downward into an upright drilled shaft. It sent bone-shaking blast waves rippling through the deep-rock strata for twenty miles in every direction.
Beside the central tripod sat the Iron Sieve. A fifty-foot armored sand-crawler mounted on six caterpillar tracks of riveted iron plate, its forward fighting bridge bristling with air-powered harpoon-launchers.
On the open watching deck stood Kaelen Voss.
He was thirty years old, broad-shouldered and scarred, his left eye covered by a brass lens-shutter, wearing a greatcoat of boiled bull-hide lined with wolf fur. In his right hand, he held a heavy iron-nibbed slaver’s metal pen. In his left, the throttle lever of the central boiler.
“Increase boiler pressure to thirty sea-weights!” Kaelen Voss roared through his brass speaking horn, his voice amplified across the salt flats. “Drive the spikes deeper! Pound the bedrock until the worms lose their minds!”
