To a novice laborer, digging a hole was simply a matter of sweating through a shirt with an iron spade.
To Frank, an open underground digging was an active, ticking bomb governed by shear angles, water-pressure pore pressure, and the strict safety mandates of CIE-404 1926 Subpart P.
And right now, the jagged rift running ten thousand li along the land-wide keel was the most atrocious digging hazard Frank had ever laid eyes on.
The fourteen-meter land-wide plate slip had not created a clean, engineered spreading joint.
It had torn open a huge, jagged wound through the planet’s mantle. The walls of the deep gap were sheer, upright cliffs of fractured shale, overhanging dark rock boulders, and unstable pockets of crushed aggregate hanging thirty feet above the trench floor.
Every thirty seconds, an overhang gave way. He dropped fifty thousand tons of loose rock into the void with a sound like rolling thunder.
Underground rock-mites—back shell-armored pests the size of hunting hounds—crawled through the loose fissures, chewing at the cracked stone and dislodging more debris.
Frank walked along the rim of the deep gap. His six-foot folded wooden ruler tucked under his arm, his hands shoved deep into the front pockets of his denim overalls.
