Carruthers had the hungry look in his eyes that Joel did not understand.
And Joel was impatient. It was a tableau of men and machines that he had watched before, and always, at the end of it, there was something big for him to handle—frustrating if not dangerous, a mind and bone-wearying struggle if not an outright battle. They never came smooth, never.
"Forehull clear, sir!" It was Southard, calling from the lip of the immense hole his machines had excavated.
"Cut your servos!"
Southard signalled to his units, and they muttered slowly into silence, and then the silence hung over them all like a heavy thing, and Captain Nicholas Joel knew that what happened next was up to him.
With a motion of one gauntleted hand he brought Dobermann and Carruthers in next to him, and then the three of them walked with a disciplined haste to the sandy lip, past Southard, and looked down.
A pitted forehull jutted up out of the moist sand two hundred feet below them, its plates glittering darkly in the rays of the powerful illumination units which had already been lowered.
