The flatbed rumbled and jarred through the soaking wet night. The ground drive of these things was supposed to keep them floating one to three feet off the ground. But when the ground varied eight to ten feet from level every few feet, the effect was far from floating. It was bone jarring.
The teleportation-type drive sought to automatically adjust itself to the sensed ground distance. It corrected and recorrected and the result was a whining, racing, dying, racing combination of rumbles and screeches that hurt the ears.
No wheeled vehicle could have traveled this “road” at all; so gullied and rock strewn a “highway” was fit only for wandering beasts, if that. The ore trucks that had traversed it for hundreds of years had worsened it, rather than otherwise, as they blew off the humus, th
