The underground lake gave way to a maze of drowned fiery throats.
Under eight thousand meters of living granite, the water was no longer the calm turquoise of the upper underground water bed. Rising heat currents tore through the underwater ravines, carrying dense ribbons of yellow sulfur silt and boiling stone salt water. Arthur Vance stood braced against the dorsal ridge of Titus’s dark rock back shell, his black rubber dive-boots wedged firmly between the tortoise’s second and third vertebral plates. The heavy fabric of his dry-suit hummed against the rushing water. It shook with the water-pressure pulse of the deep trench. Every seam of his gear was sealed against acid-burning acid. But he could still taste the bitter tang of dissolved fiery gas filtering through his rebreather scrubbers.
Beside Arthur’s knee, secured to the heavy mounting rails of Titus’s back shell, the backup monitoring console flickered with green test diodes. Before departing Outpost 09, Arthur had spent forty minutes pressure-testing every valve, hose, and spark lead. When running in a deep-sea drain tube, a single micro-fracture in an oxygen control valve was an immediate death sentence.
Around them, the water heat was climbing with relentless speed as the current carried them deeper into Trench 05.
