The tremor didn’t come from the earth-shaking crust. It came from the water itself.
At eight thousand meters beneath the earth, the surrounding deep water pressure was already huge. It pressed against every square half-inch of Arthur Vance’s dry-suit with eight crushing deep-sea pressure of force. But in a single, terrifying second, that pressure spiked by twenty percent, then plummeted into a violent empty pocket trough.
A deep, sub-heard shaking shuddered through the living rock of Trench 05. It wasn’t the sharp, grating crack of fault lines shifting. It was a rhythmic, muscular thrum, like the beating of a world-size heart wrapped in muscle and armored bone. The shaking traveled through the dark rock bedrock, through Titus’s thick claws, and straight up into Arthur’s boots. That made his teeth rattle in their sockets.
Titus’s head whipped around, his dark, leathery eyes narrowing into slits. His thick webbed forelegs dug wildly into the dark rock seabed, his silver-steel-heavy claws gouging deep furrows into the stone as he fought to anchor his six-ton bulk against a sudden, violent undertow. The giant tortoise let out a deep, anxious hiss through his nostrils, his belly shell grinding against the rock.
“Hold fast!” Arthur roared through the soul-sync, dropping low onto Titus’s back shell and wrapping both arms around the forward marginal armor scales.
