Echo could no longer live in a forty-five-liter bait bucket.
An eighty-five-inch, nearly three-two-pound dragon-axolotl needed space to swim, clean water with high stone breath flow. An environment that accommodated his amphibious nature. Fortunately, the Iron Ark possessed the ultimate mobile aquatic platform: Titus.
Early the following morning, Old Thomas and Toby Mallow completed the construction of Echo’‘‘s new habitat on the rear deck of the razor-sharp trailer.
Thomas used sheets of tiny hardened tough clear glass salvaged from an abandoned Academy watching underwater. He had made a customized, three-hundred-liter curved aquarium basin. The tank was shaped to contour perfectly over the rear vertebral plates of Titus’‘‘s massive dark rock back shell, secured by heavy-duty shaking-dampening silver-steel straps, high-pulling turnbuckles, and vulcanized black rubber rings.
“The crushing weight was the trickiest part, Commander,” Old Thomas explained. He tapped the polished acrylic with a brass measuring tongs. “At three hundred liters, that’‘‘s roughly three hundred pounds of water weight, plus fifty pounds of heavy alloy framing. On a normal draft beast, that deadweight would induce severe lower-back lordosis and spinal fatigue within three days.”
“Titus isn’‘‘t a normal draft beast,” Arthur noted, checking the torque on the silver-steel turnbuckles. “His vertebral armor scales are fused directly to his internal chest ribs. He can carry twenty metric tons without skeletal squeezing. But the dynamic sloshing of the water was my main concern. If Titus turns suddenly, the liquid heavy rush could throw off his balance point.”
