The underground lake turned into a sound slaughterhouse.
At sixty knots, an underwater bubbling blast torpedo doesn’t glide. It wildly tears through the liquid medium. That created a trailing sheath of scalding steam bubbles driven by high-pressure tightly packed air and chemical propellants. Through Arthur Vance’s Zeiss monocle, the twin white wakes carved by Viper-01’s torpedoes looked like glowing laser beams searing through the pitch-black water of Trench 05. He closed the distance to the railway spur at over thirty meters per second.
The ground shape of the railway spur made the defensive position both a castle and a trap. The narrow-gauge tracks ran along a natural limestone shelf forty feet above the lake. But the unloading docks, the fuel reserves, and the commoner supply haulers were clustered on the low-lying stone boat ramp at the water’s edge. Behind the docks rose a sheer, upright cliff of porous limestone that soared two hundred feet to the cave ceiling. If a heavy torpedo blew up against the underwater wooden support posts, the resulting high-pressure blast wave wouldn’t scatter into open water. It would reflect off the rear cliff face, amplifying the excess pressure threefold and shattering the entire shelf.
Ten minutes before the first launch, Arthur had personally supervised the final defensive preparations. He had ordered Dr. Calder and Toby to shepherd all three hundred commoner children and the elderly into the deep granite upkeep adits five hundred meters back along the rail spur. The heavy steel blast doors of the…
