The laws of fluid dynamics didn’t merely bend in the cold waters of Trench 05. They shattered into tiny crystal-clear facets.
When Echo let loose his echoing vocal pulse, the sound didn’t propagate through the black lake as an ordinary sound shaking. It swelled outward as an invisible, ball-shaped disturbance in the local spacetime continuum. Originating from the four-inch jade antler anchored to the little drake’s frontal plate, the boundary of the field shone with a pale, violet-cyan iridescence. A three-and-a-half-meter sphere of extreme time dilation that intercepted the twin bubbling blast torpedoes thirty paces from the railway boat ramp.
The instant the bronze nose cones crossed the threshold of the sphere, their forward driving force collapsed.
To the naked human eye, the shift was jarring enough to induce physical dizziness. Running at sixty knots—over thirty meters per second—the two heavy torpedoes had been tearing through the underground lake like high-speed freight trains. He drove violent high-pressure blast waves ahead of their copper casings. They entered Echo’s frozen stillness horizon. Then, their speed plummeted by ninety-nine point one percent.
The roaring whine of their internal tightly packed-gas turbines dropped from an ear-piercing scream into a sluggish, sub-heard drone. Their counter-rotating bronze propellers, which had been spinning at three thousand turns a minute, slowed until each single curved blade could be counted by an observer on the docks. Even the bubbling blast envelope—the boiling sheath of boiled away steam clinging to the torpedo hulls—froze in mid-collapse, suspended in the dark water…
