The shift from the shallow underground lake into the deep-rock drain tube was marked by a sudden, steep plunge of the dark rock riverbed.
Beneath the four-inch-thick quartz viewports of the Iron Ark, the lit up riverbed dropped away at a forty-five-degree incline. He plunged into a narrow, water-carved canyon that spiraled down through the world-size mantle. The vehicle’s heavy hard dark metal-bronze crawler tracks ground against the ancient granite shelf, their chevron grousers biting into the stone crust with a deep, rhythmic clockwork clatter that shook through the steel hull plates.
Arthur Vance sat at the main backup helm, his hands resting on the dual high-pressure track steering levers. His Vanguard type-list monocle was locked over his right eye. He tracked the cascading digital tracking data sent by the outside sensor pods.
The deep water pressure gauge was climbing with terrifying speed:
Eight hundred and twenty sea-weights.
At that crushing depth, the pressure exerted upon every square inch of the vehicle’s hull was equivalent to the weight of an armored battle tank. Inside the command cabin, the massive silver-steel-hardened carbon-iron load-bearing ribs gave a series of sharp, ringing metal groans as the steel tightly packed by tiny fractions of a tiny fraction of an inch, equalizing against the unimaginable weight of the world-size ocean above them.
