The deep water beneath Mining Rig Omega churned with the desperate, thrashing fury of a mortally wounded hunting beast.
Deprived of its main torpedo batteries and disoriented by the time distortion blast wave, the Chimera Abyssal Megalodon abandoned all tactical standoff doctrine. Driven by the painful spark pulses surging from its bio-spliced skull implants, the eighteen-meter beast lunged directly at Echo. Its massive tail-end fin beat the dark water with violent, high-pressure power. He drove thirty-six metric tons of bio-engineered muscle forward at over forty knots.
Its huge jaws opened to an angle of nearly one hundred and fifty degrees. It showed four nested tiers of foot-long serrated heavy dark metal teeth that ground together with a sound like iron gears in a heavy-duty stone-crusher:
SKRRRR-CLANG.
The shark intended to bite Echo’s twelve-meter sky body in half. It crushed his draconic spine and internal organs beneath sixty thousand pounds of raw clockwork bite force.
Arthur Vance stood upon the Iron Ark’s bridge, watching the charge through his Zeiss monocle. His pulse remained dead-center at sixty-two beats per minute, his breathing perfectly timed together with the steady hum of the ship’s gyro-stabilizers.
“Echo,” Arthur whispered through the soul-sync link, transmitting the precise spatial map points into the giant beast’s mind. “Execute space-folding phase-drift. Don’t meet striking force with physical armor. Let reality fold around them.”
