The air inside Drydock Bay 04 smelled of rusted copper, high-temp high-pressure grease, and salt water. High above the concrete boat ramp, huge overhead frame cranes groaned on grease-slicked rails as they hoisted the expeditionary module into position above Titus’s massive dark rock back shell.
Arthur Vance stood on the steel work frames beside the ancient terrapin’s left flank, a handheld high-pitched flaw detector pressed against the third vertebral scute. Through the digital display on his Zeiss Monocle Loupe, the internal micro-structure of Titus’s back shell resolved into a dense, linked lattice of black iron and dark rock bone webs.
BONE Stone Weight: 18.42 g/cm³ Water-weight YIELD THRESHOLD: 385.0 MPa Deep hum ABSORPTION: 96.8% [OPTIMAL] MICRO-FRACTURE Weight: 0.00% [Clean]
“Most tamers look at a terrapin and see an armored gate,” Arthur remarked to Toby Mallow, who was busy torquing down the high-pulling mounting brackets of the forward watching dome. “They don’t understand that bone is a living, pressure-sparking semiconductor. Conventional submarine alloys fail in the Hadal zone because silver-steel and high-pulling steel have uniform crystal-clear grains. Under cyclic water-pressure shear, micro-fractures propagate along those grain boundaries until the hull implodes in less than three split seconds. But Titus’s armor scales grow in six-sided spirals. The more water pressure pushes down on him, the tighter the bone crystals lock together.”
