The Pacific Ocean was a roaring wall of ink and white froth.
Supercarrier Giant beast’s Bane split through thirty-meter swells, her hundred-thousand-ton hull groaning against the ground-shaking surges generated by the rupturing seabed four hundred miles to the south. Sleet-laden rain slashed horizontally across the armored flight deck, swept along by gale-force winds that tasted of heavy sulfur and spark-charged ozone.
Arthur Vance stood near the starboard catapult tracks, his charcoal trench coat soaked through. His combat boots were locked into the deck’s magnetic mooring grid. Through the triple fine-scale prisms of his Zeiss Monocle Loupe, he wasn’t looking at the crashing waves. He was tracking the glowing green returns of the carrier’s phased-array sonar display projected directly onto his eye.
SONAR CONTACT: MULTIPLE HOSTILE BIO-MASSES DEPTH: -40 METERS AND RISING RAPIDLY BEARING: 180 RELATIVE | Speed: 65 KNOTS ESTIMATED ENGAGEMENT WINDOW: 00:00:24
“They’re coming up!” an officer shouted through the carrier’s outside comms. “Anti-torpedo screens report living signed names bypassing the magnetic nets!”
The ocean beside the supercarrier erupted.
A geyser of black salt water shot eighty feet into the howling night air, and from within the foam lunged the vanguard of the rift swarm: Abyssal Manta-Spikes. These were not natural marine rays. Stretched across four meters of leathery, midnight-blue joint padding, their bodies were studded with hardened bone barbs and segmented hard shell ridges. The clear genetic signed name of the Sovereign Chimera Order’s deep-sea breeding vats. Protruding from their rostrums were two-meter serrated bone lances that whistled…
