The water at minus eight thousand four hundred meters was not merely cold. It was a physical weight that pressed against the mind like a solid slab of lead.
Arthur Vance stepped into Titus’s lower deployment airlock, his boots clanking against the drainage grate. The sky diving rig he wore was a masterpiece of frontline building. An said clearlyexosuit of charcoal-tinted heavy dark metal alloy, with micro-high-pressure joints powered by Titus’s pressure-sparking charge and a flexible aether-membrane lining that stopped external water-pressure shear.
Across his chest hung the ARC-7 Longfang, its receiver sealed in a high-pressure black rubber sleeve. On his right forearm, the air-powered micro-centrifuge needle glove was loaded with six hyperbaric steadying cannulas. In his leg sword sheaths rested the twin nine-and-a-half-inch heavy dark metal-hardened carbon-iron razor knife-stilettos, their micro-grooved spines filled with hyper-osmolar coagulant salve.
“Flood cycle started,” Toby’s voice echoed through the helmet comms. “Arthur, remember: you have an eighty-meter tether. If you get dragged into the trench down-draft, Titus has to burn anchor to hold position.”
“Understood,” Arthur replied. “Open outer valves.”
Seawater roared into the chamber. It was an assault of black ice and crushing thickness. But as the water rose past Arthur’s visor, his breathing remained calm. Through his soul-sync connection with Echo, his lungs experienced no sympathetic panic. The axolotl’s Spatiotemporal Apnea flowed through the link, slowing Arthur’s resting heart rate to forty-two beats per minute and expanding his oxygen utilization smooth speed tenfold.
