In the silent void of the deep ocean, sound doesn’t behave as it does in air. In dense, cold salt water under eighty-five tons of pressure of pressure, sound waves travel at nearly one thousand five hundred meters per second. Every clockwork click of the dreadnought’s weapons systems, every water-flow vortex shed by its living chest muscle fins, struck Titus’s dark rock back shell not as faint noise. But as a physical shaking that rattled through Arthur’s boots.
Arthur stood with his feet shoulder-width apart, his weight balanced. He felt the subtle shifts in the water column through his soul-sync link with Titus and Echo.
“Toby, report on the Trident’s condition,” Arthur said without looking back.
“Patrol boat has killed their main engines to reduce bubbling blast noise,” Toby responded, his fingers flying across the backup controls. “They’re floating on emergency trim, three hundred yards off our starboard quarter. But their reactor cooling pump is still screaming. The chimera’s targeting computer is locked onto that heat signed name.”
“Then we make ourselves louder,” Arthur said. “Titus, prepare the barrier.”
The distance between Titus’s living bathysphere and the Goliath-03 closed to less than four hundred meters.
At ten thousand meters below the surface, four hundred meters was point-blank knife range. The water was so dense, so heavy with stone salts and aetheric heat wave, that every movement of the dreadnought sent physical blast waves through Titus’s dark rock hull that rattled the instruments on Toby’s console.
