At minus twelve thousand two hundred meters, Station Deep-Anchor rose from the black deep-sea silt like a castle carved from the bones of a sunken mountain.
The station had been built during the second decade of the Rift Era, anchored to the dark rock summit of an extinct underwater volcano. It wasn’t a conventional submarine outpost of riveted metal and acrylic portholes. Under one thousand two crushing deep-sea pressure of deep water pressure—nearly eighteen thousand pounds of pressure—conventional civil building had given way to ancient geotechnic stonework.
Huge six-sided towers, hewn from solid fiery dark rock and bonded with aether-current-carrying black glass mortar, formed a protective ring around a central geotitanic dome. Massive silver-steel-alloy tether cables, each as thick as a red-wood trunk, anchored the floating upper rings to the bedrock below, groaning with deep, musical hums as the slow deep-sea currents tugged against them.
Arthur Vance stood at the forward watching port of Titus’s command blister, his hands resting lightly on the brass safety railing. Outside, the station’s outer edge searchlights cut long, amber shafts through the black water, lighting up clouds of stone snow and schools of blind, semi-clear hadal prawns that swarmed around the heat discharge chimney pipes.
