The officers’ mess hall in Sub-Sector 3 of Station Deep-Anchor had been stripped of its dining tables to make room for emergency triage overflow and off-duty tamer bunks.
In the center of the heavy dark rock chamber stood an ancient, cast-iron biomass hearth. A pre-Cataclysm heating fixture that burned tightly packed kelp pellets and stone coal to circulate hot water through the floor coils. In a work-yard twelve miles beneath the ocean. There, the surrounding water was two degrees above freezing and the walls groaned under thousands of sea-weights of pressure, the warm, crackling hearth was the only semblance of domestic sanity.
It was, for all practical purposes, a deep-sea campfire.
Arthur Vance sat on an overturned wooden shipping crate near the hearth, his sleeves rolled to his elbows, cleaning the feed gearwork of his air-powered needle glove with a rag soaked in grain alcohol. Across from him, Surgeon-Commander Lauren Drake sat with her combat boots propped on a low steel stool, cradling a steaming metal mug of roasted chicory coffee between her palms.
Between them lay the squad.
Titus occupied nearly a third of the chamber’s open floor space. The huge terrapin had found a massive pile of stone-hard sulfur coral and dried giant kelp stalks that the station’s hydroponic crew had brought in from the lower storage vaults. Titus was chewing through the rock-hard coral with rhythmic, clockwork bliss. His jaws producing was heavy, bone-crushing crunches that echoed through the room like steady hammer strokes:
