The ocean outside Station Deep-Anchor was a swirling storm of black silt and living-glow blood.
Hospital Barge Solace-04—a three-hundred-meter tube-shaped vessel moored to the station’s eastern overhead frame by four heavy magnetic docking arms—was fighting for its life. Swarms of spliced Shark-Centipedes had already swarmed the vessel’s outside hull, their multi-jointed hard shell legs digging into the sound heat padding tiles as their serrated jaws gnawed at the emergency escape airlocks.
Inside the barge, four hundred wounded Coalition soldiers and eighty recuperating war-beasts were trapped. Their life-support modules flickered under the impact of dozens of twenty-ton hungry impacts.
Arthur Vance burst from Station Deep-Anchor’s main flood gate, riding the water-flow slipstream generated by Titus’s four-ton flippers.
“Cell Alpha and Cell Beta, deploy in Topology Gamma!” Arthur commanded through the soul link. “Grimm, Titus, form the spearhead plow! Echo, grease the vector!”
VWUMMMMM!
Titus and Grimm sped up side-by-side, locking their shoulders in an iron-hard wall of living dark rock and crushing weight.
Echo, swimming three yards ahead of their snouts, opened his wide jaws and released a massive slick of zero-friction Spatiotemporal Bio-Lubricant into the water column. The dense, freezing salt water ahead of them lost all high-pressure drag. Titus and Grimm surged forward, their forward speed doubling to over sixty knots without shedding a single foot-pound of striking force.
