The load-bearing mooring arm of Hospital Barge Solace-04 snapped with a sound like an artillery shell exploding inside a steel vault.
At minus twelve thousand five hundred meters. There, the surrounding water exerted a nonstop crushing force of one hundred and twenty tons of pressure, clockwork failure was never gradual. The main silver-steel docking pylon, weakened by the size-8.9 earthquake, buckled under the violent high-pressure thrash of a two-hundred-ton chimera vanguard.
The hydro-clockwork violence of a deep-sea hull breach is fundamentally unlike any terrestrial flood. Under one hundred and twenty tons of pressure of deep water pressure, seawater doesn’t merely spill into a compartment. It enters as a high-pressure water-flow jet capable of slicing through unarmored flesh like a gritty heavy-duty water-jet cutter.
Arthur sprinted down the access tube. Then, he could hear the load-bearing silver-steel ribs of Solace-04 screaming in metal agony. Every foot of the barge’s hull was carrying millions of foot-pounds of external load. If the solid strength dropped below the critical fifty-percent threshold, the entire three-hundred-meter vessel would pancake into a crumpled mass of mangled alloy in less than forty split seconds, killing everyone on board before their nervous systems could even register the pain.
“Toby, decouple the backup valves!” Arthur shouted into his helmet mic. “If the pressure builds in the drainage channels, the backup blowers will blow their rubber rings! Vent the ballast tanks to negative pressure!”
