Depth: minus eighteen thousand two hundred meters.
At this depth, the ocean ceased to look like anything known to surface biology. The water was no longer a fluid. It was an all-encompassing, crushing vice of hyper-dense salt water under one hundred and eighty tons of pressure of deep water pressure—more than twenty-six thousand pounds pressing down upon every single square inch of Titus’s back shell.
Inside the dark rock command module, the air was thick with the scent of hot stone, ozone, and recirculated oxygen. Veins of cerulean pressure-sparking light pulsed through the linked dark rock blocks of the walls. It cast a steady, rhythmic glow across Arthur Vance’s face as he sat at the forward watching station.
Every few minutes, a deep, metal groan echoed through the stone. It wasn’t a sign of total collapse. It was Titus’s skeleton metabolizing the huge moving weight of the water column.
A test slate flickered into focus across Arthur’s Zeiss Monocle Loupe:
“Eighteen thousand meters,” Toby Mallow murmured, his voice hushed as if speaking too loudly might cause the ocean above them to collapse. He tapped the digital depth monitor on his console. “We have officially doubled the working depth of any military underwater ever built by the Pacific Coalition. If one of our mounting bolts were to sheer right now, the high-pressure water jet would cut through this cabin and out the other side before our brains could even register the sound.”
