The heat discharge from Mooring Pylon Three formed a shimmering curtain of warm, salty water that distorted the darkness of the hadal basin.
Arthur Vance swam through the plume, his suit’s micro-thrusters purring at minimal voltage. Beside him, Echo’s four feathery gills fluttered with a steady, steady beat. The little salamander’s spatiotemporal field bent the heat rough churning around Arthur’s body. That kept the warm plume from generating churning eddy currents that could trigger the outer edge’s passive sonar buoys.
Ahead, the black silver-steel lattice of Pylon Three rose like the leg of a stone-hard giant statue, anchored deep into the dark rock shelf.
Through the greenish haze of his visor’s low-light optics, Arthur identified the intake grate. It was a massive circular port, twelve feet across, protected by heavy silver-steel bars designed to keep deep-sea megafauna from being drawn into the dreadnought’s cooling turbines. Clinging to the overhead frame narrow high walkway just above the intake were two sentries.
They weren’t human divers.
Arthur adjusted his Zeiss Loupe, zoom clicking up to 8x. The creatures were chimera thralls. Bio-spliced horrors combining human musculature with the gristle skeleton and skin denticles of deep-sea deep-sea sharks. Their heads were flattened and spade-like, devoid of hair, with rows of slit-like nostrils and dead, black gristle eyes. Along their necks and the flanks of their ribcages, glowing green sense pores pulsed with bio-electric radiance.
