The eight-thousand-ton backup dreadnought Goliath-04 surged forward like an enraged iron giant beast.
Its four massive forward thrust screws, each cast from dense hard dark metal-bronze and measuring twelve feet across, churned the freezing hadal water into a roaring vortex of bubbling blast foam. The warship’s bow—a heavy silver-steel-hardened carbon-iron ram designed to slice through ice shelves and deep-sea research stations—cut through the dark salt water at thirty-two knots, aimed directly at Titus’s exposed flank.
Inside Goliath-04’s command bridge, the chimera captain, an ugly fusion of human naval officer and hadal anglerfish with crusted bio-glowing tendrils sprouting from his temples, screamed into the shipboard intercom:
“Full ahead emergency! Divert all reactor steam to the prow hydraulics! Crush the turtle! Ram them into the plateau!”
Inside Titus’s command module, the closeness alarms wailed with ear-splitting urgency.
“Crash alert! Range: four hundred yards!” Toby shouted, his hands bracing against the edges of the helm console as the g-force tracking data flashed violent crimson. “They aren’t trying to shoot us! They’re using their entire shifted weight as a moving battering ram! Eight thousand tons at thirty knots... Arthur, that’s over two hundred megajoules of striking force! Even Titus’s shell can’t absorb a direct bow ram without total collapse!”
