The golden-violet glare streaming from the Thalassic World-Eater Kraken’s giant stone eye was an extinction-level mental weapon.
The eye was forty yards across. A huge, ball-shaped lens of crystal-clear living quartz surrounded by nested rings of pulsating glow-spots and serrated hard shell eyelids. As the iris dilated, it emitted an intense, fluctuating bio-magnetic wave that rang at forty-eight hertz, matching the exact hum of the mammalian brain cortex.
Through the forward quartz viewport of Titus’s command module, the light washed over the cabin like a tide of liquid gold.
Inside Toby’s brain, the psychic heat wave struck like a physical hammer. His hands slipped from the helm controls. His vision blurred into double images of swirling fractals. A high-pitched tinnitus was ringing in his ears as his motor coordination collapsed.
“Arthur... My head...” Toby gasped, his knees buckling as he slid toward the deck plating, his nose beginning to bleed in thin crimson trickles. “The light... It feels like someone is driving an electric drill through my skull... I can’t... I can’t move my hands...”
Arthur Vance moved instantly.
He stepped between Toby and the viewport. He pressed his thumb firmly into the acupressure point behind Toby’s mastoid bone while at the same time twisting the manual polarization dial on the cabin’s quartz shutters. The aligned silver-steel blinds snapped shut with a heavy clockwork clank, cutting off the direct line of sight.
