The naval staging cave at Naval Drydock Beta smelled of salt water, high-pressure oil, ozone, and wet black rubber.
Suspended from massive overhead frame cranes, the Nautilus-IV—a two-hundred-meter deep-sea assault battlecruiser provided by the Australis Maritime League—hung over the flooded drydock basin. Its double-hulled silver-steel-hardened carbon-iron pressure hull was clad in three-inch baked-clay heat ablative tiles, designed to withstand the crushing darkness of the sea-floor trenches.
On the concrete staging deck below, Toby Mallow was covered to his elbows in waterproof silicone sealant, calibrating the air-powered umbilical connectors of Arthur’s deep-dive trauma suit.
“Eight thousand five hundred meters, Artie,” Toby muttered. He tightened a hard dark metal collar pipe rim with an electric torque wrench. “Do you have any concept of what eight hundred and fifty sea-weights does to an organic body? If an external hatch seal fails by half a tiny fraction of an inch, the water jet cuts through human flesh like a heavy-duty water-jet router cutting through butter. You don’t drown down there. You turn into canned tuna.”
Arthur stood on the test platform, testing the articulation of the heavy exo-suit’s elbow joints. “That’s why we don’t rely on metal alone, Toby. Biology adapts where steel buckles.”
