At negative forty-eight hundred meters, the muddy floor of the Atlantic trench gave way to an unnatural deep-rock terrace. Rising from the black silt like the ribs of an ancient giant beast lay the outer edge of the Bermuda Void Atoll. The water here was undisturbed by surface storms. But it churned with violent, unnatural rising heat currents driven by heavy-duty heat exchangers embedded along the dark rock seabed. A freezing downwelling dragged against their diving rigs. It carried the metal tang of irradiated salt water and man-made amino acids.
Arthur Vance stood beside Titus’s massive head. He stared through the thick quartz viewport of his diving helmet at the underwater installation. It was vast—an underground volcano bowl spanning over four square miles, fully enclosed beneath a huge geodesic dome of heavy poly-baked-clay glass and ribbed silver-steel heavy beams. Around the outer edge of the dome, deep-sea hot-water vents had been diverted into heavy-duty heat exchangers, their white-hot sulfur plumes lighting up the structure in sickly shades of copper and bile-green. The light flickered through the dark water. It cast elongated, ugly shadows that danced across the sunken seabed like restless phantoms.
Attached to the outer rim of the volcano bowl were dozens of underwater docking bays, upkeep pens, and defensive stone retaining walls. Anchored to these platforms sat the Order’s outer defense fleet. Bio-clockwork Cephalopod Dreadnoughts, their fifty-meter tentacles wrapped around torpedo launch pylons, and cloned Great White Hydras whose multi-headed silhouettes prowled the outer edge currents like starving…
