At minus four thousand five hundred meters, the Antarctic Zero-Rift narrowed into a claustrophobic slot canyon barely fifteen meters wide.
The heat had dropped to minus ninety-two degrees. Here, the ice walls were no longer smooth. They were jagged, splintered, and grooved with massive upright scrape marks left by earth-shaking slippage between the polar ice sheet and the underlying land-wide bedrock. Every gust of downward airflow carried a sharp, dry rasp, like sandpaper rubbing across stone.
Ahead of the squad, the shelf ended suddenly in an eight-hundred-meter upright drop known on pre-Cataclysm ground-shaking charts as the Great Shear Fault.
Arthur crouched on the frozen brink, his hand resting on Titus’s left marginal scute. Even through the padded layers of his gloves, the cold streaming from the deep pit felt like freezing liquid, threatening to numb the nerve endings in his fingertips if he remained static for too long.
“Check the anchor points, Titus,” Arthur said, his voice quiet inside the helmet comms.
The giant tortoise grunted in rule-following. Titus shifted his forty-five-ton bulk to the edge, extending his four massive columnar legs. From the underside of his belly shell, four heavy iron-hard metal high-pressure spurs extended six feet into the solid blue ice, biting through the frozen strata with a bone-jarring crunch. Once anchored, Titus became an unmoving bedrock winch, capable of holding hundreds of tons of suspended weight without slipping a tiny fraction of an inch.
