The screaming gale of the upright shaft tore at the seams of Arthur Vance’s exosuit as the forward third of the Boreas Rig crumbled in their wake.
Twisted silver-steel support heavy beams, broken high-pressure channels, and jagged chunks of ancient black ice tumbled alongside them through the dark. At minus ten thousand meters, the air was so dense with unbonded cosmic aether that the air itself felt heavy as water, resisting their descent with churning, white-hot friction.
“Echo, maintain the hydro-spatial cushion!” Arthur roared into the suit’s comms pickup, his fingers white-knuckled around Titus’s rear handling strap. “Titus, prepare for gravity drag!”
Inside his heat-proof glass flask on Arthur’s chest, Echo’s pink body was glowing with brilliant turquoise light. The little axolotl’s outer gills fluttered at hyper-speed, venting streams of rainbow-bright spatiotemporal mist into the air.
BLOOP.
A forty-meter sphere of warped map point space swelled around Titus’s massive dark rock dome. Inside the bubble, the laws of moving gaining speed bent. Falling steel heavy beams weighing twenty tons slowed to a gentle, floating crawl, drifting harmlessly past Arthur’s visor like autumn leaves in a quiet breeze. The screaming wind fell away into a soft, murmuring hum.
Titus shifted his forty-five-ton bulk in mid-air. The giant tortoise angled his massive front limbs downward. It extended four heavy iron-hard metal high-pressure spurs from the outer edge of his belly shell.
