The celebratory silence on the sunlit ridge of Mount Menzies lasted for less than two minutes.
Without warning, the long-range transceiver on Arthur’s chest began to scream with a high-pitched, warbling priority alert that cut through the polar air like an air-raid siren.
At Arthur’s feet, Grimm’s black glass head snapped up, his ears flattening against his skull as a low, violent growl rumbled deep within his chest. Beside them, Titus’s four massive column legs dug twelve inches into the snow-covered granite. His sixty-five-ton shell shook with deep, underground alarm.
Arthur tapped the emergency tracking data toggle on his gauntlet.
A cascade of flashing crimson alerts overtook his heads-up display.
Four thousand miles to the north, along the western crust-sink boundary of the Pacific Ocean, the seabed was tearing apart. The sympathetic mantle blast wave—triggered by the sudden, massive unblocking of the Antarctic cooling spirit vein at Vault One—had reached the earth-shaking fire of Caldera Tartarus with total violence.
A size 8.6 sub-oceanic earthquake had just ripped through the Mariana Arc at minus nine thousand eight hundred meters depth.
Over one hundred and twenty thousand cubic meters of white-hot dark rock magma were erupting into the deep-sea ocean every second. The ocean floor was buckling, hydro-heat geysers were venting black stone plumes three miles into the water column. The compromised ancient quarantine seal of Vault Two was fracturing under thousands of sea-weights of pressure.
