The silver-steel-clad ballast frame of the deep-descent capsule groaned as the digital depth display flashed through twenty thousand meters.
Beyond the three-inch quartz viewports, the Pacific Ocean had long ceased to be water. At these crushing depths, the sea was an alien mantle of liquid thickness, as black glass and cold enough to turn motor oil into animal fat. The external tracking data sensor shrieked every six seconds, reporting water-pressure squeezing that would flatten an armored personnel carrier into a sheet of foil.
Arthur Vance knelt on the rubberized deck plates of the open cage, his gloved fingers resting on the lateral sense line of the pink creature curled across his lap.
Echo looked like a three-meter pale salamander with outer gills that fluttered like branches of cyan coral. The creature’s blunt snout rested against Arthur’s knee, its small black eyes blinking with sluggish, calm. Every few seconds, the axolotl let out a muffled sound against the wet rubber matting. A round, liquid bloop that sent a ripple of violet light through the air surrounding the capsule.
That ripple was the only reason Arthur was still breathing.
Echo’s spatial membrane was actively folding the water away from the cage. Instead of absorbing thirty thousand pounds of pressure per square inch, the hull rested inside a nearby pocket of folded space. The seawater slid around them as if the capsule occupied a separate dimension.
