At thirty-two thousand meters beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean, the boundary between the Earth’s crust and the upper mantle ceased to be a theoretical deep-rock line.
It was an open, roaring world-size wound.
The squad passed through a narrow fissure of snapped dense green rock and plunged into a giant stone underground tiered arena over twelve miles wide. Here, the freezing, hyper-saline hadal salt water met the molten inside of the planet. Towering hot-water chimneys—black smokers eighty meters high—spewed white-hot stone fluids at four hundred and fifty degrees directly into the freezing depths. The violent crash of extreme heat and three-thousand-two-hundred-air pressure created a heat-powered whirlpool of shimmering, overload fluid that defied normal fluid dynamics.
Yet within this chaotic cooking pot of creation and destruction, Arthur Vance stood calm and collected on Echo’s dorsal ridge.
Arthur adjusted his Zeiss monocle, switching through heat, sound, and bio-deep ring spectra. The test readings streaming across his heads-up display revealed a landscape of breathtaking, terrifying beauty.
“Heat slope is extreme,” Arthur noted through the squad comms, his voice measured and authoritative. “Four hundred and fifty degrees at the vent mouths, dropping to one point two degrees ten meters away. Surrounding deep water pressure holds at thirty-two hundred and ten sea-weights. Maintain body-energy heat padding protocols.”
