Landing on the skull of a four-hundred-half-mile world-serpent didn’t feel like landing on an animal. It felt like establishing an expedition basecamp on a barren, earth-shaking plateau.
Arthur Vance activated the magnetic soles of his boots with a double-click of his heels. The electromagnets engaged with a sharp clack, binding his feet to the iron-rich dark rock matrix of World-serpent’s frontal bone plate.
The scale beneath his boots was seventy meters wide and forty meters long. A single, massive polygon of stone-hard black rock shot through with shimmering veins of underground diamond. Beneath that rocky armor, Arthur could feel the rhythmic, earth-shaking drumming of the titan’s pulse. Every heart cycle sent a deep, rolling shaking through the soles of his feet, with the muffled roar of millions of gallons of ancient blood coursing through sub-skull blood-vessel channels as wide as subway tunnels.
“Cell Beta, establish the anchor platform,” Arthur commanded. He knelt to check the ground thickness with his deep-rock probe. “We need total shaking solitude. If the plate shifts half an inch while we’re studying the blood sheath, the stiletto will puncture the inner lumen.”
Titus stepped onto the plate with heavy, heavy, slow power. The terrapin surveyed the dark rock terrain, his ancient amber eyes blinking once. Titus lowered his front belly shell. He drove all four sets of his massive, heavy digging claws deep into the spreading fissure between two linked skull plates.
