When an underground organism three hundred meters long dies, the earth doesn’t gently absorb its absence.
With the total ruin of the Brood-Mother and the vaporization of her anchoring struts, the delicate heat-powered balance that had held the Great Mantle Deep gap open for hundreds of years crumbled. The huge deep water pressure of the surrounding dark rock crust—billions of tons of fiery rock that had been artificially propped up by the alien titan’s void-biomass—began to collapse inward toward the empty center.
The three-mile-high ceiling groaned with a sound like tearing sheet metal.
Hairline fractures that had formed during the battle tore open into jagged fissures twenty meters wide. Multi-ton slabs of glass-fused dark rock, white-hot melted rock waste, and cooling magma crust snapped free from the cave roof. It plunged through the airless void like a relentless meteor shower.
“All personnel aboard the crawler! Now!” Arthur Vance shouted over the emergency escape channel, his voice cutting through the rising static.
Miller and his seven riflemen were already hustling the four high-pressure medical cocoons containing Torres, O’Neil, Chen, and Brutus into the heavy cargo hold of the Titan Mole. The wounded soldiers were locked into high-pressure shock-absorbing gurneys, their vital signs continuously monitored by Toby’s central console.
