The earth-measuring sonar scanner on Giles Croft’s central drafting console began to scream.
It wasn’t the intermittent chirp of ground-shaking settling.
It was a nonstop, high-pitched sound alarm that triggered when underground ground shifted weight exceeded four feet per second.
Giles sprinted to the master tracking data board, snapping on the quartz display screen.
Beside him, Toby Karr, Captain Kenneth Drake, and Master Borin crowded around the console, their faces bathed in the flickering amber glow of the earth-measuring radar map.
Across the circular display grid, a strange flaw was rising from the deep mantle beneath the northern mountain range.
It wasn’t a fault fracture. It was a nonstop, said clearlybiological mass of staggering, impossible to understand proportions.
The sonar return traced a segmented dark shape fifty-two miles in length and eight hundred and twenty feet in width, moving upward through the deep dark rock cave network at three miles an hour.
