Twenty feet of tightly packed marine clay smelled like rotting kelp and cold iron, even through four inches of nickel-chromium steel.
Inside The Nautilus, Giles Croft stood before the backup ballast pipe hub with an open grease-pencil in his teeth.
He tapped the pressure gauge on the high-pressure jet line with his pocket transit pin.
“Pipe hub pressure eight hundred and fifty pounds of pressure,” Giles said.
“Corbin, connect the high-pressure discharge couplings to the crown lances.”
Foreman Corbin Cross didn’t drop his wrench this time.
His hands were steady, his miner’s stubbornness finally asserting itself over the primal horror of being buried beneath the Atlantic Ocean.
“Lances coupled, Master Giles,” Corbin said. He wiped a drop of sweat from his nose with his sleeve.
