The six titan-serpents didn’t look like the docile, intelligent krakens of the deep trench.
They were wild deep-sea hunting beasts. Two hundred feet of sinuous, muscle-bound muscle armored in linked scales of oily jade, their three-sided heads armed with three tiers of backward-curving teeth that dripped yellow stomach acid into the foam.
The lead serpent reared thirty feet above the water. Its amber eyes were locked on an aggregate barge where twenty dockworkers were scrambling for the ladders.
With a rasping hiss that smelled of rotten shark meat, the beast lunged forward. Its jaw opening was wide enough to swallow a cargo wagon whole.
Captain Kenneth Drake didn’t draw his cutlass.
He had learned from Giles Croft that cold steel against multi-ton living mass was an inefficient waste of striking force.
Instead, Kenneth raised a brass firing lanyard connected to an underwater cable reel mounted on the template narrow high walkway.
“Town boundary rule-break,” Kenneth spoke into the speaking tube, his voice hard as iron.
