A three-hundred-foot door of solid iron-hard metal didn’t swing open with a creak.
It opened with a sound like a distant thunderstorm moving across a mountain range.
Deep beneath the white plaza, forty thousand tons of liquid silver balance weights dropped through sealed bedrock cylinders.
Within the massive doorframe, six-foot-thick locking bolts of hardened alloy retracted with a set of bone-shaking, underground thuds that shook through the soles of Giles Croft’s boots.
THUD. THUD. THUD.
Then came the hiss.
It was a huge, prolonged breath out of releasing empty pocket. The sound of ten thousand years of hermetic seal equalizing with the dense, dry air of the drained ocean basin.
A cloud of fine, crystal-clear frost billowed outward from the parting seam, swirling around the companions in cold, sparkling vapor that smelled of dry ozone, ancient copper, and stone-hard pine needles.
