Dr. Victor Corvo stepped through the airlock hatch onto the Moon Pool catwalk, his black leather medical kit gripped tight in his left hand as three tarnished brass buttons clattered across the steel grating.
The physical roar outside struck his chest like a solid wall.
Forty feet below their open diamond-mesh grating, the black Atlantic churned inside the concrete caisson of the Moon Pool, frothing with pale blue-green streaks of bioluminescent foam. Yet the sound of the sea was drowned out by the mechanical fury bolted directly ahead of them.
Occupying the center of the vibrating shaker deck was the Brandt King Cobra linear-motion shale shaker.
The machine was a twenty-foot-long monster of riveted steel plates, hydraulic tensioners, and inclined wire-mesh screens. Its twin electric vibrator motors ran at eighteen hundred revolutions per minute, shaking the entire catwalk until Corvo felt the fifty-eight-hertz tremor buzzing inside the cartilage of his knees.
An exceptional environment for acute acoustic trauma, Corvo thought, his pathologist’s mind automatically registering the decibel load as salt spray stung his cheekbones. Three minutes without ear protection will permanently flatten the outer hair cells of the cochlea. And most men fear blood, whereas a proper coroner knows to fear paper--flesh rots, while an administrative mandate never stops chewing.
