Lin Mei pressed her gloved palms over the cold rubber ear-cups of her headset as the steel catwalk bucked beneath her boots.
The entire caisson rim of Blackwater Rig Twelve was vibrating at thirty-eight kilohertz, an ultrasonic shriek carried on a crushing fifty-eight hertz electrical hum. Across the diamond-plated floor plates, red rust shavings and slivers of grey sea-frost leapt two inches into the air, dancing in sharp geometric rings.
“Do not let the vibrations match your skull frequency!” Lin Mei screamed through her saline-wetted Draeger mask, her voice muffled behind the speech diaphragm.
“The acoustic pressure is driving past one hundred and eighty decibels!” she shouted, pointing at the fluttering needle of her portable decibel meter.
“My molars are clattering against each other like dice!” Mac Cole roared, steadying himself against the yellow safety railing with his naval brass prosthetic forearm.
“The whole deck feels like an unbalanced centrifuge!” Mac shouted, spit flecking his respirator lens.
“It is an acoustic broadcast from the seabed!” Doctor Victor Corvo called out, leaning over his medical kit on the upper grating.
A thin trickle of dark red blood slipped from Corvo’s left nostril, pooling against the clear polycarbonate rim of his mask.
