A blinding spear of blue starlight pierced the dark abyss.
The boiling vacuum tunnel illuminated the jagged canyon mouth in stark, unnatural brilliance. Behind the celestial beam, sixty twenty-ton meteoric anchors fell like a shower of iron tombstones.
Kaelen Vance stood on the narrow basalt ledge, his clogs resting quietly on the stone.
The downward pressure was immense.
The water column groaned under the weight of twelve hundred tons of falling metal, driven by Saint Vessel Mid array force. Two miles below, the hull timbers of the sixteen allied warships creaked in sympathetic agony.
Barnaby Holt held a heavy cast-iron skillet over his head like an umbrella, his eyes darting toward the stone ceiling.
“If that roof comes down, we will be flatter than yesterday’s pancakes,” Barnaby grumbled, backing against the obsidian furnace. “Two miles of rock does not leave room for open-casket funerals.”
Linnea watched the thermal pressure gauges with grim precision, her fingers poised over the cooling valves. “The acoustic displacement is climbing by forty atmospheres every second. The upper bottleneck is taking the brunt of the kinetic shock.”
