The hall leaving the sovereign cenotaph sloped downward into an underground canyon that showed the violent physical scars of the Great Drowning: Entry hall 704, the Flooded Flume of the High Stoves. Here, the clean joinery of the andesite walls was shattered by huge lengthwise fractures. There, three thousand cubic yards of boiler plate had buckled inward under the sudden water-pressure hammer of the ocean.
Suspended in the cold, dry air along the ceiling were millions of semi-clear white spar-stone spherules. Stone-hard steam-bubbles that had formed when scalding steam at three thousand degrees exploded into forty thousand deep-water lengths of freezing oceanic salt water. The violent cooling had hardened the bubbles in mid-air, cementing them against the dark rock vault in glittering clusters that looked like the frozen foam of an ancient wave.
Qiao Ming walked along the center of the fractured water chute, his bare calloused feet stepping over slabs of distorted steel and hardened melted rock waste. The floor was rough, coated in a fine layer of crushed heat-proof brick that crunched faintly under his soles. He paused beneath a huge boiler-plate girder that had been twisted into a spiral like a ribbon of wet leather, its four-inch rivets snapped off at the root.
