The metal clinking beneath the keel was drowned by a row of thunderous crashes that echoed from the northern and southern arches of the high dome.
The two backup war-galleys—the eighty-oar iron-clad corvettes that Zhu Heling had suspended from the ceiling to serve as airborne artillery batteries—had reached the total limit of their moorings.
For eighteen months, these two warships had hung thirty arm-lengths above the floor, their thirty-two-pounder bronze cannons aimed down at the lower tiers. Now, as the rising floodwaters reached twenty-eight deep-water lengths depth, the floating lift of the water collided wildly with the fixed mid-air cables that held them from above.
The physics was devastating. A ship floating in water exerts upward floating lift equal to the mass of the water it displaces. When held rigid from above by steel ropes, that floating force converts into huge upward thrust against the ceiling anchors.
The northern mid-air bracket tore free with a terrifying scream of snapped iron. Galley #02 plunged down into the flood, its flat-bottomed hull striking the surface with a bone-shaking boom that sent a twenty-foot tidal surge washing across the tiered arena.
Galley #02, named the Iron Talon in the registers of the Iron Bureau, was a heavy assault vessel built to breach the water-gates of the Southern Trench. Its forward deck was crowded with thirty-two repeating fire-lances and four high-pressure oil projectors. When it hit the water, the violent water-flow shock burst the internal oil tanks, releasing twelve barrels of whale fat across…
