Under five crushing deep-sea pressure of water-pressure load, a compromised diving dress does not fail by degrees. It collapses with the sudden, total violence of an imploding eggshell.
Qiao Ming lay on his left side across the six-sided hard speckled rock flags of the stone stand, his cheek pressed against the cold inner curve of his bronze helmet. The sudden restoration of his breathing had saved his lungs from collapsing, but the physical damage to his deep-sea envelope was critical. Through the left flank of his vulcanized shark-leather suit. There, the brass waist-pipe rim mated with the heavy lead-weighted trousers, a fine, nonstop jet of black Hadal salt water was forcing its way past the tightly packed sheepskin seal ring.
The water entered not as a gentle trickle. But as a razor-sharp high-pressure needle under seven thousand pounds of pressure of pressure, piercing through his woolen undergarments and slicing across the skin of his left hip with the burning sting of a red-hot iron wire.
“Slow leak in the waist pipe rim,” Qiao Ming said, his voice flat, skilled, and stripped of panic by sixty seasons of water-mapping conditioning. “Left flank. The sheepskin seal ring has snapped under the body blast wave. Rate of ingress... Fourteen centiliters per minute and climbing.”
