The floor of Entry hall 989 was tearing apart as their feet cleared the lower stairway arch.
The sound was not that of cracking stone. It was the titanic, groaning shriek of the Ark’s main keel-timbers being twisted beyond their elastic limit. Deep beneath the flat stone slabs lay the great spinal beams of stone-hard hardwood, six arm-lengths square, laid down in the First Epoch to bind the forward bows to the stern engine-wells. Those ancient timbers, harder than cast iron and seasoned by forty hundred years of deep-sea salt water, were bowing upward in the center of the hall, throwing the massive granite paving slabs into jagged, tilted castle walls that blocked the hall like tumbled sea-cliffs.
Through the center of the hall yawned a terrifying, jagged deep gap.
The floor had torn open along the central lengthwise axis, revealing a black, bottomless deep pit fourteen arm-lengths wide that dropped through sixty deep-water lengths of flooded ballast chambers down to the outer hull plating. From the depths of the rift rose the ear-splitting roar of rushing bilge water, mingled with the foul, oily stench of raw void-thick tar and the rhythmic, grinding thrum of the ship’s lower frames flexing against the outside pressure. Every ten breaths, a violent blast of freezing air rushed upward from the gap, carrying fine droplets of black spray that coated the ceiling in grease.
