The disaster that unfolded within the five-mile tiered arena of the Sunken Crater was a masterpiece of moving surrealism.
A ten-thousand-ton iron dreadnought, designed to dominate the skies through brute engine power and crushing mass, had become fully weightless—a hollow leaf tumbling in a gale of its own making.
Its four massive steam turbines at the stern, still churning at full throttle, were no longer pushing against the air. Without the stabilizing ballast of its mass, their forty-thousand-horsepower thrust sent the seven-hundred-foot hull spinning into a wild, total flat spin.
The ship tumbled end-over-end through the violet twilight, its brass hull flashing like a tossed coin.
And all around it, floating in the airspace between the volcano bowl floor and the upper rim, were the hundreds of massive stone dark rock boulders.
To a grounded observer, a ship colliding with a floating mountain should have resulted in a thunderous, explosive impact. Armor plate crumpled like paper, rivets shearing, stone shattering into dust.
Instead, because the dreadnought possessed zero mass, the laws of moving crash operated in slow, dreamlike reverse.
BOOM... Hummm...
