At fifteen hundred deep-water lengths, the ocean ceased to be merely water and became a graveyard of boiling stone.
They dropped through a forest of hot-water chimneys. The titanic stone spires rose from the deep-sea shelf like the charred rows of stone pillars of a sunken cathedral. Their jagged was dark rock towers crusted with golden pyrite, sulfur blooms, and heavy deposits of chalcopyrite. From their fractured summits, dense plumes of black sulfide-laden water billowed wildly into the deep—white-hot stone jets venting at three hundred and fifty degrees.
The water had ceased to behave like a liquid. Under three crushing deep-sea pressure of water-pressure load, the water couldn’t boil. It remained a dense, shimmering fluid. An overload torrent venting at three hundred and fifty degrees. He carried dissolved lead and iron into the dark before cooling against the polar current.
“Mind the heat sheer,” Deep-Diver Ren warned through the copper drain tube. “Two feet to the left and it’s two degrees above freezing. Step two inches into that plume and your flesh cooks off your shin before your nerves can register the burn.”
The smuggler held a heavy brass sounding-lead in his left fist. It tested the boundary layer between freezing deep-sea salt water and the white-hot updrafts. His scarred level pupils tracked the sight shimmer of the rising heat.
