The ceiling of the Central Round hall didn’t simply crack. It blew up.
Seventy yards overhead, the ancient dark rock dome was breached by forty thousand tons of directed striking force. It had held back six thousand deep-water lengths of freezing ocean for four hundred years.
The first impact didn’t produce sound as men knew it on the surface. In the hyper-dense, one-thousand-air salt water of the trench, the blast was a sound hammer that slammed through the water column. That turned liquid into an incompressible blast wave. The force hit Ren Vale like a flying timber. He lifted his lead-weighted boots off the flat stone slabs and threw him backward.
Deep-Diver Ren was already moving.
The smuggler’s massive, flippered body surged through the churning salt water with terrifying speed. His left arm clamped around Ren’s lambskin apron while his right encircled Mira’s waist. He hauled them both behind the fluted fiery pillar of a massive archway. He slammed his back against the stone, drove his heavy boots into a fissure between the flat stone slabs. Then he locked his copper diving collar down against his chest.
“Brace!” the diver’s roar ripped through the copper drain tube line, distorted by screaming static. “Hold your faceplates! Don’t let the bubbling blast empty pocket rip the rubber rings!”
