The main dredge drill didn’t care that its command ship was in mutiny.
Engines of that scale possessed no intellect, only driving force. Driven by two thousand pounds of air-powered steam pressure piped down from the surface dreadnought The Giant beast’s Yoke, the sixty-ton star-iron drill head churned blindly in the center of the Great Scroll hall, boring downward through the floor toward the sub-vault below.
It was a tube-shaped monster four paces in width, its cone-shaped nose ringed with sixty diamond-toothed cutting bits that spun at eighty turns a minute. Every rotation ground forty cubic feet of ancient dark rock into a slurry of grey powder, vomiting clouds of crushed rock into the freezing salt water. The low, deep roar was terrifying. It shook through Ren’s ribs with enough violence to make his brittle quartz bones hum with painful tension.
Thirty feet below the spinning teeth lay the sealed ceiling of the Vault of Foundation Plates.
If that sixty-ton drill punched through, the pre-cataclysm gold-silver metal stone stand would be wiped out, the Three Foundation Plates crushed into scrap. The frozen stillness bubble collapsed into six thousand deep-water lengths of crushing hadal water.
“We have less than three minutes,” Ren Vale said into the copper drain tube, his voice strained as he pulled himself along the fractured stone railing. “The drill has already bored ten feet into the floor strata. If it touches the frozen stillness wards, the mirror will never be restored.”
