The final sixty deep-water lengths of the Southern Pelagic Sea were choked with the iron bones of an empire.
As Ren Vale, Mira, and Deep-Diver surged upward through the emerald chop, the calm silence of the hadal trenches was wildly shattered by the thunder of the upper world. The water was no longer clean and cold. It was thick with soot, greasy with heavy fuel oil, and burning with the underwater blast waves of exploding boilers.
When Ren had cut the Arch-Notary’s indentures and dredged the Three Primordial Foundation Plates six thousand deep-water lengths below, the earth-shaking floor of the Mariana Rift had dropped. That huge sea-floor subsidence had pulled Lord Malakor’s salvage armada down with it.
The multi-ton air-powered dredge cables—cables of braided star-iron three inches thick, anchored to the steam winches of the dreadnought The Giant beast’s Yoke—had been dragged taut as lute strings against the collapsing dark rock shelf. At six thousand deep-water lengths, the earth doesn’t yield to steam engines. The cables had snapped.
The whiplash had traveled up two leagues of ocean in a split second.
Through the greenish gloom, Ren saw the total aftermath drifting through the water column. A shattered naval gun turret, its twin twelve-pounder barrels twisted like licorice, plunged into the deep, trailed by a star-pattern of glowing coal embers. Armored ironclad plating, torn from dreadnought hulls by the snapped cables, drifted downward like falling tombstones. Dead mercenary divers in crushed bronze bathyscaphic suits tumbled through the current, their helmets imploded…
