What Lodup had seen and heard in the last twenty-four hours should have been more than enough to shut him down. He had worked underwater, at frightening depths, for his entire adult life. He had always known that the oceans, unexplored as they were and arguably as inimical to human life as space, had many more secrets to give up. It had never occurred to him that these secrets would be of this nature. It was so far beyond the realm of his experience and understanding that he couldn’t process it. He felt numb. While he found that he wasn’t shutting down with the sheer enormity of it, he couldn’t embrace the wonder of it, either. He was left feeling as if the weight of all that black water between the habitat and the surface had a palpable presence and was pressing against the fragile breathing, diamond hull of the habitat, looking for a way in. He was left with a profound sense of unease by the twisted, dead, sense-defying city that he felt lurking in the water outside.
