“Ike! I’m Ike … Eisen? Eisner? Eisenbert … Eisenbraun! I’m Ike Eisenbraun, and this is Oceanus!”

*   *   *

It was as if my brain was a light and I had stumbled upon the switch, turning it on. Giddy, I looked around the room as if seeing it for the first time, the anxiety matching my confusion. “Sweet Jesus, what the fuck happened?”

Before I could begin to analyze my altered surroundings the reverberation hit me—a tingling sensation registering deep within my bones, followed immediately by a muted siren’s scream—the sound of buckling metal!

Oceanus toppled forward amid an avalanche of rusted steel, an unseen force leveling the habitat out, causing loose objects to slide toward me across the tilting floor. The sudden inertia parted clumps of seaweed and algae, allowing me a small fluctuating porthole of visibility to view the event unfolding outside the vessel.

The northern support arm was collapsing, redistributing the awkwardly displaced weight of Oceanus, which had already lost its southern appendage. For a brief moment, the sphere balanced on its eastern and western legs, until the western leg began bending beneath the habitat’s teetering center of gravity.

The sphere began rolling again, this time to my left. Gripping the curtains, I slid into the far wall, my eyes focused on a clear patch of sea that parted the algae. Standing on the wall, I pressed my face to the viewport and looked up, expecting to see an ice sheet, but instead I saw only deep blue sea.

It’s what I saw when I looked down that scared the bloodstained piss out of me.

A deep, dark canyon cut a jagged path across the seafloor, the lone remaining anchor leg no more than a hundred yards from its nearest edge. When it too collapsed, the forward inertia would roll the giant sphere across that infinitesimal expanse and into oblivion.

Jesus, Eisenbraun, you’ve got to get the hell off this ship!

Fleeing the stateroom, I sprinted down the dark, rotating corridor—stopping at the science lab.

“Andie…”

I tried the door, but it was sealed. “GOLEM, open the lab! GOLEM, acknowledge!”

A shudder shook the habitat, the reverberation building like a massive seaquake.

The last anchor arm … it’s collapsing!

There was nothing I could do, nothing to grip. Suddenly I was flying backward down the corridor, and then sideways through an alcove, headfirst into the arboretum thicket. I dragged myself to my feet as the jungle around me continued its slow, gravity-defying roll, the trees forcibly suspended sideways, their cracking branches crashing, igniting growling sounds from unseen wildlife.

And then my back met the bruising embrace of a tree limb as my world thankfully stopped rolling.

From what I surmised, the remains of the western leg was momentarily acting like a brake, preventing the giant sphere from falling into the canyon. How long it would hold—I had no idea, but I needed to get to the mini-subs, and fast.