Rising from beds of yellow weeds and honeycombs of bryozoans were the outer ruins of the city: leaning, pitted rectangles and domes and massive slabs encrusted with corals and polyp colonies. And then more and more: jutting shafts like pointing fingers, worm-holed obelisks, pillars and multi-sided buildings that resembled ornate mortuaries. Everything was colossal, oversized, experiments in morbid gigantism and warped angles. Some of the pillars were hundreds of feet high, the rectangles like weathered blocks a giant had tired playing with.

The city rose up and spread out in every direction, as far as the lights could reach through those murky waters. Primeval ruins oozing with slime, draped with marine creepers and shrouded with colonies of bivalves and primitive corals. And the farther the SDV took them, the more complex and profuse the ruins became until it was a veritable necropolis of shattered pyramids, cracked domes, arches strung with deep-sea fungi, cones and monoliths, an elaborate system of multi-leveled barrow trenches intersecting them.

And by that point, Bell could feel his stomach actually pulsating with horror, jumping from all the adrenaline shooting through him in hot spurts. His chest was tight, his breathing coming fast, his heart rapping ceaselessly. The fear he felt of this place, the brooding genetic memory it inspired, was not just psychological or spiritual, but biological. He felt like he could have vomited out his intestines.

And then the ruins played out, fading into the murk, and here was the city proper.

Dear God, here it was as it had been for millions of years. The lights brought it into view through the raining silt and waving growths and once again, as always, he had to fight back a scream. The lights could only reveal the smallest portion of it, but that was plenty. It was black and stark, honeycombed and oddly machined in appearance. Something composed of a dozen geometrical shapes welded into a leaning, mushrooming whole.

He had seen the images taken of it by the hydrobot five years before and the video the ROVs and AUV Orca had sent back. He knew that it was a cyclopean, crumbling megalopolis, sepulchral and skeletal, rising up well over five-hundred feet from its mounded base to the very tops of its tomb yard expanse of spires and narrow pipes and spoke-like pinnacles. The AUV had confirmed that it was clustered over a series of rolling submarine mountains and covered an area of some three-square miles. Though in every direction, collapsed into hollows and nighted abysses, were ruins that spread out much farther. How large it had once been, was impossible to say now. Much of it was broken and crumbling like a megalithic fossil.