The charges went over, and some evil fate exploded them right outside the forward engine-room; the possible weak spot. An engine-room artificer stood before his huge bank of wheels: behind him, the force of the hammering explosions burst a rivet from her side. The steel particle flew across the engine-room with the force of a bullet.
But it wasn’t the rivet that hit him. Outside that tiny hole the deep ocean was thrusting against the hull, clamping round it with a pressure of hundreds of tons per square inch. As the rivet exploded into the room, it was followed by a thin, horizontal jet of water; a jet under such enormous force that it was solid, like a thin, steel rapier. The jet struck the artificer in the neck, a trifle behind his left ear. Before he knew what had hit him, the jet bore into his head like a gimlet, smashing the lower part of his brain, careering round inside the bony cranium of his skull with ten times the damaging effect of a bullet. He fell backward, and in a twinkling the water-jet gouged his left eye from its socket in the dead face.