In her final seconds, she reached a terminal velocity of as much as thirty-six feet per second, or about twenty-five miles per hour, just slightly slower than her best flank speed during the run from Hunters Point. She was falling in three and a half miles of water, some of the deepest on the planet, and it took nearly five minutes for her to reach the bottom, a place so remote and dark and cold that in the history of the world no light had ever shone there. As she slammed into the ocean floor in a giant cloud of silt, her steel hull broke into two pieces and gradually rocked to a halt. It had
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