Cetaterra prologue preview

Here is a early sneak preview of the prologue to My new Novel cetaterra:

The Echoes of the Sky-Piercer

The darkness of the Great Shattered Belt—the jagged remnants of what humans once called the Southeast Asian archipelago—was not a void to Klak; it was a cathedral of data.
She stood balanced on her flipper-feet, her dorsal-tail twitching rhythmically to keep her steady against the deep currents of the Ssh-Klak Trench. Here, where the bones of the ancient Japanese islands had been crushed and submerged by the slow-motion collision of the southern continents, the water was thick with the silt of a vanished world.
Klak let out a rapid sequence of high-frequency clicks. The sound rippled out from her melon, struck the jagged silhouettes of the ruins ahead, and bounced back, vibrating through the acoustic channels in her lower jaw. Her mind assembled the echoes into a map: a collapsed skeleton of a structure she knew from the old song-charts as the Sky-Piercer City—the place the Air-Breathers had called Tokyo.
“Steady on the line,” Klak whistled, the sound pulsed and metallic through the pod’s comms. “Lower the dredger. The ‘Knowledge’ is buried under the primary sediment of the Sky-Piercer.”
Beside her, two other orcanidule—their skin a ghostly, translucent pink—maneuvered the archaeological dredger. It was a humming mechanical maw designed to delicately vacuum away 50 million years of grit without shattering the fragile artifacts beneath.
As the dredger’s intake began to moan, sucking up the black sand, Klak reached out with a dexterous, three-fingered hand to steady a guidance cable. She couldn’t see the ruins, but she could feel the resonance of the metal through her skin. It was denser than the surrounding rock, vibrating with the ghost of a deliberate purpose.
“Klak,” a rising whistle came from the dredger operator. “We’ve hit something solid. It’s not stone. It’s… geometric.”
Klak shifted her weight, her sightless head tilting as she focused her clicks on the small patch of cleared ground. Beneath the silt, a flat, unnaturally smooth surface was emerging. It was the first trace of the Air-Breathers they had found in this sector of the Great Shattered Belt.
“Careful,” Klak clicked, her voice tight with a mix of scientific caution and ancestral reverence. “Don’t break the history. We are close now.”