The descent into the underground casting basement was like stepping into the gullet of a hardened giant beast. The rusted iron stairwell had long since dissolved beneath decades of rotten-egg runoff. That forced the squad to go down via heavy hemp ropes anchored to Titus’s unmoving front limbs.
Arthur was the first to touch down upon the cracked flat stone slabs of the basement floor, thirty feet below ground level. The air here was ten degrees warmer than the surface, heavy and humid with the stench of boiling bile and sweet, rotten marrow. A pale, throbbing emerald eerie glow bathed the chamber in unnatural twilight. It cast elongated, jittering shadows that danced across the sweating limestone walls.
At the far end of the cavernous chamber, spanning sixty paces across a flooded casting sump, sat the source of the infestation: the Synaptic Relay Queen.
The creature was a monstrosity of horrific living adaptation. She didn’t possess the slender, hungry dark shape of the Stalkers above. Her belly had swelled into a huge, pulsating sac of semi-clear, hardened tissue nearly twenty feet in width, anchored directly into the exposed steam mains and wastewater water gates of Sector 7. Dozens of pale, segmented legs protruded from her dorsal ridges, twitching in rhythmic spasms as she pumped thousands of baby egg clusters into the flooded channels.
