The cutting-open lamp on the ceiling of the lab wagon hummed with a low, sixty-cycle buzz. It cast a harsh, sterile cone of white halogen light over the zinc running slab.
Arthur Vance tightened the yellowed nitrile cuffs of his cutting-open gloves, adjusting his Zeiss-Vanguard monocle down to sight cross-section mode. On the zinc table before him lay the body of the centipede-jawed saboteur, stripped of its tactical harness and clothing.
Beside the slab, Dr. Morrigan Calder had plugged the encrypted comm-slate taken from Garrow into her field data end-post. The cooling fan of the end-post whined in protest as rows of hex-code and high-resolution electron micrographs scrolled across the amber glowing monitor.
“Encryption bypassed,” Morrigan announced. She pushed a pair of brass jeweler’s loupes up into her tangled chestnut hair. “It’s a direct working link to the Chimera Order’s mainframe at Refinery Fourteen. Arthur, it’s worse than we thought. They aren’t just synthesizing the V7 blue lung vector. Look at the manufacturing ledgers.”
Arthur glanced toward the monitor without lifting his razor knife.
On the screen, hundreds of living intake logs flashed past: wild drakes, armored swamp mantises, three-headed river serpents, and over eighty civilian refugees captured from outer frontier settlements, all categorized under cold, commercial inventory codes: FEEDSTOCK BATCH 109-ALPHA.
