The Broodmother was dying, but she wasn’t finished.
Driven by the wild, clockwork pulses of the ApexBio wired pump bolted into her chest crest, the chimera’s leftover central head whipped back and forth in a blind, psychotic frenzy. The brass casing of the hormonal pump was glowing cherry-red, its internal pressure governors shrieking in dissonant harmony with the beast’s dying rattles.
Across her swollen belly, a massive, semi-clear bio-plague sac—pulsating with thirty thousand gallons of high-pressure, sapphire-blue viral spore sludge—began to swell like an over-inflated boiler.
Through the semi-clear epidermal wall of the sac, millions of tiny stone-glass crystals drifted in the thick, sticky lymph, sparkling with deadly azure light. If that membrane burst under the building internal pressure, the entire underground chamber would be instantly filled with an aerosolized cloud of Blue Lung contagion. It scattered into the upper air-flow shafts and traveled for miles across the frontier fens.
Arthur Vance saw the total chemical cascade unfold across the living tracking data of his Zeiss-Vanguard monocle:
“The pump is forcing her into an autolytic blowout!” Arthur shouted into the tactical squad channel, his voice cutting through the hiss of escaping steam. “Her heart pressure is off the scale! If that central sac bursts, thirty-five thousand frontier commoners will breathe this spore cloud before noon! Titus, lock her foundation! Grimm, tear the breastplate! Vesper, standby for map point phase-slip!”
