The mobile razor-sharp trailer was converted into a potion-made lab, bathed in the sharp amber glow of high-pressure halogen lamps.
Outside, the underground lake lapped gently against the limestone docks of the captured railway spur. The Iron Ark’s commoner sentries walked their rounds atop the parked haulers. Their rifles were held at low ready against the damp mist of Trench 05. The air in the cave had cooled significantly since leaving Outpost 09. He carried the crisp, wet chill of ancient limestone underground water beds. But inside the trailer, the heat was warm, humid, and heavy with the sharp scents of boiling acetic acid, high-proof ethanol, and powdered minerals.
Arthur Vance stood before an array of pyrex condensing coils, baked-clay heating mantles, and stainless steel distillation columns, his Zeiss monocle humming as he calculated atom-deep weights, osmotic gradients, and aetheric saturation thresholds. In his last life as Fang Ran, he had worked with advanced pharmaceutical centrifuges and computerized liquid chromatographs. Here, under eight thousand meters of solid rock, he relied on brass burners, glass pipettes. The razor-sharp tracking data projected directly into his optic nerves by the Ancient Taxonomy Engine.
Beside the workbench, Dr. Morrigan Calder was adjusting the blue flame beneath a two-liter round-bottom distilling flask. She watched the water drops of ice-slow vapor through a coiled glass steam cooler tube.
