The air-powered handpiece whined at eighty thousand turns a minute, emitting a clean, high-pitched hum that rang against the stainless steel walls of the razor-sharp trailer.
Inside the sterile enclosure, the air was cold, damp. Then it soaked with the faint tang of chlorinated antiseptic and spark-charged stone dust. Outside, under eight thousand meters of living granite, the underground water bed groaned with low-hum earth-shaking murmurs. But within the mobile lab, the shaking-dampening air-powered struts held the running table as motionless as an altar of solid black glass. High-intensity halogen razor-sharp lamps focused three overlapping beams of shadowless white light onto the center of the field, lighting up the delicate patient resting upon the sterile silicone cradle.
Arthur Vance sat perfectly upright in his ergonomic running chair, his forearms supported by padded silver-steel armrests. His dark hair was tucked securely beneath a sterile razor-sharp cap. His Zeiss-Vanguard monocle was coupled directly to the eye lens of the high-zoom razor-sharp microscope, overlaying glowing amber test grids over the glistening tissue of Echo’s skull.
Before touching the instruments, Arthur had spent twenty minutes reviewing the operative set with his razor-sharp team. In his last life as a trauma beast-doctor corpse-judge, he had performed neuro-decompressive procedures on injured hungry mammals. But an eighty-five-gram amphibian with old family draconic gene introns presented a unique body-leverage challenge.
