Inside the concrete railway machine shop, the emergency triage bay smelled of iodine, boiled rubber tubing, and raw glucose syrup.
Toby Mallow carefully laid Echo’s limp, bloated body onto a clean razor-sharp drape spread over a wooden workbench. The eighty-five-inch Azure Stream Drake lay flat on his back, his plump white belly protruding upward like a taught, semi-clear dome. Through the stretched belly wall, the faint violet shimmer of the contained hexogen explosion was already fading into a dull, colloidal glow as gastric enzymes began their slow, cellular breakdown of the twenty-two-pound steel mortar casing.
Echo’s four stubby, webbed feet stuck straight up into the air, entirely devoid of muscle tone. His head flopped sideways against a rolled cotton towel, his little pink tongue lolling out across his rubbery lower jaw. Every ten seconds, a faint, wheezing snore puffed from between his lips:
Bloop... Snrrr... Bloop.
“Inner body heat is down two point four degrees,” Dr. Calder reported, her fingers pressed firmly against Echo’s thigh blood pulse point. “Breathing is depressed to four shallow cycles per minute. Arthur is right—this isn’t trauma shock. It’s an acute body hibernation state. His cells have shut down every body-energy function to protect his nervous system from glucose starvation.”
