Six hours after the destruction of Silas Kane’s gunboat flotilla, the concrete railway machine shop had settled into the quiet, rhythmic hum of an intensive care ward.
In the center of the clean workbay, Echo lay on his padded cedar basking tray. It was surrounded by three battery-powered warming lamps that cast a soft amber glow over his plump, eighty-five-inch frame. The little Azure Stream Drake remained entirely inert, resting flat on his back with his four stubby, webbed paws sticking straight into the air like overturned fence posts. His rounded belly, still visibly distended from swallowing the twenty-two-pound steel mortar casing, rose. Then he fell in slow, deliberate respirations of four cycles per minute.
Through the semi-clear, rubbery skin of his belly, the faint violet shimmer of his sub-spatial stomach pouch had settled into a steady, deep-indigo soft glow. Arthur Vance leaned over the check tray, his Zeiss monocle locked over his right eye. He tracked the tiny cellular reactions occurring within the creature’s gastrointestinal tract.
The Ancient Taxonomy Engine projected a test status slate across his eye field:
“Fourteen point two percent dissolving,” Arthur murmured, adjusting the fine focus knob of the monocle. “His stomach is secreting an ultra-packed hydrochloric-aether acid that breaks down hard dark metal-steel into bio-available trace minerals. The explosive hexogen has already been fully stopped by his spatial fluid-draining folds.”
