Inside the central lab of the Iron Ark, the air was cool, sterile. Then it soaked with the faint, healing aromas of formaldehyde, anhydrous alcohol, and crushed river-jade silicates.
Three battery-powered halogen razor-sharp lamps cast brilliant, shadowless white light across the main stainless-steel cutting-open bench. Mounted above the table, a salvaged light-projected tactical projector—recovered from the command bridge of Viper-01—hummed with high-hum cooling fans. It projected a semi-clear, emerald-green three-space-folding wireframe model of the underground deep pit into the center of the room.
In the center of the projection, suspended in eight thousand meters of virtual water, rotated the body reconstruction of the Gorged Abyssal Wyrm.
Arthur Vance stood before the display, his sleeves rolled to his elbows. His Zeiss type-list monocle was locked securely over his right eye. Behind the triple-ground quartz lenses, the Ancient Taxonomy Engine processed the sound sonar logs, ground-shaking waveforms, and living tissue samples collected from the wreckage of Silas Kane’s forward dredging stations, compiling an exhaustive cold and exact profile across his eye vision:
Beside the table, Toby Mallow, Dr. Morrigan Calder, and Valerie Koslov studied the spinning wireframe with varying expressions of intense focus, cold and exact fascination, and grim skilled math.
“Thirty-two point five meters,” Valerie observed. She leaned her forearms against the edge of the steel bench. Her cold gray eyes tracked the snake-like contours of the beast’s spinal column. “That’s longer than two railway boxcars coupled together. Look at the scale plating along the ventral ridge. Those aren’t ordinary living…
