The underground railway depot was a cavernous cathedral of made nightmares.
Built eighty years ago during the First Trench Reconstruction, the heavy-duty work-yard spanned four hundred meters of vaulted underground tunnels, formerly used by the town transit power to service heavy freight locomotives. Now, the rusted tracks and steel upkeep platforms were underwater beneath a sea of warm, stale amniotic fluid that smelled overpoweringly of formaldehyde, decaying joint padding, and the sour grease of high-voltage pumps. Thick steam, tinged with a sickly sweet chemical undertone, rose from the floor grates to condense into greasy yellow droplets on the overhead heavy beams.
Suspended from the high iron roof beams by thick high-pressure winches and braided steel cables were rows upon rows of tube-shaped glass bio-vats. Over three thousand vats hung in rigid sharp-angled ranks across the gloom, each measuring four meters in height and filled with cloudy, glowing amber nutrient broth. Inside the glass chambers, bathed in nonstop aetheric power-coil currents, floated baby chimeras in various stages of forced metamorphic growth. Some were twitching with premature muscular contractions. Others floated motionless, their half-formed limbs tangled in artificial umbilical lines.
Arthur Vance walked down the narrow central narrow high walkway. His boots stepped carefully over thick clusters of ribbed polymer hoses that snaked across the steel grating like blackened veins. Every hose pulsed with a sluggish, rhythmic heave, pumping high-concentration mutagenic peptide broths and man-made adrenal compounds directly into the vats. The hum of forty heavy-duty circulating compressors shook through the soles…
