The mobile lab trailer parked behind Gate Seven’s inner castle wall smelled of boiling copper reagents, formalin preservative, and stale chicory coffee.
Outside, the steady, rhythmic concussions of the artillery duel continued to rattle the glassware inside the heavy cabinets. Every three seconds, a distant thud sent ripples through the chemical beakers sitting on the magnetic stir-plates.
Arthur Vance sat on a light metal swivel stool, hunched over a dual-eyepiece digital fluorescence microscope. His right eye was pressed against the optic lens, his uninjured right hand delicately adjusting the fine-focus hair-width knob. On the slide beneath the four-hundred-times full-body VR objective, the biopsy sample from the Stitch-Stalker’s backup amniotic node was stained in glowing emerald fluorophores.
Beside him, Professor Bramwell Heseltine stood leaning against a stainless-steel centrifuge console, a battered briar pipe clenched between his tobacco-stained teeth. The old dean puffed a thin ribbon of blue-gray latakia smoke toward the exhaust vent, his watery, sharp gray eyes watching the digital display mounted above the workspace.
“Well, boy?” Heseltine rasped, tapping the stem of his pipe against his thumb. “What has Father Genesis’s pet butcher tucked into the belly of his bugs?”
“Look at the cellular membrane structure, Professor,” Arthur replied. He stepped back to let the older corpse-judge look through the optics. “It’s not natural mitosis. It’s a man-made baby culture suspended in a high-thickness peptide broth.”
