The private bio-potion-made lab beneath the newly commissioned 7th Vanguard Expeditionary Headquarters hummed with the steady, quiet power of three heavy-duty magnetic centrifuges.
Rows of heat-proof glass distillation coils, quartz reaction tubes, and high-pressure copper settling tanks lined the outer edge walls, bathed in the cool, cold and exact light of overhead razor-sharp halogens. The air smelled of boiled away wintergreen, calcined bone ash, and the crisp, clean ozone of high-purity aether reagents.
Arthur Vance stood before the central smooth-flowing-flow workstation, wearing a clean white lab coat over his black officer’s uniform. His left arm was nearly healed, the sling discarded in favor of a flexible squeezing sleeve that allowed full articulation of his fingers.
Resting in an ice-cold cooling cradle on the steel bench was the prize of Gate Seven. The clean, fist-sized chest core of the Chimeric Hydra-Drake.
The crystal was a rainbow-bright, many-sided emerald that pulsed with a deep, rhythmic inner soft glow. It was surrounded by three smaller, hardened bone-marrow nodes harvested from the fallen Siege Giant statues.
Beside Arthur, Professor Bramwell Heseltine leaned against the workbench, puffing thoughtfully on his pipe as he checked the heat gauges on the fractional distillation column.
“Purity assay confirms ninety-nine-point-two percent uncorrupted deep-sea aether, Arthur,” Heseltine rasped. He pointed with his pipe stem at the digital readout. “The copper-zinc fine mist we deployed stopped the man-made mutagenic markers before the beast died. You’ve got five pounds of pure, pure ancient spark here. The capital academies would kill for three…
