The air inside the Goliath-03 was heavy with the oppressive weight of a living crime scene.
Every breath Arthur drew through his rebreather filter carried the sickly, sweet stench of rotting tissue mixed with heavy-duty ozone. The deck beneath his boots was not clean steel. It was coated in a layer of slippery, semi-clear membrane that had sloughed off the walls. The discarded epidermal cells of the living hull. Overhead, clusters of fleshy, living-glow polyps hung from the cable channels like ugly grapes, pulsing with dim, sickly yellow light that cast long, trembling shadows down the companionway.
Vesper walked with her tail curled high, her nose wrinkled in total revulsion. She stepped only on the dry raised ribs of the deck grating, carefully avoiding the puddles of pink amniotic fluid. A drop of water drops dripped from the ceiling toward her head. Each time, a micro-crushing force flickered above her ears, crumbling the droplet into harmless vapor before it could touch her fur.
“They aren’t just breeding beasts here,” Arthur noted, his eyes scanning the biometric monitors mounted to the inner walls. “Look at the genetic transcription readouts. They’re using human stem-cell vectors to stabilize the deep-sea cephalopod grafts. This is direct rule-break of the Geneva Biological Sanctions.”
