The waist-deep water in Sector 2 of Hospital Barge Solace-04 was rapidly draining. But the floor was slick with pink hemocyanin, shredded tentacles, and medical debris.
Arthur Vance stood in the center of the flooded ward, his sky suit’s chest seals parted, his sleeves rolled past his elbows. Around him, thirty naval hospital corpsmen and orderlies were scrambling under the flickering yellow glare of emergency battle lanterns. Their faces were pale with shock as they followed the clipped, razor-sharp commands of the Vanguard Commander.
“Corpsman, clamp that thigh bleeder!” Arthur barked, not breaking rhythm as his own hands worked inside the chest cavity of a young naval lieutenant. “Use a curved hemostat and pack the wound with hadal coagulant foam. Don’t touch the lateral tendon—that’s the tamer’s soul-spirit vein link. If you sever it, his beast goes into permanent synaptic dizziness!”
The corpsman blinked, swallowed hard, and jammed the coagulant pack into the wound. Right away, the expanding potion-made foam adhered to the cut artery, the heavy bleeding halting in seconds.
Beside Arthur lay the lieutenant’s bonded beast. An eight-foot Abyssal Razor-Fin Guard Shark, its midnight-gray flank sliced open by dozens of poisonous viper-squid bites.
The shark was convulsing wildly, its gills snapping open and shut in spastic tremors as white, frothy bile vented from its spiracles. The chimera venom was a neuro-toxic polypeptide engineered to block sodium-potassium ion channels across the neuromuscular junction, inducing complete breathing total numbness in less than five minutes.
