The smell of steaming saline, iodine, and heated alcohol rose into the cold hangar air as Arthur lowered the razor-sharp visor over his eyes. In the center of Hangar Bay Nine, Titus lay anchored with his belly shell flat against the concrete, acting as a massive, heated razor-sharp island. His dorsal shell, warmed by earth-heat energy channeled from his deep-earth core, kept four stainless steel running trays at a sterile sixty degrees.
On the rubberized mat beside Titus lay the first patient. A young dire-hound whose coat had been bleached white by sulfur runoff. The beast was starved, its ribs protruding like the slats of a broken barrel. But its main threat was nerve.
Driven straight between its second and third neck bones was a thumb-thick rod of pitted black iron—a crude neural-override spike used by the Splicer cult to slave wild hunting beasts to their sound broadcast network. Around the puncture site, the muscle had turned into a dark, rotting porridge. The animal’s hind legs kicked in rhythmic, reflex spasms.
“Spinal blood bruise is expanding,” Dr. Morrigan Calder said, holding a suction hollow tube in one hand and a bulb syringe of chilled heparinized saline in the other. Her goggles threw a grid of green measurement lines across the hound’s swollen neck. “Mean blood pressure is dropping. If that spike isn’t out in four minutes, the main spine nerve will infarct from local blood loss.”
