The air in Hangar Bay Nine fractured with bone-shaking violence. Inquisitor Korgan Rask didn’t walk into the room. He charged like an armored locomotive, his heavy iron-shod boots gouging chunks of concrete from the floor with every stride. Behind him, the three-hundred-pound trench anchor rattled against the deck plates. That left a gouged furrow that sparked with orange fire.
The sheer living mass of the creature was staggering. Standing over seven feet tall, Rask’s natural human skeleton had been brutally widened to support massive bundles of cloned gorilla musculature and high-pressure piston housings bolted directly through his iliac crests. His skin was the sickly white of lard, crisscrossed with jagged keloid stitch-lines where black razor-sharp thread pulled his flesh taut over man-made pumps.
“Die in the name of the Father!” Rask roared, his voice shaking through the air-flow grates like iron gears grinding without oil. Across his exposed chest, two monstrous monster hearts—one stolen from a swamp behemoth, the other from an underground gorgon—thumped wildly out of exact timing beneath an open cage of spliced ribs. Every contraction forced dark, sludge-like blood through thick semi-clear silicone hoses grafted directly into his subclavian arteries.
With a sickening groan of grafted muscle and high-pressure high-pressure fluid, Rask whipped his right arm forward. The heavy flesh-chains uncoiled with blinding speed, launching the three-hundred-pound forged iron anchor through the air like a siege catapult stone, aimed straight at Arthur’s chest.
