The space beyond the air-flow grate was not a lab. It was a heavy-duty temple dedicated to living blasphemy. Splicing Factory Beta occupied a cavernous vaulted chamber three stories tall, carved directly out of the living dark rock of the floating mountain. Towering iron pillars, crusted with weeping saltpeter and rusted ladders, supported a ceiling lost in swirling clouds of chemical steam.
Arranged across the floor in nested rings were over three hundred tube-shaped glass incubation vats, each twenty feet tall and filled with a glowing, emerald-green nutrient broth.
Inside the glass, lit up by underwater halogen lamps, floated the horrors.
Arthur gripped the frame of the air-flow grate, his knuckles white against the iron. Through his Monocle Loupe, he could see hundreds of hybridized embryos suspended in the fluid like ugly living specimens in a museum. There were wolf pups with the scaly, waving tails of poisonous pit-vipers. Young raptors whose wings were fused into heavy, hard-shelled mantis scythes. And young terrapins whose shells had been hollowed out to accommodate artificial chemical injection pumps.
Pulsing through the bottom of each vat was a bundle of semi-clear rubber tubes, pumping a constant stream of man-made hormones, growth accelerators, and black-market mana solutions into their umbilical cords.
