The Vanguard mobile research trailer was parked inside the secure service bay of Transit Hub Beta, its heavy silver-steel-alloy walls padded against electronic eavesdropping by a dual-layer Faraday cage and active sound scramblers. Inside, the cramped lab smelled of boiling distilled water, isopropyl alcohol, freezing liquid coolant, and the acrid, stale tobacco smoke drifting from Professor Bramwell Heseltine’s unlit pipe.
Arthur stood before the central bio-spectrometry workstation, still wearing his mud-splattered combat rig. His fingers were rock-steady as he used a tuned micropipette to transfer two drops of the viridian-black fine mist concentrate from a high-pressure glass collection vial into the chamber of an ultra-high-speed sight centrifuge.
Beside him, Bramwell leaned his heavy, scarred knuckles against the stainless-steel counter. The former dean of the Ironfang Veterinary College had dark circles under his bloodshot eyes, his white lab coat stained with chemical reagents piled up over forty years of living research. He tapped the stem of his pipe against his thumbnail, his gaze fixed on the digital readouts scrolling across the main monitor.
“The atom-deep weight spreading is fully unnatural, Arthur,” Bramwell growled. He pointed a nicotine-stained finger at the jagged chromatography peaks. “A wild-type cordyceps fungus—even an aggressive rift-mutated strain from the Marianas Deep pit—carries a polysaccharide atom-deep envelope averaging four hundred and eighty kilodaltons. Look at those baseline readings. Six distinct atom-deep peaks, every single one of them exactly tuned at six hundred and twenty kilodaltons.”
