The potbelly cast-iron stove in the corner of the District 4 field clinic glowed a comforting, cherry-red dullness, streaming the dry, fragrant heat of seasoned cedar logs.
Outside the tall roll-up doors of the converted brick grain warehouse, evening was falling over Mega-City 01. The sky over the harbor was a vast canvas of bruised violet and copper, while below, the streetlights of the lower ring districts flickered to life one by one. For the first time in sixty years, there were no corporate security curfews, no roving black-market court guards demanding license tokens, and no blacked-out transport vans spiriting away unlicensed beasts into the dark.
Inside the warehouse, the air smelled wonderfully of roasted marrow bones, chicory coffee, old paper, and sweet vanilla pipe tobacco.
Professor Bramwell Heseltine sat sunk deep into a battered, horsehair-stuffed wicker armchair, his muddy boots propped upon an empty wooden ammunition crate. In his nicotine-stained right hand, he held his beloved briar pipe, puffing slow, contemplative rings of pale blue smoke toward the exposed timber rafters.
“Forty years,” Bramwell murmured, his weathered face softened by the stove’s golden glow, a faint, contented smile creasing his gray beard. “Forty years I watched the University Senate kowtow to ApexBio grants. If a brilliant doctoral student discovered a simple herbal spirit-extract that steadied marrow fever, the patent attorneys would buy the research, classify it under Section Twelve, and bury the notes in a corporate vault so they could continue selling man-made immunosuppressants for ten thousand credits a…
