The control housing of Airlock Gate Alpha-7 was buried behind three inches of rusted through marine bronze, bolted to the dark rock doorframe with six heavy six-sided studs. Arthur Vance worked with the swift, careful economy of an orthopedic surgeon cutting through a hardened joint capsule. His fingers, clad in thin nitrile-lined razor-sharp gloves beneath his diving gauntlets, moved with total certainty, calm by the crushing pressure of the surrounding ocean.
He slipped the tip of his narrow heavy dark metal stiletto beneath the edge of the access plate, applied thirty pounds of lateral leverage. Then he popped the rusted through cover free. Inside lay a tangled knot of copper air-powered tubes and pulsing, bio-man-made nerve cables—a hybrid screen characteristic of Project Genesis’s early shift from human building to ugly chimera biology. The copper was green with green rust. But the living tissue was glistening, wet, and warm, nourished by a nonstop drip of glucose and oxygenated saline.
“They have bypassed the manual override,” Arthur observed, shining a narrow beam of white LED light into the housing. “The locking dogs are held shut by living muscle clamps. Look here.”
Valerie leaned in, her rebreather mask brushing his shoulder. Beneath the air-powered channels sat two thick cords of cloned bovine tendon, wrapped tightly around the main release valves. The tendons were kept under constant spark tension by a pair of silver electrode needles pushed in into their centers, causing the muscle fibers to contract in a permanent locked-muscle lock. The living…
