Vault 04-B lay two hundred yards beneath the central archive round hall, accessible only via a heavy high-pressure ramp lined with blast-proof decontamination locks. Arthur Vance led the squad down the incline. Then, the dry cold of the server rooms was replaced by a humid, sterile air that smelled of clean saline, freezing liquid, and uncorrupted amniotic fluid. The lighting shifted from harsh sodium yellow to a gentle, pulsing living-glow blue that cast soothing ripples across the stainless-steel floor.
The nursery was a huge circular vault spanning sixty paces across. The walls were lined with towering stainless-steel ice-cold carousels, each holding hundreds of high-pressure glass incubation pods that pulsed with gentle, rhythmic light. Overhead, a self-running brass track system moved small feeding cannulas from pod to pod, delivering precise micro-doses of purified stone broth and oxygenated saline to the developing embryos within.
Arthur walked down the central aisle, his type-list monocle sweeping across the lit up pods. Inside the clear fluid, suspended in weightless peace, were thousands of tiny and early-stage blastocysts:
“By the ancestors,” Valerie breathed, stopping before a central pod labeled Sample 0014: APEX PROTO-FENRIR. “These aren’t chimeras. There’s not a single splice-wire or wired shunt in any of these containers. They’re pureblood old family embryos, fully untouched by mutagenic growth serums.”
