The bone-shaking blast wave from Korgan Rask’s forward charge hit the air of Sector 5 like an explosive artillery blast. The spliced giant covered forty meters of blood-slicked granite in two huge strides. His silver-steel-heavy combat boots left crushed, webbed craters in the two-foot-thick flat stone slabs. Overhead, the heavy chains suspending the vivisection vats swung wildly on their motorized tracks, the murky green formaldehyde splashing against the glass walls. The entire chamber shook with his moving driving force.
His four-meter Scorpid claw swept horizontally through the humid air. It whistled with the high-pitched shriek of over-high-pressure high-pressure fluid. The serrated hard shell blade sliced through a row of six-inch solid steel load-bearing pillars as effortlessly as a hot razor knife parting soft connective tissue. It sent cut iron support posts spinning through the gloom. The air smelled of burnt signal oil, man-made coolant, and the acrid ozone stench of discharging bio-charge banks.
“Scatter! Take the flanks!” Valerie shouted, diving sideways behind an overturned autopsy cart. Shards of snapped steel whistled inches above her helmet. Her magnetic rifle came up instantly. It sent a triple-burst of heavy dark metal sabots downrange. But the hyper-dense moving slugs merely sparked against Rask’s subdermal hard shell breastplate. That left shallow grey indentations before ricocheting into the vaulted ceiling.
