The internal bio-circuitry of Arthur Vance’s restructured nervous system engaged with a silent, electric surge.
The sixty-second body overdrive window opened.
In Arthur’s senses, the chaotic violence of the vivisection hall ground into slow, thick, sticky motion. The dropping Scorpid pincer, moving at seventy meters per second, slowed until Arthur could clearly trace the tiny stress fractures running along its hard shell edge. The hiss of escaping air-powered fluid became a rhythmic, drawn-out sigh. The warning klaxons overhead stretched into a deep, underground drone. Their pitch dropping three was full octaves.
Every sense receptor in Arthur’s body flared into hyper-acuity. Through his linked nervous system, he felt the cold, unbending weight of Titus’s dark rock shell grounding the floor beneath him. He felt Pip’s radiant solar pulse mapping the heat gradients of the room. He felt Grimm’s gravity vectors curving the air around his shoulders. He felt Vesper’s sharp slaughter intent marking the spatial seam lines in the ceiling. And he felt Echo’s fluid water-pressure awareness tracking the blood rushing through Rask’s torn arteries.
Second 01.
Arthur stepped forty inches to his right, rotating his hips with easy high-pressure care. His carbon-dark rock marrow absorbed the sideways tearing force without a tremor. The razor-sharp tip of the four-meter pincer sliced through the exact volume of space his shoulder had occupied a heartbeat prior, shearing through the air with a bone-shaking crack that parted the fog of chemical coolant.
