The deck plates beneath Arthur’s boots buckled upward with the shriek of shearing rivets.
From the dark elevator shaft leading to Deck 04, a wave of rancid, freezing air erupted into the central companionway. The stench was an appalling mixture of ancient black flesh-rot, ice-cold embalming fluid, and hyper-packed Zone 5 aether.
Scrambling up the upright ladder wells came the melted into glass Miner-Chimeras.
They were the ugly leftovers of the 2082 drilling crew that had died in the lower decontamination bays, their corpses colonized over a century by deep-trench cryo-amoebas and rotting marrow parasites. Their human frames were hideously distorted. Limbs stretched to twice their natural length, skin turned to semi-clear, blue-veined ice. Their jaws split vertically into four-part jaws lined with splintered ribs.
“Cell Alpha, sweep and clear!” Arthur barked, racking the charging handle of his ARC-7 Mag-Carbine. “Don’t allow them into the bridge!”
Grimm launched forward like an artillery shell.
The hound’s black glass mass struck the lead chimera at full sprint. At the moment of impact, Grimm let loose [Crushing Density Burst], increasing his effective mass to fifteen metric tons for a split second.
The lead chimera didn’t merely shatter. It was fully crushed. Its frozen torso exploded into thousands of crystal-clear fragments that peppered the steel inner walls like shrapnel.
