The air in the Central Glacial Caldera snapped with the dry, terrifying crackle of raw bio-electric discharge.
Across the two-mile floor of black iron-hard metal ice, the crippled titan began to writhe. Stripped of its right shoulder assembly and anchored to the floor by its cut knee tendon, Ymir-Chimaera was no longer running on instinct. It was drowning in existential agony. Deep within its shattered ribs, where whale-bone plates hung in jagged splinters, the rotting chest core pulsed with blinding, sickly azure soft glow. The core beat at an uneven one hundred and eighty contractions per minute, venting white-hot cryo-star-fire that hissed wildly against the freezing rime.
Arthur Vance stood fifty paces back from the edge of the blast crater, his magnetic boots anchored firmly to the craton, his left hand raised high above his head.
In his last life as a trauma surgeon, Arthur had presided over hundreds of open-chest emergencies. A heart-artery splitting headache burst or a heart ventricle tore under blunt-force trauma. Then, there was no room for pause, no margin for panic. The human brain had to sever its emotional connections and transform into a cold, calculating machine of body triage.
Facing a two-hundred-meter living monster in the lightless bowels of Antarctica needed that exact same detached cold and exact care, magnified ten thousand times.
