A deep, ringing stillness settled over the vast underground volcano bowl of Progenitor Vault Two. It wasn’t the hollow, fragile silence of an abandoned tomb. But the deep, rhythmic, calming pulse of a sleeping continent whose fever had finally broken.
He stood on the narrow dark rock ledge within the chest fissure. Arthur Vance stepped back from the stitched main heart artery. The see-through amber visor of his magnifying glass flickered with fresh streams of data. It swept the Behemoth’s myocardial tissues from the apex of the ventricle to the base of its massive lung arteries.
The chaotic, wild fluttering that had threatened to tear the titan apart was gone. In its place was a slow, majestic, earth-shaking rhythm that pulsed like a world-size clockwork.
THUMP.
Every one-point-two seconds, the Behemoth’s heart tightened with huge, graceful power. The heart rate, which had hovered at a lethal four hundred and twenty-eight beats per minute during the leech-like infection, plunged steadily down the test scale: three hundred... Two hundred... Eighty... Until it settled at a perfect, calm forty-eight beats per minute.
The deep water pressure inside the main heart artery dropped from five-point-two gigapascals to a healthy, sustainable two-point-one gigapascals. Across the titan’s massive body, the bulging, discolored veins of fiery melted rock waste softened from blinding white to a warm, rich, blazing bright amber. The rotting purple discoloration along the rib seams was already flaking away, replaced by the natural, healthy dense green rock sheen of living mantle rock.
