To climb alongside the body of the Archaic World-Serpent World-serpent was to realize that geology and comparative anatomy were, at their ancient limits, the exact same science.
Titus angled his four-ton flippers upward, his ventral belly shell humming with an intensified gravimetric glide that carried the squad parallel to the first climbing coil. The scale was dizzying. What from twelve miles away had looked like a textured snake-like flank was, at five hundred meters, an unbroken cliff of six-sided emerald armor that rose vertically into the golden sky for thirty miles.
Each single scale was thirty meters across, forged of hardened, bio-crystal-clear horn-protein three feet thick, ridged with ancient battle scars that had blunted the moving impacts of ancient extinction asteroids.
Yet Titus climbed past the second coil. Then, the majesty gave way to a charnel house of cosmic rot.
Arthur Vance leaned over the edge of Titus’s back shell, his Zeiss-Vanguard Loupe whining as its internal quartz prisms zoomed to tiny resolution. Through the polarizing filters, Arthur saw that the gaps between the massive scales—the flexible synovial membranes where the skin should have folded like supple, armored leather—were engorged with black, stringy tumors.
Ancient hard-shelled proboscises, thirty feet in outer rim and barbed like harpoons, were snapped off flush with the scales. Their hollow centers wept nonstop streams of acidic void-ichor. The rotting drainage had eaten deep, cavernous ulcers into the serpent’s skin plates. It exposed corded bundles of black, infected muscle fibers that shivered with reflex fibrillations.
