The air inside Vault 6 was ten degrees colder than the throne cave, carrying the acrid stench of scorched hard shell, decaying sulfur, and decomposing silicon.
The precursor quarantine chamber was built from massive stone blocks of unpolished dark rock. It was sealed behind a twelve-foot air-powered blast hatch. In the center of the heavy holding pit lay the cut carcass of the Void Miasma Star-core.
The creature was four meters tall. A bloated, bulbous nucleus of hardened purple-black hard shell, bristling with hundreds of desiccated nerve tendrils that had once anchored into the skull of the Archaic World-Serpent. Rainbow-bright violet ichor leaked from its cut base. It hissed wildly as it etched tiny craters into the stone floor.
Deep within the core, a rhythm pulsed.
It wasn’t a living heartbeat. It was the sharp, clockwork rhythm of a spark oscillator: CLICK... CLICK... CLICK. Every pulse emitted a tiny ripple of violet static that caused the hairs on Arthur Vance’s forearms to stand on end.
“Heat wave counters are ticking,” Toby’s voice warned through the comms. “Arthur, whatever that thing is transmitting, it’s bypassing the world-size ionosphere entirely. It’s punching straight through the mantle fault lines using quantum-entangled carrier waves.”
