At eighty-four miles above the surface of the Moon, the true scale of the horror was laid bare before Arthur Vance’s eyes.
The Vanguard Scalpel entered a low polar orbit, skimming across the lonely dark rock plains of the Mare Imbrium. Below them, the lunar surface was not the sterile, powdery gray desert recorded in pre-Cataclysm human archives. It was an alien butcher shop.
Across thousands of square miles of ancient fiery plains, sprawling mats of black, fungal mycelium covered the craters like diseased lichen. Massive veins of stone-hard bio-hard shell—some as wide as four-lane highways—snaked across the maria, converging from all directions toward the central depression of Crater Copernicus.
Arthur adjusted his Monocle Taxonomy Loupe, peering into the heart of the crater:
Rising from the central peak of Copernicus was a spire of living, hardened hard shell twelve miles tall, piercing into the black empty pocket of space like a black glass needle. The structure was alive. Through the sight zoom of his magnifying glass, Arthur could see huge blood-vessel trunks pulsing along the spire’s outside walls, pumping glowing violet nutrients from deep within the lunar mantle up to the pinnacle.
At the summit of the spire hung three huge, glowing bio-sac anchors. From these anchors, thick strands of dark-matter silk—each strand several miles in length—stretched outward like web lines. It wrapped around three massive lunar mountain fragments that had been broken off during the Cataclysm.
