The air in Auxiliary Research Vault Gamma was heavy with the sickening, sweet odor of rotting flesh and spark-charged ozone.
Located six miles southwest of Outpost Alpha along the sub-crustal transit artery, Vault Gamma had been cut off from the main outside grid. Just then, the first void rift tore through the floor of Mare Tranquillitatis. Behind its dented blast hatch, twenty civilian asteroid miners and five military Iron-Tusk Mastiffs had taken shelter next to an unshielded void reactor coolant line.
Arthur Vance pushed through the manual airlock. Then, the scene that greeted his magnifying glass was one of total living devastation.
The miners were slumped against the inner wall walls. It was wrapped in filthy heat blankets that were soaked with serosanguinous ooze. Their skin was covered in weeping, blistered lesions—the characteristic “heat wave burn” of unshielded cosmic gamma exposure. Hair had fallen out in ragged patches, exposing raw, inflamed scalps. In the corner of the vault, the five mastiffs—massive, four-hundred-pound bio-engineered draft beasts bred for hauling ore carts—lay curled in shivering heaps. Their thick gray coats were sloughing off in wet clumps. Their gums bleeding was dark, uncoagulated blood, their breathing shallow and rattling.
Arthur tapped his magnifying glass, setting the scanning array to deep-tissue heat wave dosimetry:
