The inside of the Eclipse Dread was a cathedral of bone, steel, and frozen empty pocket.
In the zero gravity of the flagship’s main blood hall, there was no sound, no air, and no warmth. The hall stretched forward for half a half-mile. An eight-meter-wide tube lined with hardened silver-steel rib-struts that curved like the skeletal belly of an ancient deep-space serpent. Along the walls, thick bundles of bio-man-made nerve cables pulsed with a sickly violet soft glow, circulating high-pressure cold-coolant and liquid void-energy through the ship’s blood-flow tree.
Arthur ran his gloved fingers along the inner wall, his magnifying glass analyzing the cellular composition of the ship’s walls.
The Eclipse Dread was not merely an armored vessel. It was an organism suffering from end-post bio-clockwork mutation. The load-bearing inner walls were composed of osteo-man-made titan-whale rib struts, stone-hard by heavy-metal mineralization and grafted onto stygian steel roof beams. Running between the bone beams were decentralized automatic ganglia that pulsed with reflex fibrillations every few seconds.
“Notice the blood-vessel stonework of the walls, Toby,” Arthur noted in a low whisper, his boots locked to the grated floor. “The ship doesn’t rely on spark wiring to signal its blast doors. It uses bio-chemical neurotransmitters circulating through high-pressure tiny blood vessel loops. This is a giant, man-made giant beast whose brain cortex has been replaced by a wired command bridge. To disable the internal security barriers, we don’t need an electronic slicer. We need to sever the local reflex arcs.”
