The shift from the open void of the Kuiper Belt into the inside chest duct was marked by a sudden, jarring shift in physics.
The Argo-Vanguard passed through the inner sphincter of Intake Duct Beta-7 with a muted shudder that ran the length of its keel. The circular valve—a ring of stringy muscle and ossified joint padding five hundred miles in width—closed slowly behind them, sealing off the starlight of the Milky Way with a wet, earth-shaking thud that shook through Arthur Vance’s boots.
They were inside.
Beyond the bridge viewports, the universe had been replaced by the inside of a living world-eater. The passage was twelve miles wide, forming a vast, ribbed tunnel that curved away into the violet gloom. The walls were not forged of steel or stonework. They were built of stratified sheets of stone-hard black hard shell, interlaced with glistening webs of tough binding tissue. Along the floor and ceiling, rhythmic waves of thick, cilia-like sense bristles—each three stories tall and coated in clear stomach slime—swayed back and forth in the high-pressure methane air, filtering airborne nutrients like sea anemones in a deep-sea trench.
Down the center of the channel ran a sluggish, living-glow river of dark copper fluid. Rotting lymph, rich in dissolved stellar star-fire and metabolized world-size crust. The fluid radiated a sickly violet glow, lighting up the vaulted rib arches above with shifting, watery reflections.
