The upkeep narrow high walkway of Intake Duct Beta-7 hung suspended eighty meters above the living-glow lymph river, anchored to the ceiling by massive cables of stone-hard connective tissue.
Arthur Vance moved along the grated walkway with the silent, balanced stride of an experienced scout. His magnetic boots were dialed to minimum field strength, preventing metal clicks against the bone-hard hardened aggregate. Grimm padded directly behind him, his broad black glass paws flexing to grip the uneven surface. His gravity mantle fully took in the sound of his six-hundred-two-pound weight.
Above them, clinging to the underside of a titanic vertebral arch, three Void Chitin-Scavengers were busy feeding on a hardened stone deposit.
The creatures looked like giant, six-legged lice plated in jagged slate-black armor. Their mouthparts—three-sided clusters of serrated bone jaws—ground against the wall with a rhythmic, wet chewing sound that masked Arthur’s approach. Their semi-clear belly sacs glowed with pulsating violet bile, lighting up the fine networks of tracheal breathing tubes running along their flanks.
Arthur knelt on one knee behind a cluster of ossified sense cilia. He adjusted his Monocle Taxonomy Loupe, his cold and exact eye studying the scavengers’ anatomy in a split second.
“They aren’t hunting beasts,” Arthur whispered over the neural bridge. “They’re body-energy housekeepers. Their nervous systems are primitive, wired directly into the local fluid-draining reflex arc. If we sever the main chest nerve knot at the base of the skull, the body will experience instant flaccid total numbness without releasing distress pheromones.”
