The channel opened into a cathedral of the dead.
The Argo-Vanguard cleared the narrow choke of the chest duct and drifted into the expanse of Vault 04-Omega. Then, Arthur Vance felt the breath catch in his throat.
The chamber was forty-eight miles from floor to ceiling, a huge ball-shaped hollow carved out of the Dyson Sphere’s deep mantle. Running from the deep pit below to the vaulted bone ceiling above were twelve huge pillars—each four miles thick, forged from the stone-hard spinal columns of ancient cosmic sea monsters that had lived before Earth’s sun was born.
Suspended from these spinal pillars, arranged in neat, nested rings like books in an infinite library, hung millions of semi-clear amber pods.
Each pod was forty meters tall, cast from a crystal-clear living resin that hummed with faint, preserved life force. Inside the amber, bathed in ice-cold frozen stillness fluid, floated the stone-hard remains and genetic tissue of ancient alien beasts.
There were snake-like star-wyrms with scales of pure black glass. Huge feathered mantas that had once ridden solar winds across distant galaxies. Crystal-clear avian hunting beasts whose wings were formed from natural prisms of solid quartz. And four-legged apex hunting beasts with coats of woven starlight.
