The descent from the Extinct Pantheon Codex led into an underground deep pit of heavy-duty biology that dwarfed anything Arthur Vance had witnessed in the bio-laboratories of Earth.
Intake Duct Beta-7 opened into Incubation Sector 14—a humid, cavernous chamber eight miles across and three miles tall. The air here was warm and choking. It smelled terrible, of fermented protein, amniotic fluid, and the sharp, vinegar sting of acetic acid. Running across the floor in sharp-angled rows were hundreds of sunken pools, each sixty meters in width, carved directly out of the Dyson Sphere’s fiery dark rock bed.
Inside the pools bubbled millions of gallons of thick, violet nutrient slurry.
Beneath the frothing surface of the vats, pale, semi-clear shapes twitched in rhythmic, baby sleep. Millions of young void parasites—segmented hard shell-slugs, larval scout cephalopods, and barbed mantis grubs—floated in dense mid-air, connected to the dark rock walls by thick umbilical cords of pulsating blood-vessel tissue. Above each vat, arched bone pipes pumped a nonstop stream of dark, copper-colored lymph harvested from the captured dwarf star, feeding the sped up growth of the swarm.
Arthur stood on a narrow high walkway overlooking the central nursery array, his Monocle Taxonomy Loupe humming as he surveyed the heavy-duty atrocity. Grimm remained pressed against his left calf, his black lips pulled back in a silent, disgusted snarl, his nose wrinkling against the rancid chemical vapor rising from the vats.
