The main glandular junction was a sky-high valve.
Where the fourteen channels of the incubation sector came together, the stonework of the Dyson Sphere shifted from bone-ribbed tunnels into a huge ball-shaped chamber five miles across. The walls were lined with massive, glandular sacs the size of cathedrals, pulsing with rhythmic, water-pressure contractions that pumped biochemical hormones through the hive’s blood-flow system.
The air here was freezing cold. It dropped rapidly from the humid warmth of the nursery to sub-zero chill as closeness to the outer void increased.
And guarding the four exit archways that led toward the central Synaptic Spire stood the hive’s heavy immune guards.
Four Chitinous Phalanx Wardens.
The wardens were forty-meter-long bio-centipedes, their back shells forged from dense, tightly packed dark rock aggregate that gleamed like polished slate. Along their chest segments, clusters of heavy bone barrels—sound deep ring cannons capable of firing focused blast waves of tightly packed void aether—were locked in forward firing positions. Their thirty pairs of armored legs ended in diamond-tipped spikes that gouged deep furrows into the bedrock floor as they paced the outer edge.
The Argo-Vanguard cleared the junction threshold. Then, the wardens’ eye sensors—slits of blinding crimson light—locked onto the ship.
