Leaving the scorching Chitin Smelters behind, the squad passed through a massive pressure-lock carved from stone-hard giant beast ribs. He stepped onto the threshold of Sector 14: The Pulmonary Void Chamber.
The moment the lock cycled open, the sound of the universe was ripped away.
It wasn’t silence born of peace. It was the terrifying, dead void of a near-total empty pocket. The chamber was a huge ball-shaped deep pit thirty miles in width, spanning the entire thickness of the Dyson Sphere’s outer crust. Far below, massive giant stone exhaust valves, each five miles across, opened directly into the black, star-dusted emptiness of the Kuiper Belt. Through these massive iris portals, the distant blue glow of Neptune was visible as a tiny, frozen marble. It was flanked by the sparse glittering of Kuiper Belt planetoids.
Through these valves, the hive was expelling its waste heat in a roaring, hyper-speed torrent of melted void-spark coolant, boiled away methane, and crystal-clear cold air. The exhaust jet rushed outward at Mach 24. It tore into the cosmic empty pocket like a roaring pillar of blue-white fire that stretched for hundreds of miles into deep space. The sheer moving reaction caused the thirty-half-mile chamber to vibrate with nonstop, bone-jarring tremors that rattled Arthur’s teeth inside his helmet. The silver-steel narrow high walkways groaned under the cyclical shudder, their spreading joints flexing against the frozen limestone anchors.
