Chapter 48

Absolute darkness was pierced by three pinpricks of eerie green light. No, not pinpricks. Three cold, sharp, inhumanly gleaming optical sensor units—like three miniature, venom-soaked stars—penetrated the turbid, dark-red gelatinous zone that shrouded everything. This light was no warm source; it was more like the shadowless lamp of a precise surgeon, falling with cold ruthlessness upon the broken metal wreckage below, half-buried deep in the filthy gel and lying utterly motionless like a piece of garbage. The dark-red gel was like the amniotic fluid of some biological matrix, possessing a dead, viscous thickness as it slowly flowed, swallowing the chaotic energy particles drifting from the decaying space around it. Every slight spatial tremor sent morbid ripples through this filthy pool of energy. The metal wreckage resembled ancient mechanical fragments soaked in corrupt plasma; most of it was wrapped and covered by the viscous gel, leaving exposed only a small fraction of armor shards and the outline of a fractured mechanical arm.