The silence in the control room was total. It was broken only by the steady, rhythmic clicking of the cooling fans and the slow, deep breathing of Grimm beneath Pip’s perch. Arthur Vance sat frozen before the granite end-post, his eyes absorbing the horrifying lines of tracking data that traced the birth of the modern world.
For one hundred and forty years, the history taught in every academy across the five federations had been a carefully curated myth. Cadets were taught that in the year 2082, the sky had fractured without warning, that cosmic portals known as ‘Rifts’ had opened across Earth’s continents, vomiting forth mutated beasts and alien foul fog that shattered human great realm in a matter of months. Humanity had cast itself as the blameless victim of an impossible to understand cosmic assault.
The truth recorded in the Project Genesis black box was far more humiliating and far more terrifying.
“Look at the ground-shaking tracking data logs following the breach,” Arthur said. His voice dropped into a cold, cold and exact register as he pulled up the global geophysical maps. “The moment the drilled shaft pierced the holding shell, the entity within began to wake. It was an ancient cosmic parasite—a star-devouring void horror that had crashed into Earth during the late Cretaceous period, sixty-five million years ago.”
