Arthur Vance sat upon a carved dark rock bench in the vaulted hall connecting Vault 6 to the central descent, his forearms resting on his knees. In his bare hands, he held the dead black glass pocket watch he had ripped from the chest of the void parasite.
The stone hall was silent save for the steady, underground draft that rose from the world-size mantle, warm and rich with the scent of uncorrupted earth.
Over the command hum, the radio was anything but silent.
“Arthur, look at the sky-high test model we’re receiving from High Command,” Instructor Valerie Koslov’s gravelly voice broke through the speaker, with the persistent hum of military mainframes processing deep-space tracking data. “If those signed names entering the Oort Cloud are what your autopsy indicates—a vanguard battle group of the Void Devourer Armada—we have less than ninety days before their forward scouting pods reach low Earth orbit. Maybe less, if they deploy sub-light gravity slingshots around Neptune.”
Toby Mallow’s voice chimed in from the backup comms bunker, his tone tight with anxiety. “And the Vanguard High Council is already in emergency session, Arthur. The corporate representatives from Apex GeneTech and House Vance are calling for an immediate lockdown of all underground operations. They want us to withdraw from the Hollow Core, seal the mantle fault lines with sun-hot charges, and maintain the world-size quarantine barrier at all costs.”
