Four hundred and twelve miles above the curved blue limb of the Earth, silence was not an absence of sound, but an iron press against the ears inside a high-pressure flight helmet.
Through the heavy stone-glass viewing port of Orbital Bastion Aegis-One, the air looked like a semi-clear ribbon of cyan silk stretched across the dark. Below that ribbon lay the healed continents, their green canopies and silver river deltas breathing in the wake of the Gaia Core awakening. But above the ribbon. There, the thermosphere frayed into the raw empty pocket of cis-lunar space, the stars were not twinkling.
They were being swallowed.
Arthur Vance tightened the seal on his right gauntlet. He listened to the pneumatics hiss as the micro-seals bonded against the wrist rings of his Mark IV Void Tactical Rig. The fabric was a triple-ply laminate. Outer dark rock-weave fiber spun from Titus’s shed osteoderms, an inner dampening gel to absorb hyper-g gaining speed. An intermediate blood-vessel mesh that circulated heat coolant across his main thigh blood vessels. His breath fogged the lower third of his visor before the internal scrubbers whisked it away.
Beside his right knee, Grimm rested his heavy muzzle against the magnetic deck plates. The hound had grown to the size of a stygian warhorse, his coat a dense carpet of matte-black carbon bristles that absorbed the harsh glare of sky-high daylight without a glimmer. Even in the artificial zero-point seven gravity kept by Aegis-One’s outward-pulling ring, Grimm weighed nearly four hundred…
