The shattered forward hull of the Void Talon offered a gaping, jagged wound fifty meters wide, venting white-hot vapors and alien viscera into the blackness of orbit.
Arthur launched from the airlock of Aegis-One, his personal maneuvering thrusters hissing in short, tuned bursts that guided him across the wreckage-strewn void. Beside him, Vesper moved with an agility that defied the physics of spaceflight. She didn’t use thrusters. She walked across micro-tears in the local gravity fabric. Her silver paws stepped on invisible spatial folds as casually as a housecat prowling across a kitchen counter.
Ahead of them, Grimm stood perched atop the ruined spinal cannon, his heavy jaws dripping with frozen alien ichor. The hound had already torn through three outer hatch seals, his twelve-thousand-PSI bite force chewing through load-bearing iron-hard metal struts like dried beef tendon.
Arthur cleared the lip of the breach. Then, his boots slammed onto the bio-metal decking of the frigate’s main command spine.
The inside of the Void Talon was not a clockwork bridge. It was a living cathedral of hardened bone and pulsing bio-cables. Thick, blood-vessel channels the size of redwood trunks pulsed with dark, violet fluids along the ribbed ceiling. Down the central hall, twelve elite Void Praetorians—three-meter-tall insectoid warriors clad in mirror-sheened black glass back shell—were advancing with heavy hard shell phase-glaives leveled at Arthur’s chest.
