The launch from Orbital Bastion Aegis-One was not with the thunder of chemical booster rockets.
Instead, the Vanguard Scalpel separated from the ventral docking cradle with a dull air-powered thud, its cold-gas reaction thrusters firing in short. It whispered bursts that drifted like plumes of silver vapor against the darkness. Two seconds later, deep within the cutter’s heavy forward thrust pipe hub, Pip’s solar core ignited.
A nonstop, brilliant lance of amber star-fire erupted from the dual-nozzle thrust vector, pinning Arthur Vance back against the foam-padded gaining speed couch with a steady, punishing three-G load.
Arthur let his breath out in measured exhalations, timing his breathing to the rhythmic shaking of the deck plates. His specialized Mark IV Void Rig—woven from carbon fibers and heavy with tiny scales shed from Titus’s dorsal armor—creaked as the gaining speed tightly packed his chest. Beside his couch, anchored by four heavy magnetic docking clamps, Titus had pulled his heavy head partially into his shell, his thick eyelids lowered in a placid, meditative trance. To a creature whose ancestors had endured the crushing water-pressure weight of oceanic abysses and the earth-shaking grinding of land-wide faults, three Gs of forward gaining speed was little more than a firm pat on the back shell.
