The lower ventral airlock of the Vanguard Scalpel cycled open with a silent, high-pressure retraction.
Six hundred meters below the ship’s keel, the three Void Corvettes were rising like hungry sharks through the dark rock dust. Their hulls were long, flattened wedges of dark, stone-hard bone, covered in porous bio-venting ports that expelled cold air to mask their heat signed names. From their forward prows, four air-powered harpoon cannons—each loaded with a six-meter barbed spike forged from toxic bio-crystal—were turning upward. It locked onto the cutter’s crew module.
Grimm stood on the threshold of the airlock. His massive paws gripped the punched holes in silver-steel doorstep.
In the empty pocket of space, the hound looked like an elemental beast carved from a slab of midnight. His carbon-dense fur absorbed every photon of stray light. That left only his glowing amber eyes visible against the stars. His one notched ear lay flat, his broad jaw slightly parted. He showed elongated black glass canines that glittered with dormant gravity aether.
Arthur leaned over the airlock railing. His Monocle Taxonomy Loupe projected the high-speed intercept vectors directly onto Grimm’s eyes across the neural link:
“Newton’s third law, boy,” Arthur sent, his mental voice steady and precise. “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. But you own the mass. Drop on them.”
