The sky-high insertion burn was scheduled for T-minus fifteen minutes. Just then, the cutter’s main forward thrust pipe hub began to choke.
Inside the cockpit, warning strobes flared from amber to violent crimson. The low, reassuring hum of Pip’s star-fire thrusters sputtered, developing a jagged, coughing shaking that shook the entire three-hundred-meter frame of the Vanguard Scalpel.
“Thrust output dropping through forty-five percent!” Toby yelled, his hands flying across the fuel-injection toggles. “Fuel heat in the backup pipe hub is plunging toward ice-cold freeze! Arthur, something is eating our reaction mass inside the injection chamber!”
Arthur bolted from the watching deck into the lower building crawlway, his boots clattering against the metal rungs.
He reached the main propellant junction, unsealed the quartz check port on the main fuel line. Then he pressed his Monocle Taxonomy Loupe against the glass.
What he saw made his blood run cold:
The inside of the silver-steel fuel line was choked with living sludge. Thousands of semi-clear, pea-sized parasites—Void-Tick larvae—had somehow bypassed the outside intake filters during their transit through the dust tail. They had clustered along the injectors like a thick, throbbing tumor, their tiny mouthparts drinking in the white-hot star-fire fuel and excreting a heat-drawing gel that was freezing the lines solid.
