The Earth-Moon Lagrange Point 1 was an invisible graveyard of gravity tension.
Located sixty-four thousand miles above the Moon’s sunlit hemisphere, L1 was the precise map point where the gravity attraction of the Earth and the Moon balanced into a stable balance. In the quiet void of space, an object parked at L1 needed zero forward thrust to maintain its position relative to the two worlds. It was the premier sky-high gateway of the inner system. And right now, it was the staging ground for humanity’s total ruin.
Anchored at the center of the map point was the Eclipse Dread.
Three miles long and shaped like the blackened skull of a deep-sea viper, Fleet Admiral Kaelen’s flagship was a monstrous bio-clockwork dreadnought forged from void-hard shell and dense stygian alloys. Along its spine, three heavy cruiser escorts formed a three-sided defensive screen. Their long-range void-star-fire batteries tracked every approach vector from low lunar orbit.
Arthur swept the huge warship with his magnifying glass, analyzing its load-bearing anatomy through deep-spectrum tracking data.
The Eclipse Dread was not a vessel made in a sterile sky-high shipyard. It was a bio-clockwork chimera. A living deep-space hunting beast whose outer hull was grown from layers of stone-hard void-hard shell, heavy with silver-steel-gengjin bone struts. Along its dorsal ridge, millions of pulsing nerve tendrils connected its bridge directly to its main fusion-void hybrid reactors.
