When a void-spark particle blade ignites in a hard empty pocket, it makes no sound. It simply consumes the light.
The three-meter blade in Fleet Admiral Kaelen’s upper right hand crackled with black lightning. A roaring stream of magnetically confined positrons that boiled away the stray dust specks in the airless vault. The weapon was brought to bear. Then, the heat in the reactor chamber plummeted thirty degrees as the blade’s holding field drank the surrounding heat wave.
Kaelen didn’t order his eight Praetorian honor guards to attack Arthur’s beasts.
His four compound optics locked onto Arthur Vance with single-minded, hungry hatred.
“Decapitation doctrine,” Kaelen’s voice grated through the deck plates, his four-ton wired frame lunging from the high platform with explosive high-pressure force. “Die, little doctor!”
The Admiral crossed the sixty-meter gap across the ball-shaped chamber in less than one second, propelled by high-pressure cold-gas thrusters mounted along his spinal ridges. His void-spark blade came down in a vicious upright cleave meant to bifurcate Arthur from helmet to groin.
Arthur didn’t panic.
In the brutal environment of zero-gravity combat trauma, panic was an inefficiency that resulted in death.
