The cut skull of Fleet Admiral Kaelen didn’t bleed red. It leaked black, thick, sticky wired fluid that pooled in floating, oily globes in the zero-gravity vault.
Even with his wired neck spine cut and his four-ton war-chassis lying in ruins, the Admiral’s main skull core continued to pulse with uneven violet soft glow. His sight sensors flickered with dying, static-laced hatred. Arthur Vance stepped onto the command platform.
“You took my flagship... Little surgeon,” Kaelen’s voice rasped through his cracked vocal synthesizer, a burst of sound static that sent shivers across the comms band. “You think you have achieved victory. You think humanity has secured its sky. But the Moon was never the objective.”
“Speak clearly, Kaelen,” Arthur said, his ARC-7 Mag-Carbine leveled at the center of the skull’s skull cortex. “Your armada is broken. Your void-spark core is cold.”
“A diversion,” Kaelen hissed, a sound that looked like the rattle of dry bone against steel. “The lunar brood was merely the bait to draw Earth’s elite tamers into the dirt. While you crawled through dark rock trenches and stitched together dying grunts... Our grand vanguard reached the true heart of this system.”
Before Arthur could pull the trigger, the Admiral’s skull core flashed with a sudden, blinding burst of high-hum tachyon heat wave.
