The extraction pylon loomed ahead like a black glass mountain suspended in the solar fire. Eighty miles of jagged, body-leverage hard shell bristled with thousands of pulsing sensor stalks and cold-matter vent arrays. But the Aethelgard closed within fifty miles. Then, a sudden rift in local spacetime tore open directly above the pylon’s main anchor ring.
A sleek, sickle-shaped vessel eighty meters in length dropped out of a solar magnetic null-pocket. Unlike the organic, insectoid skirmishers they had fought in the asteroid belt, this ship was an engineered war craft: a Void Inquisitor Scout-Cruiser. Its hull was forged from cold-rolled deep-sea alloy that drank the sunlight. That left a dark shape as black as a hole cut into the fabric of space.
“Hostile dreadnought de-cloaking at zero-one-zero!” Navigator Kira shouted, her hands slamming into the battle-station controls. “They’ve locked weapons on our bridge! Massive dark-matter energy signed names detected in their forward tubes! Range: forty-two miles and closing fast!”
From the prow of the alien cruiser, three massive moving harpoons launched with silent, total gaining speed. These were not explosive missiles. They were solid rods of hyper-dense crushed-star dark matter, each weighing fifty tons, designed to punch straight through world-size defense shields and impale a ship’s reactor core.
