The shattered hulk of the Void Judge scout-cruiser drifted into the lower solar slipstream, tumbling end over end until the crushing heat wave of the chromosphere engulfed it, vaporizing the dark alloy into a brief, glittering streak of blazing bright gas. On the Aethelgard’s bridge, the tension didn’t lessen. It deepened into the heavy, focused silence of a running theater before an end-post clean cut.
Arthur Vance sat before the main scouting console, his sight magnifying glass interfaced directly with the ship’s long-range quantum sensor array. Beside him, Chief Szabo was running test checks on the recovered alien data core. A crystal-clear dodecahedron pulsing with dim violet light, secured inside a magnetic solitude box.
“Data recovery is at sixty-two percent,” Szabo reported. His greasy fingers tapped rapidly on the decryption end-post. “The core’s translation matrix matches the ancient bio-cipher we pulled from the Splicer Citadel during our assault on their castle. Vance, this isn’t an isolated harvesting outpost. Look at the sky-high mapping schematics.”
Szabo flicked his wrist, throwing the light-projected projection into the center of the bridge. The three-space-folding image resolved into a scale model of the Sun. But overlaid across the golden star was a fine, detailed, nightmarish spiderweb of pitch-black bio-filaments.
