The destruction of the vanguard swarm had cleared the Aethelgard’s hull. But the ship closed within two thousand miles of the Continental Eclipse Sun-Eater’s eastern mantle. Then, a far more insidious threat revealed itself to Arthur’s magnifying glass.
Stretching from the creature’s dorsal neural nexus, three giant, semi-clear pillars of folded space rose vertically out of the solar corona. He extended into the deep void like the black umbilical cords of a cosmic parasite. These were not physical tubes of hard shell or metal. They were Quantum-Entangled Void Pipes. Super-dense gravity channels through which the distant Void Hive Dyson Sphere was pumping dark-matter catalysts and regenerative enzymes directly into the Sun-Eater’s living core.
“That’s why the titan has survived inside a star for millions of years,” Arthur observed. His voice ringing with was cold and exact realization as he pointed his metal pen at the sensor feeds. “It isn’t just feeding on the sun. It’s being continuously repaired and heavy by a steady stream of cold-matter polymers pumped across the solar system from the Kuiper Belt. If we attack the central eye pit while those three channels are active, the Void Hive will pump emergency regenerative biomass into the wound faster than we can cauterize it.”
