The Kuiper Belt didn’t look like the asteroid belts depicted in old sky-high charts. It wasn’t a sparse sprinkling of solitary rocks separated by millions of leagues of empty pocket. Here, at forty-four sky-high units from the dying sun, the gravity wake of the Void Hive had tightly packed billions of tons of frozen planetesimals into a churning, claustrophobic maze of ice, nickel-iron, and dark matter coagulations.
Hundreds of years ago, ancient Earth astronomers had launched small metal probes like Voyager and New Horizons, peering through grainy telescopic lenses and believing this realm was merely a quiet, frozen graveyard of clean solar system leftovers. They had never suspected that a sky-high hunting beast had already claimed the outer edge, corralling the rubble into an active world-size outer edge wall.
The Argo-Vanguard moved through the field like a ghost ship.
Her main ion drives were shut down, her heat radiators retracted into armored recesses. Propelled solely by the warped gravity incline generated by Titus’s massive 94.5% Xuanwu core, the transport slid silently between two tumbling icebergs the size of mountain ranges. The absence of engine shaking gave the journey an eerie, floating quality, as though the vessel were falling endlessly down an invisible chute carved through the dark.
