The three Void Harvester ambush cruisers didn’t announce their presence with comms chatter or sensor locks. In the dead freeze of the Kuiper Belt, warfare was silent, moving, and instant.
The central cruiser—a four-hundred-meter monstrosity resembling a skeletal sea serpent plated in hardened dark rock—opened its forward weapon sky-slits. Six air-powered launch tubes flared with tightly packed void gas.
Six hyper-dense moving harpoons, each sixty meters long and forged from solid heavy dark metal-iron cores salvaged from digested world-size mantles, tore across the void at eighty miles per second.
At that speed, there was no dodging. No ship’s thrusters could overcome the heavy rush in time.
“Titus! Planetary Grounding!” Arthur commanded through the mental bridge.
In the cargo bay, Titus didn’t flinch. The terrapin’s eyes snapped open, blazing with primal emerald power. He drove his four pillar-like legs into the ship’s keel plating. That let out a deep, sub-sound bellow that traveled through the metal bones of the Argo.
A heavy local gravity well of fifty thousand metric tons materialized around the transport. But Titus didn’t try to absorb the moving harpoons with the ship’s mass alone. He linked the ship’s gravity pull directly to a twenty-half-mile nickel-iron asteroid drifting five hundred meters beneath their keel.
