The ventral void below the Argo-Vanguard flared with sickly emerald soft glow.
The third ambush cruiser—a squat, heavily armored warship shaped like a deep-sea trilobite—had maneuvered into the ship’s blind spot beneath the keel. Its ventral jaws peeled back, revealing a cavernous bio-reactor maw four meters wide. Inside, thousands of tightly packed star-fire-glands were superheating toxic void aether, preparing to vomit a million-degree stream of acid-burning bioplasma directly against the Argo’s unshielded engines.
Pip didn’t wait for the weapon to fire.
From his perch on the upper sensor mast, the Three-Legged Golden Crow unfolded his wings. In the total cold of deep space, Pip’s feathers didn’t merely glow. They ignited with the pure, primal bright glare of a newborn star. The bitter chill of 2.8 Degrees of star-heat vanished in a hundred-meter sphere around the bird, replaced by the crackling, blasting heat of a mid-belt desert.
Pip took flight.
He didn’t fly by pushing air. He flew by generating an intense, nearby heat slope that literally warped the empty pocket around him. In the sub-zero void of deep space, the difference between surrounding space and Pip’s twenty-thousand-degree core created a massive heat forward thrust cone. The Golden Crow broke past Mach 30 in an eyeblink, streaking down past the Argo’s hull like a falling meteorite of spun gold.
