The air above the narrow high walkway tightly packed with the sickening, oily whistling of a high-speed empty pocket dive.
The Astral Siphon Stalker dropped through the dark like a falling guillotine blade. Its phase-shifting camouflage bent the amber starlight of the amniotic pods into distorted spirals. Its four diamond-tipped harvesting needles were locked forward. It shook at three thousand cycles per second, ready to punch through Vesper’s dorsal spine bones and drain her marrow before she could turn.
Arthur Vance didn’t flinch. His boots were anchored shoulder-width apart on the stone-hard narrow high walkway. His eyes tracked the subtle refraction wave through his Monocle Taxonomy Loupe. In his ears, the high-hum tracking data from his field scanner ticked off the split second countdown. Forty split seconds to intercept, thirty, twenty.
“Grimm,” Arthur barked through the neural link. “Invert the gravity vector. Forty-five degrees south! Maximum nearby thickness!”
Grimm didn’t hesitate for a fraction of a heartbeat. The jet-black hound drove all four paws into the hardened floor of the narrow high walkway, his claws digging half an inch into the bone plating. His black coat drank in the surrounding soft glow as the gravity marrow in his thigh bone and spinal column flared into life with a dark, low-hum.
