[Location: Jupiter Orbit - The Leviathan] [Time: T-Plus 6 Months since First Contact] Alex pulled the trigger. The kinetic slug punched through the Praetorian’s chest plate and shattered the central power core. The machine collapsed. Sparks showered the deck. Alex dropped the empty magazine, slammed a fresh one into his rifle, and pulled the charging handle. The deck heaved. Outside, fifty Terran dreadnoughts fired their main thrusters. The solid Belter iron ships crossed the void and slammed into the flank of the Leviathan. The flagship groaned. Inside the firing chamber, the impact threw Alex to the metal floor. The bulkheads buckled under the extreme kinetic stress. The lights died. Red backup bulbs flickered on. Alex pushed himself up to one knee and tapped the comms unit on his helmet. "Report," Alex said. "The fleet breached the outer hull," Ares replied. "The main reactor is offline, orbital velocity is lost, and Jupiter's gravity has taken hold." "We are fal

[Location: Deep Space - Sector Sirius] [Time: T-Plus 6 Months since First Contact] The forty-nine dreadnoughts held their position. They hovered three hundred miles above the seam of the newly formed planet and aimed their railguns at the biological mass trapped between the tectonic plates. Alex walked to the airlock. He opened the storage locker. He removed an environmental suit from the rack, unzipped the front seal, and stepped his right leg inside. He pushed his boot through the gasket. He stepped his left leg inside. He pulled the suit up over his waist, slid his biological arm into the right sleeve, and pushed his mechanical arm into the left sleeve. He zipped the front seal. He reached for the helmet. He placed the helmet over his head, aligned the locking rings with the neck collar, and twisted the helmet clockwise until the mechanisms clicked. He pushed the oxygen valve. Air hissed into the suit. He checked the pressure gauge on his wrist console, verified the

[Location: Deep Space - The Dyson Sphere Interior] [Time: T-Plus 6 Months since First Contact] The dreadnoughts descended. They fired their forward retro-thrusters to counteract the gravitational pull of the hypergiant star below their position. The iron hulls vibrated. Echo monitored the telemetry. She pushed the thruster output to seventy percent and adjusted the downward pitch of the forty-nine ships. The fleet held formation. The ambient temperature rose. The external sensors registered ten thousand degrees Celsius as the ships entered the upper stellar corona layer. The iron turned orange. Ares managed the cooling. The AI pumped thousands of gallons of liquid nitrogen through the capillary tubes within the exterior hull plating. The nitrogen boiled instantly. Vance watched the tactical table. He tracked the descent vector and measured the remaining distance to the Prime processing core node. "Forty million miles," Vance said. Solar flares erupted upward. A colum

[Location: Galactic Core - Sagittarius A]*[Time: T-Plus 6 Months since First Contact]The fleet exited jump.Forty-eight dreadnoughts dropped out of the white void and stabilized their thrusters at the edge of the galactic center.The stars were gone.The core was dark.A massive ring of white cubes, numbering in the millions, surrounded the supermassive black hole and blocked all light from the galaxy.They formed a shell."The Format is active," Ares said.The AI analyzed the space between the cubes and measured the disintegration of matter as the Architects erased the surrounding star systems."The galaxy is being deleted."Alex stood at the helm.He looked at the black hole in the center of the ring, where the event horizon shimmered with red mathematical code.The Voidbreaker Arm pulsed.The casing grew hot.The white light inside the metal veins vibrated at a frequency that matched the gravity of the central singularity.Alex felt the data surge."Echo, maintain a stable orbit,"