The fall was quiet. Idris Cole was surrounded by ten thousand tons of burning starship wreckage plummeting through the atmosphere. Plumes of hot plasma and twisted hyper-steel streaked past Idris Cole like dying meteors painting the dark clouds in chaotic shades of orange and violet.Inside Idris Coles skull the mental landscape was fading fast. System alert the scarred text flickered weakly across Idris Coles darkening vision. Extreme core exhaustion detected. Assimilation reserves depleted to three percent. Neural pruning imminent to preserve Apex Core integrity. Deleting -essential neural pathways...Idris Cole gritted his teeth his jaw locking so tight the dark armor plates on his cheeks creaked under the pressure. No Idris Cole snarled internally driving his consciousness into the core of his dark matter marrow. Leave it alone!A memory dissolved before Idris Coles eyes. He tried to grab it. The image of a quiet room a wooden table and the sound of rainfall melted into cold stati

The two suns did not just light up the Vault they got rid of shadows completely.Idris Cole felt a lot of pressure in his head. It had nothing to do with gravity. This pressure was absolute. It felt like it was crushing him. The red interface in his mind, which was usually a mess of violent words and warnings just stopped working. The Apex Core, which was the engine that had pulled ten spaceships from the sky just went silent and acted like a scared animal in front of its master.The Progenitor was inside a pod and it did not move its lips but its voice was heard by everyone in the room at the same time.The voice said that the variables were flawed. It was very smooth. Did not sound like a man or a woman and it sounded like a special kind of fork that makes a clear sound when it is hit. The voice said that the grid was made for order. The people in the room were like a disease that spreads chaos.Evelyn fell to her knees. She did not want to kneel. Her body just did it because of the

The ash did not fall around him; it calculated its trajectory. Moved out of his way.The entity that was once Idris Cole stepped out of the bunker and into the ruined courtyard of Vanguard Outpost. The silver light radiating from the plates beneath his skin was perfectly clean. It did not flicker with the hunger of dark matter. It pulsed with the metronomic rhythm of a machine running a planetary defense algorithm.Rhea, Evelyn and Keal followed him at a distance their weapons. Their nerves pulled tight enough to snap. The crushing gravity well he had used in the trauma bay was gone,. The air around him still felt dangerously thin as if he were passively consuming the atmosphere just by existing.He stood at the edge of the permacrete crater his silver eyes scanning the wreckage of the twelve Sector One dreadnoughts and the shattered Sovereign Prime Vault.Grid analysis the Protocols voice broadcasted directly into their minds, smooth and devoid of any tonal variance. Usable hyper-ste

Wake up you man! They are through the wall!The loud roar of a bad infected person shattered the crazy dream in Idris Coles mind. The silver water, the spaceships, the stuff. It all broke into a thousand pieces of blue computer code and disappeared.Idris gasped, his eyes opening wide. He was not floating in a computer dream. He was lying on the bloody floor of Vanguard Outposts command room. The air did not smell like electricity and spaceships; it smelled like meat, gun smoke and people trying to survive.Computer system upgrade is complete. Fake world stopped.Secret information is now open.Welcome back Idris.Idris coughed, holding his head as the reality of the Grey Grid came back to him. The system upgrade had put his brain through a test downloading secret information about the bad virus while his body lay still.Get up Idris! Rhea Knox yelled, her voice rough and tired.She stood in the doorway of the command room her famous big sword covered in thick black infected blood. He

He's heart was ticking so fast like a time bomb. Idris Cole stood on the steel walls of Vanguard Outpost staring at the burning remains of the Architect gunships. The smell of ozone and burned metal filled the air. It was a smell that should have meant they won. It did not feel like a victory. Twenty-nine days, twenty-three hours fifty-eight minutes were all that Idris had left. The system would shut him down if he did not deliver the Category 5 Alpha Core to the Spire in time. The Architects had put a kill-switch in Idriss system. If he failed his own blood would boil in his veins. Are we going to move or are you just going to stare at the smoke all day Rhea Knox asked. Idris turned to face her. Rhea stood at the top of the stairs her big knife resting on her shoulder. She looked confident like a person who was in control. We are moving Idris said, trying to sound calm.. We are not going to the Spire right now. The Architects know we have the Alpha Core. They will make it hard