The air in the primary reactor corridor was thick with the stench of scorched chitin and ozone.Cyrus stepped over the mangled bodies of the Carvers that Rael had previously cut down. He kept the Keres grav-glaive normalized. His left arm hung stiffly at his side. The micro-tears in his shoulder were a constant, burning reminder of the toll this station had taken on his body."Keep your spacing," Cyrus ordered, his voice flat.Corporal Hayes and the two surviving marines formed a tight perimeter around Director Thorne and Sergeant Rael. They moved past the ruined titanium blast doors and stepped into the reactor core.The sheer scale of the fusion pillar dominated the room. It was a towering cylinder of contained solar fire, pulsing with a deep, steady blue light.The ambient hum vibrated right through Cyrus's boots, aggravating the dull ache in his fused ribs."Console is here," Rael said.The sergeant moved quickly to the primary engineering terminal overlooking the reactor basin. T

The absolute silence of slip-space was a heavy contrast to the violence they had just left behind. Inside the Directorate extraction pod, the harsh blue tactical lighting cast deep shadows across the faces of the survivors, highlighting the grime and exhaustion ground into their features.Cyrus sat rigidly in his crash couch. The adrenaline that had kept him moving through the collapsing Gateway was finally beginning to recede, leaving nothing but the brutal reality of his physical condition. His left arm was completely unresponsive, hanging against his side. The torn muscle in his shoulder sent a deep, pulsing throb down to his fingertips, radiating across his fused ribs with every shallow breath he took."We have a twelve-hour transit," Rael announced from the pilot's seat, his voice quiet in the small cabin. "Trajectory is locked. Stealth baffles are engaged."Corporal Hayes unbuckled his harness and stood up in the narrow aisle. He moved to the emergency bulkhead, his boots quiet

Cyrus woke to the harsh mechanical hiss of the heavy security door sliding open.He didn't startle or jump. His eighty-nine percent resonance helped anchor his focus despite the heavy fog of exhaustion, His eighty-nine percent resonance helped anchor his focus despite the heavy fog of exhaustion. He sat up slowly on the edge of the medical bed.The movement pulled sharply at his fused ribs. His left arm remained a dead, heavy weight against his chest, locked entirely in place by Corporal Hayes’s bio-foam splint and the thick medical binding. The persistent throbbing in his shoulder hadn't faded; it had just settled into a deep, agonizing rhythm.Sergeant Rael was already standing by the armory bench, loading specialized armor-piercing magazines into a tactical rig.Director Silas Thorne stepped into the holding room. The pristine lines of his dark Directorate uniform were still immaculate, but there was a hard, cold tension in his jaw that hadn't been there two hours ago."The High Co

The vibration carried down through the ferrocrete pillars before the creature ever showed itself.Cyrus tracked the tremor through the soles of his magnetic boots. In the vacuum of the dead station, there was no sound to give the enemy away, only the rhythmic, physical thud of heavy claws piercing metal, transmitted directly through the outpost’s skeleton."Check your fields of fire," Thorne’s voice crackled softly over the encrypted local comms. "Remember your recoil. Don't tear yourselves off the deck."Above them, the heavy steel access hatch buckled inward.It didn't burst open. It was slowly, methodically torn apart. Four long, multi-jointed limbs reached through the shredded metal, ending in hardened, scythe-like hooks designed specifically to puncture starship armor.The creature pulled itself through the opening, moving with fluid ease in the zero-gravity environment. It was roughly the size of a Praetorian, but entirely different in design. Its carapace was pale and elongated

The stealth corvette drifted toward the megastructure like a speck of dust approaching a mountain.Sergeant Rael had cut the primary drives completely, maneuvering the ship using only short, cold-gas thruster bursts to avoid triggering any thermal alarms. Through the cockpit viewport, the true scale of the Othari destination became difficult to comprehend. It filled the entire visual field, blotting out the faint, distant glow of the Milky Way behind them.Up close, the surface wasn't a static hull. It was alive.Thick ridges of bone-white chitin formed shifting tectonic plates over layers of dark, fibrous tissue. Rivers of bioluminescent fluid pulsed sluggishly through translucent veins the size of Vanguard dreadnoughts."We are entering its shadow," Rael murmured, his eyes fixed on the passive sensors. "I'm picking up thousands of bio-forms clinging to the outer carapace. Carvers, Praetorians, and things I don't recognize. They're dormant. Hooked into the structure like ticks on a h