The moon of New Terra-4 didn't exist anymore—at least, not as a sphere. The Drealius had carved it into a series of floating, skeletal arches, held together by shimmering violet gravity filaments. From a distance, it looked like a ribcage floating in the dark.
"Kill the active sensors. Switched to passive thermal only," General Harry Hampton whispered into his throat-mic.
His mecha, the Vanguard-One, was unrecognizable. The bright military hull had been draped in "Void-Cloth"—a reactive mesh that absorbed light and radar. Beside him, two of his most trusted pilots, Lieutenant Kael and Sergeant Miller, drifted in similarly shrouded scout-suits. They weren't using thrusters; they were using compressed cold-gas bursts to drift toward the lunar fragments like pieces of space debris.
"General, look at the central arch," Kael's voice was a ghost in Harry's ear. "That's not mining equipment."
The Harvesting Floor
As they drifted behind a jagged mountain of moon-rock, the "Harvest" came into view. It was a nightmare of industrial biology.
Huge, obsidian tendrils reached down from a hovering Mother-Shard, plunging into a massive atmospheric dome that had survived the moon's dismantling. Thousands of stasis pods—old United Sol technology—were being hoisted up into the black ship.
But they weren't being emptied. They were being fused.
Harry zoomed his optical sensors. He watched as a pod containing a colonist was brought into contact with a stream of the black nanite oil. The oil didn't coat the pod; it dissolved the metal and began to weave itself into the human's skin. The person inside didn't die. Their eyes snapped open, glowing with that same sickly violet light Harry had seen on the Shard's hull.
"They're... they're building a new Shard," Miller gasped, his breathing heavy in the comms. "They're using the colonists as the 'wet-ware' for the processors. General, we have to stop this."
"Negative, Sergeant," Harry snapped, though his own heart was hammering against his ribs. "We are three mechs against a shipyard. We fire one shot, and the Tenth Fleet loses its commanding officer and its only lead. We watch. We record. We learn."
The Breach of Silence
Suddenly, the Vanguard-One's internal HUD flickered. A deep, rhythmic thrumming began to vibrate through the mech's feet.
"General," CALI's voice was urgent. "We have a localized gravity spike. Something is 'unfolding' behind us."
Harry spun the Vanguard-One around. Emerging from the shadow of a nearby lunar fragment was a Drealius Seeker—a smaller, faster version of the Shards, shaped like a jagged arrowhead. It didn't have weapons; it had a massive, lidless "eye" made of shifting black glass.
It had found them.
"Go hot!" Harry roared, the "zone" snapping back into place instantly. "Kael, Miller—break for the extraction point! I'll draw its focus!"
He tore the Void-Cloth away, revealing the battle-scarred hull of the Vanguard-One. He didn't use his minigun—the noise would bring every Shard on the moon down on them. Instead, he drew the Thermal Blade from his mech's thigh-plate—a six-meter streak of superheated plasma.
The Duel in the Ribcage
The Seeker lunged. It didn't fly; it "blinked," teleporting short distances through the gravity folds. Harry anticipated the move, a skill honed at the Orion Gates. He pivoted the Vanguard-One on a single thruster, swinging the plasma blade in a wide, searing arc.
The blade bit deep into the Seeker's obsidian hull. Black oil sprayed across the moon-rock, sizzling in the vacuum. The Seeker let out a sub-sonic shriek that cracked Harry's cockpit glass.
"Miller, get those sensor logs back to the Vanguard! That's an order!" Harry barked as he kicked the Seeker away, his thrusters finally roaring to life in a full-burn escape.
As he raced away from the dismantled moon, thousands of violet lights began to blink awake on the Mother-Shard above. The harvest was over. The hunt had begun.