Catrin handed Nico to Graves without a word.
"Take him to my bedroom," Catrin ordered softly. "Lock the door. Don’t let him look out the windows."
"You got it, Boss," Graves said, gently taking the sleeping toddler and turning down the hall.
Catrin stepped into the security hub. The room was bathed in the harsh red glow of the emergency monitors. Elias was hunched over the main console, his fingers flying across the keyboard. Jax was standing behind him, staring at the screen with a deep frown.
"Play it," Catrin said, crossing her arms over her chest. Her heart was beating violently, but her voice was pure ice.
Elias hit a button.
The audio filled the room. It wasn’t a voice. It sounded like a mixture of deep, rhythmic clicking and a low, harmonic hum. It was almost musical, but the pitch was entirely wrong. It made the hair on the back of Catrin’s neck stand up. It felt cold.
"What is that?" Quinn whispered, shivering despite her thick clothes. "It sounds like a whale song mixed with a dial-up modem."
"It’s a repeating loop," Elias explained, his voice tight. "But that’s not the scary part. Listen to the cadence. It’s math. It’s a sequence of numbers."
Elias typed a command, and a string of digits translated from the audio appeared on the main screen.
Catrin stared at the numbers. Her blood ran cold.
"Those are coordinates," Catrin said.
"Exactly," Jax grunted, leaning forward. "They are pinging a precise location. Latitude and longitude."
"Where?" Quinn asked.
"Here," Elias swallowed hard, looking up at Catrin. "It’s pinging the exact peak of this mountain. Whatever is broadcasting this signal is looking right at the Ark."
Catrin felt a wave of absolute dread. The flare. When Nico had lost control during the fight with Julian, that massive beam of energy had shot into the sky. It acted like a lighthouse. And now, something in the dark had seen it.
She thought about the man from four years ago. The terrifying, impossible strength he possessed. The way he moved like a shadow.
I don’t know what you are, Catrin thought, her nails digging into her palms. But you aren’t taking my son.
"Jax," Catrin ordered, her voice cutting through the panic in the room. "Total lockdown. I want every single mercenary fully armed and on the perimeter wall. Nobody fires unless they have a visual on a target."
"Yes, Ma’am," Jax hit his radio. "Aegis squad, defensive positions! Now!"
"Elias, scramble our outgoing signature," Catrin continued. "Reroute the power. Make the Ark look like a dead rock on their scanners."
"On it," Elias said, his hands blurring across the keys.
Two hundred feet above the mountain, hidden completely within the swirling, violent purple storm clouds, a stealth ship hovered in perfect silence.
It was shaped like a sleek, obsidian spear. Its hull bent light and radar entirely, making it completely invisible to the primitive human technology below.
Inside the dark, freezing bridge of the ship, Commander Zeviel stood perfectly still.
He was staring down through the transparent floor at the black titanium fortress resting on the mountain peak. His cape of liquid starlight barely moved. His ancient, golden eyes were locked onto a single, tiny thermal signature sleeping on the second floor of the building.
My son, Zeviel thought.
His chest ached with a strange, heavy pressure he had never felt in his three thousand years of conquest. The raw instinct to rip the roof off that metal box and take his heir was almost overwhelming.
"My Prince," his lieutenant, a tall alien with pale grey skin, stepped forward and bowed. "The human structure is attempting to jam our scanners. Shall we breach the hull? We can extract the child in less than twenty seconds."
Zeviel didn’t blink. "No."
The lieutenant looked confused. "Sir? This planet is a toxic wasteland. The boy is in danger."
"The structure is made of reinforced titanium," Zeviel noted, his deep voice rumbling. "It has internal atmospheric scrubbers. The temperature inside is perfectly regulated. It is surrounded by fifty armed guards."
Zeviel shifted his gaze to the thermal signature of the woman standing in the security hub. Catrin.
He remembered her fierce green eyes. He remembered the fire in her.
"She owns a fortress," Zeviel murmured, a rare flicker of profound respect crossing his stoic face. "While the rest of her species turns to ash, she built a paradise to keep my son safe."
"Then we make contact?" the lieutenant asked.
Zeviel frowned. The truth was, the Vanguard Prince of the greatest armada in the galaxy had absolutely no idea what to do. He had glassed planets. He had shattered empires. But how did he approach a human woman who didn’t even know his species existed? How did he introduce himself to a four-year-old child without terrifying him?
If he kicked the door down, she would fight him. He knew her. She would rather die than give up her child. And if she fought him, the boy would hate him.
"We observe," Zeviel commanded smoothly, hiding his internal panic behind a wall of cold authority. "I will not traumatize my heir. We will study their defenses. We will wait for the perfect moment."
Suddenly, the tactical console on the bridge flashed red.
"Prince Zeviel," the lieutenant warned, looking at the screens. "A massive biological anomaly is moving up the mountain. It appears the residual energy from your son’s flare attracted the local infected fauna."
Zeviel looked back down through the floor.
Through the thick purple fog, a swarm of heat signatures was rushing up the mountain road. Hundreds of them.
"Let them come," Zeviel’s eyes narrowed, glowing with a deadly, protective gold. "I want to see how she fights."
Inside the Ark, the perimeter alarms started screaming.
"Boss!" Jax shouted over the noise, pointing at the external cameras. "We have a massive breach coming up the main road! Mutants!"
Catrin leaned over the console.
The thermal cameras showed a nightmare. It wasn’t just a pack of Spore-Hounds. It was an entire stampede. Hundreds of mutated, rotting animals were charging up the mountain, drawn blindly by the energy Nico had released.
And leading the pack was a Goliath. It was a mutated bear, standing nearly twenty feet tall. Its fur was burned away, exposing pulsing purple muscles and jagged bone armor.
"They’re going to hit the barricade in sixty seconds!" Quinn yelled, grabbing her rifle and racking a round. "That bear is going to tear the steel gates off the hinges!"
"Jax, open fire!" Catrin commanded, pulling her own pistol. "Do not let them touch that wall!"
On the screens, the fifty Aegis mercenaries unleashed hell. Tracers lit up the purple fog. The heavy machine guns roared, tearing into the front lines of the mutant horde. Spore-Hounds exploded into black tar, but there were simply too many of them.
The Goliath roared, shaking off the high-caliber bullets like they were mosquito bites. It dropped to all fours and charged the barricade with the momentum of a runaway freight train.
"Brace for impact!" Jax yelled into the radio.
Catrin gripped the edge of the console. If the barricade fell, the horde would swarm the outer rings. They would be trapped inside the main hull.
The massive bear lunged, raising its heavy, bone-plated claws to smash the steel gate.
But it never hit the wall.
A brilliant, blinding pillar of cold white light suddenly dropped from the storm clouds directly above the mountain. There was no sound. No explosion.
The pillar of light struck the Goliath.
In a fraction of a second, the twenty-foot mutant was simply... gone. Vaporized into a cloud of fine, grey dust.
The beam swept sideways in a silent, perfectly straight line across the mountain road. The remaining hundreds of Spore-Hounds were instantly erased from existence.
The road, which had been swarming with monsters a second ago, was now completely, terrifyingly empty. Only perfectly smooth glass remained where the dirt road had been melted by the intense heat.
Inside the security hub, the silence was deafening.
Quinn slowly lowered her rifle, her jaw practically hitting the floor. Jax took a step back from the monitors, his eyes wide with absolute disbelief.
"Boss..." Jax whispered, his voice shaking. "Did... did the roof turrets do that?"
"No," Elias choked out. He was staring at the Ark’s vertical radar, his face entirely drained of blood. "The turrets didn’t fire."
Catrin stared at the screen showing the empty, glassed road. Her heart was beating so fast it physically hurt. "Then what did?"
Elias slowly raised a trembling finger and pointed at the radar screen.
Right in the center of the black grid, a massive, solid blip had appeared.
"There’s something up there," Elias whispered, staring at the ceiling. "Right above us. Catrin... it’s the size of a battleship. And it’s just sitting there."