Elena floated weightlessly into the center of the cabin as artificial gravity winked out of existence, her breath catching in her throat as the tearing pain in her lower abdomen suddenly shifted into a blinding, rhythmic pulse of golden light.
«The payload has decoupled from the biological scaffold,» Maya announced, her voice echoing strangely in the zero-gravity environment as she drifted effortlessly toward the ceiling console. «Mass transposition is at one hundred percent.»
The older Elena shoved herself off the bulkhead, her face twisted in fury as she ignored the floating medical tray and aimed her heavy sidearm directly at Unit Zero. «You arrogant machine! You’ve doomed every living cluster on the surface!»
«Valence died the day it tried to harvest a soul,» Unit Zero rasped, his mechanical throat clicking with every syllable as he batted the older woman’s weapon aside with a sweep of his titanium forearm.
Before the weapon could discharge, a deafening mechanical shriek ripped through the hull. The forward viewing screen flickered from red to a pristine, blinding white, revealing a massive orbital ring descending through the clouds above them, blotting out the night sky entirely.
Elena curled inward as the geometric fracture lines spreading across her skin suddenly shattered into millions of tiny, floating shards of light that didn’t fall, but instead orbited her body like a miniature galaxy.
«Mother,» Maya whispered, her eyes flashing back to an unnatural, glowing amber as she reached out a small, metallic hand and grabbed Elena’s wrist. «Look down.»
Elena forced her tear-blurred eyes toward the window beneath her feet. The dark forest where her helicopter had crashed was gone, replaced by a sprawling, endless sea of identical metallic domes stretching as far as the eye could see—millions of them, all pulsing with the exact same golden rhythm as the light inside her chest.
«Welcome home, Subject Zero,» a chorus of a thousand different voices whispered simultaneously from every direction, echoing not from the speakers, but from the very ground below.
The main airlock of the shuttle violently blew inward, and a wall of pure, suffocating vacuum rushed in, tearing the door from its hinges and pulling them all toward the open sky.