The final blast door did not open; it melted.
Orion drove the point of the Solar Anvil through four feet of reinforced, pre-war titanium alloy and twisted his wrist. A localized flare of golden plasma washed outward, shearing through the heavy locking bolts and collapsing the massive bulkhead into a glowing heap of slag.
He kicked the remnants aside and stepped into the heart of the Harvester mothership.
The central chamber was a terrifying cathedral of industrial architecture. It spanned nearly two miles across, carved directly out of the hollowed planetary mantle. There was no floor—only a bottomless abyss of scaffolding, rusted maintenance catwalks, and thick, groaning gravity conduits that converged like the legs of a mechanical spider toward the absolute center of the room.
And suspended in the middle of that cavernous void was the Gravity Overseer.
