The lights in the rotunda flickered violently, dropping the chamber into emergency amber darkness.
A voice cut through the Spire's public address system—not recorded, but live, cold, and laced with the rasp of ozone-burned lungs:
"Calder."
Idris froze. His jaw tightened until his teeth ached.
"Graven," Idris whispered.
"You dropped ten thousand tons of bronze on my command vehicle," Graven's voice echoed through the bulkheads. "A commendable tactical expenditure. But you forgot that the Iron Hive does not build machines out of hope. We build them out of reinforced armor plate."
Through the rotunda's panoramic viewport, an enormous black shape emerged from the smoke of the upper chasm.
It was the Titan-V—a colossal deep-crust drilling dreadnought, its massive magnetic tractor claws clamped directly onto the Spire's remaining suspension cables. Along the dreadnought's flanks, dozens of high-energy plasma cutting rings were already biting into the braided steel ropes, sending showers of blue sparks into the abyss.
"I have placed cutting rigs on cables Two through Six," Graven continued. "In twenty-five minutes, the remaining anchors will fail. The Spire will drop into the magma lake, and my salvage drones will dredge what remains of Vespera from the crust. Bring her to the upper transit bridge now, Calder, and I will let the wretches in this station evacuate."
The communication line clicked dead.
Behind Idris, the sound of a pneumatic hammer cocking broke the silence.
Idris didn't turn around. He could see Sorsha's reflection in the cracked glass of the console. She was holding a heavy pneumatic slug-pistol leveled directly at the back of his skull.
"Step away from the console, Calder," Sorsha said, her voice shaking with desperate fury. "I have eighty families living in the lower residential pods. Children. Old scavengers who never saw the sky. I'm not letting them burn for a girl in a grey tunic."
Vespera stepped between Idris and the gun, her silver eyes fixed on Sorsha.
"Move, girl!" Sorsha snarled, her finger tightening on the trigger.
"She won't move," Idris said quietly. "And you won't shoot."
"Try me, scavenger!"
Sorsha pulled the trigger.
Crack.
The slug didn't hit Idris. It didn't even cross the room.
Before entering the rotunda, Idris had plugged his acoustic analyzer into the room's localized anti-gravity field coil, inverting the polarity around the entrance gantry. The kinetic discharge of Sorsha's weapon instantly reversed her personal gravitational field.
Sorsha was yanked violently upward, slamming back-first into the steel ceiling grid thirty feet above, her weapon flying from her grip.
Idris tapped the console, restoring standard gravity.
Sorsha dropped like a sack of ore, landing hard on the composite deck with a ragged groan. Idris was on her in an instant, his boot pinning her right wrist to the floor, his dart thrower aimed at her throat.
"Graven isn't going to evacuate your people, Sorsha," Idris said, his voice flat and merciless. "The moment the girl is in his hands, he'll burn this Spire anyway to keep the Core location a secret. You want your people to live? Help us reach the Core Transit Pod."
Sorsha coughed, clutching her bruised ribs, staring up into Idris's uncompromising eyes.
"The transit pod is in the Sub-Level Four cryo-wing," she gasped. "Beneath the quarantine vault."
Sub-Level Four was buried in perpetual frost, cooled by liquid nitrogen conduits that hummed inside the bulkheads.
Idris, Vespera, and Sorsha sprinted through a corridor lined with reinforced glass stasis alcoves. Most of the tubes were shattered, their contents dried into dark, desiccated husks—the failed prototypes that the Old Republic scientists had burned through before perfecting the harmonic gene sequence.
At the end of the hall, a single stasis pod still glowed with a pale azure light.
Inside, preserved in liquid stasis, floated a young girl with silver-tinged hair, wearing a white tunic identical to Vespera's. Around her throat sat a heavy torc of polished acoustic crystal.
The plaque beneath the glass read: VESSEL TWO - DESIGNATION: LYRA - STATUS: TERMINATED IN SYNCHRONIZATION TRIAL 04.
Vespera stopped. She pressed both palms against the frozen glass, her eyes wide, a low, melodic vibration humming in her throat.
"Another one..." Sorsha whispered, her breath misting in the freezing air. "They were cloning them."
"Not cloning," Idris said, reading the telemetry scrolling on the monitor. "Iterating. Lyra was the prototype who stabilized the high-frequency harmonics, but her nervous system burned out before she could handle the low-register mantle waves. Marcus Calder took her neural mapping crystal and grafted it into Vespera's design."
Vespera punched the emergency stasis purge.
The glass hissed upward on pneumatic springs. With gentle, reverent fingers, Vespera reached into the freezing mist, unclipped the crystal torc from Lyra's neck, and slotted it directly into the auxiliary port of her own collarbone socket.
CHIME.
A blinding corona of white light erupted from Vespera's chest. Her eyes flared with pure silver fire. The synchronization reading on Idris's analyzer jumped from ninety-two percent to one hundred.
The predecessor was gone, but her voice was now part of the song.
SNAP.
The sound was not an explosion; it was the catastrophic release of eighty thousand tons of mechanical tension.
Cables Two and Three severed simultaneously as the Titan-V's plasma cutters bit through the final steel cores.
The Hanging Spire dropped thirty feet in freefall before the remaining three cables caught the load, snapping taut with a violent jerk that tilted the entire inverted city forty-five degrees to the east.
Floors became walls. Ceilings became sheer cliffs.
Idris, Vespera, and Sorsha were thrown across the cryo-lab, slamming into the reinforced bulkhead as containers of liquid nitrogen shattered across the tilted deck.
From the elevator shafts above, grappling lines hissed into the corridor.
Six Hive elite sentinels descended in powered combat suits, their heavy rotary carbines spinning up with a high-pitched whine.
"Graven's strike team!" Sorsha yelled, firing her pneumatic pistol from behind an overturned stasis pod.
The sentinels opened fire. Flechettes chewed through the composite walls, shredding the cryo-tubes into clouds of ice and glass.
Idris activated his magnetic boots, locking his soles to the steel floor despite the vertical incline. He unhooked two acoustic pulse charges from his belt, slung them down the tilted corridor, and keyed the detonator to forty-two hertz—the resonant frequency of the sentinels' powered exoskeletons.
CRACK-THUMP.
The acoustic shockwave didn't harm the men inside, but it shattered the ceramic hydraulic seals of their power suits. Fluid sprayed in high-pressure jets, their mechanical limbs locking up in rigid, unyielding paralysis.
"Move!" Idris roared, hauling Sorsha and Vespera down the tilted service gantry toward the Spire's tip. "The remaining cables are snapping!"