Back on the bridge of the "Odyssey," a new set of alarms began to scream. But these were not the loud, frantic alarms of an incoming attack. These were the confused, worried beeps of a system that was seeing something impossible.
The brilliant, blue-white beam of energy that had shot out from the Gardener's Avatar had arrived. But it didn't hit their shields with a crash. It didn't burn through their hull.
It just… passed right through.
Like a ghost walking through a wall, the beam of pure light slid silently through the ship's defenses, through the thick metal of its hull, and into the heart of the vessel. It was not an explosion. It was a whisper.
"What was that?" Seraphina cried, her hands gripping her console. "What did it do?"
Zara was staring at her own screen, her eyes wide with a look of pure, scientific disbelief. Her scanners were trying to analyze the beam, but the data was just a stream of nonsense.
