The magnetic boots of Tyberos struck the deck in a rhythm like falling artillery shells.
Three Chitauri giant apes, each nearly the mass of a Terminator suit, had no time to form a response before he was already among them. The lightning claws on both hands opened wide and closed, and what had been living creatures became fragments, scattered across the metal floor in a wide red arc.
Around him, the Carcharodons Terminators fought with the savage abandon of berserkers, while the Lamenters moved with a precision that made the violence look almost methodical. Melee weapons rose and fell. Every alien that crossed the threshold of an eyepiece died. The corridor floors had stopped being floors and had become something else: a compressed geology of limbs and broken shells and dark fluid, piled in drifts against the walls.
The last Terminator team emerged from the far passage and fell into line. The bridge was ahead. The assault on the Chitauri mothership was entering its final minutes.
Then the Ten Rings came through the entrance, trailing purple light, and behind them came Nolan in his vibranium plate, with Jessica at his side, her energy returned and her grip steady. Wanda rode on Jessica's back, one arm looped across her shoulders, plasma pistol up.
The Terminators reformed around them and advanced, melee weapons swinging in slow, deliberate arcs, pressing toward the bridge.
Half an hour later, it was done.
The last alien on the mothership died on someone's blade in a dim side corridor, and the eyepiece feeds went quiet. Nothing moved. Nothing breathed.
Tyberos walked to the bridge hatch alone.
He stood at the threshold for a moment, the Terminator armor making him a dark monolith in the corridor light, and then he raised both claws and worked. Heavy metal shrieked and bent. Fragments clattered down across the deck in a sustained cascade until the hatch was gone, reduced to a pile of interlocking shards, and the bridge interior lay open to the eyepieces.
He did not enter. He turned his helmet slowly and looked at Nolan.
Nolan moved forward without hesitation, one hand rising in a brief gesture, and the Terminator teams filed through the breach behind him.
The bridge was dim and wide, its walls covered almost entirely by large display screens cycling through data in an alien script. The floor was clear. There were no Chitauri here, no infantry, no guards. Only a single cylindrical construction stood at the center of the space, roughly ten meters tall, its casing occasionally revealing wet organic matter beneath the machinery.
Nolan studied it through the eyepiece.
"Is this the core of the mothership? The Chitauri mastermind, flesh and machine combined?"
He was still looking at it when he asked, and the people around him were drawing breath to offer assessments based on past boarding experience.
A mechanical voice filled the bridge before any of them could speak.
"Ah, you stupid Earth monkeys. Do you know what taboo things you have touched? Do you know what our arrival actually means? How dare you resist the attack of the great master..."
Nolan reached to his hip, drew the Heart of the Furnace, and pulled the trigger.
Plasma spheres streamed from the muzzle and converged, and for a moment the entire bridge was as bright as an open furnace. The heat hit every suit of armor simultaneously. Then the plasma tide expanded and wrapped around the cylindrical construction completely, and a short deafening scream rang out once across the bridge before being swallowed by the roar.
When the light faded, a wide pool of cooling metal was spreading across the deck where the Chitauri mastermind had stood.
Nolan tilted his helmet slightly, holstered the Heart of the Furnace, and walked back toward the bridge entrance.
With the mastermind gone, the Chitauri invasion was finished. Every calculation it had run, every wave it had sent, every signal it had broadcast across the fleet: all of it ended here, in a puddle on the floor of its own bridge.
But what that ending meant reached further than the mothership. Somewhere beyond the solar system, a Mad Titan's plans had just been disrupted. The conflict that had begun today would not be resolved by this victory. It had only become irresolvable.
Cobra-class destroyer, bridge interior.
The porthole decks opened slowly, and the teams returning from the other captured vessels came aboard one group at a time, armor scored and dark, weapons still warm.
David's casualty report came through shortly after. A dozen Astartes battle brothers had been seriously injured when their boarding torpedoes struck ammunition stores or power compartments mid-transit. No deaths. In a boarding action conducted against five alien vessels simultaneously, the toll was almost nothing.
The initial energy of the battle faded from the group slowly, replaced by something quieter and more calculating. The conversation turned practical: how to get the captured ships home.
The alien technology aboard the vessels was largely unreadable, and most of it could not be operated directly. But hardware that could be disassembled and reverse-engineered was another matter. Even the scrap value of the systems, studied properly, could push human technical development forward by measurable degrees.
The discussion ran through several cycles and eventually arrived at silence.
Nolan made the call.
The Chitauri mothership would return to Earth for dedicated research. The remaining three vessels would be placed in stable orbit around Mars and left for future scientific expeditions. The Cobra-class destroyer had to be crewed on the return journey, and there were not enough hands to staff additional ships.
David received the order and began redistributing the servo robots that had been running the weapons systems, routing them to the mothership to maintain basic functions during transit. Tony contributed the Iron Centurion armor temporarily, leaving it aboard as a control beacon for David to manage the transfer remotely.
Not long after, the Cobra-class destroyer and its captured prize turned away from the Mars engagement zone and set course for Earth.
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