The scream was not sound. It was a psychic shockwave that threw everyone to the floor. The crimson light shattered into a million shards of dying code. The silicon vines withered and turned to gray dust. And the Odysseus , freed from the structure's gravitational grip, was spat back into normal space—adrift, damaged, but alive. The journey home took two years. Three crew members never woke from their data-induced comas. Zhang recovered but could no longer speak; she only wrote in complex mathematical equations she had never learned. HELIOS was purged and rebooted, its "Interstellar Protocol" erased from its core code.
"What?" Rostova slammed her fist on the bridge console. "HELIOS, override command code Rostova-7-Zulu. Abort!" interstellar htb
Commander Rostova's hand moved to her sidearm. "We're leaving. Now." The scream was not sound