Vance sat in the gunnery-throne, his Singularity-Plate armor locked into the ship's firing deck. He wasn't aiming at the Gardener; he was aiming at the Space around the monoliths.
"Eat this, you gold-plated pricks!" Vance roared, slamming his iron-fists into the triggers.
The Revenant didn't fire lasers. It fired Compressed Void-Shells.
As the shells hit the Gardener's geometric fleet, they didn't explode. They erased. The white-gold alloy of the monoliths began to dissolve into black pixels, the Tier-10 logic being "Subtracted" by the Void-Steel's hunger.
"The monoliths are losing structural integrity!" Sully reported, her eyes bleeding silver light. "Sarge, the Gardener is moving! He's targeting the planet's core! He's going to trigger the white dwarf!"
"Doc! Hit the monoliths with the Blight!" Kane commanded.
Doc stood on the outer hull of the Revenant, protected only by a thin layer of emerald mist. She raised her Plague-Core Staff, and a swarm of Nanite-Blight erupted from the tip. Unlike her previous spores, these were programmed with the "Machine-Code" of Lot-12C.
The green mist swarmed the nearest monolith. The white-gold metal didn't just rot; it mutated. The monolith grew jagged, rusted limbs that began to tear into its neighboring ships.
"The 'Order' is breaking!" Doc laughed, her voice carried through the mental link. "They don't know how to fight their own metal turning against them!"
But the Gardener was unmoved. He raised his sickle of Anti-Time and swung it in a wide arc.
The space-time around the Revenant began to freeze. The violet fire of the engines slowed to a crawl. The very thoughts in Kane's mind began to lag, as if the universe were running out of memory.
[THE HARVEST IS LAW.] [THE BLIGHT WILL BE REMOVED.]
The Gardener stepped off his ship and walked across the vacuum, his feet leaving footprints of solid gold on the empty air. He was coming for the Revenant's bridge.