The instant the Barbarossa entered the gravity well, Inspector Stoneheart had already drawn his folding bow to a full moon. Light spilled from both his hands, coalescing into an arrow shaft that he nocked against the bowstring.
Krell stood beside him, looking resigned to his fate. He produced a purplish-red crystal and pinned a silver card to it. The crystal immediately floated in front of the dragonkin inspector, settling at the tip of the arrow of light to form its head.
The inspector released the bowstring, sending the crystal arrow, gleaming with a cold purplish-red light, streaking across the sky. It plunged straight into the formation suspended in the middle of the observatory.
It was only attacking a formation ten meters away, yet the impact had the oppressive force of a comet crashing into Earth.
Then the purplish-red light sank into the formation. A flash exploded, and the dazzling white light nearly blinded everyone. Everyone, that was, except Yu Lian. He had kept his spiritual senses spread around him, eyes wide as he tracked every change in the screens of light before him. In the next instant, the mottled starlight and bottomless depths of space beyond the distant portholes were gone. A vast expanse of gray mist, just as unfathomable, welled up and filled everything they could see and sense.
The psychics on the observatory stirred uneasily. If even they were unsettled, it went without saying how the ordinary crew members felt.
That problem, of course, could only be left to the captain of the ship—the one man who looked utterly dependable.
Yu Lian studied the formation still floating in the air. The arrays, coiled together like mating snakes, had stopped moving. They seemed to have fallen back into hibernation, or perhaps Inspector Stoneheart's attack had simply brought them to