The remaining Skrulls on the bridge saw their commander surrender and lowered their weapons one after another.
The Dark Order soldiers rushed in, confiscated their weapons, and escorted them deep into the mothership.
Ebony Maw walked over to the commander's seat and sat down.
The seat was more comfortable than he had expected. Skrull ergonomics were quite good.
He leaned back, resting his hands on the armrests, his black eyes fixed on the starry expanse beyond the window.
"Very good," he said.
The Skrull mothership's core laboratory was far larger than Ebony Maw had expected.
It was an enormous spherical space, over two hundred meters in diameter, its walls covered in blue-glowing pipelines, holographic screens, and data nodes.
At the center of the laboratory floated a platform bearing a complex device unlike anything Ebony Maw had ever seen.
It was a massive ring-shaped structure composed of dozens of rotating metal rings, each spinning at a different speed and in a different direction.
At the center of the rings was a pulsing sphere of white light, like a sleeping heart.
The Skrulls' chief scientist stood beneath the platform, his green skin appearing pale beneath the laboratory's blue light.
He looked very old, the wrinkles on his face as deep as knife-carved ravines.
The edges of his pointed ears curled slightly, while sparse white hair covered his scalp.
His hands trembled, not because of his age, but because he knew who the man before him was.
Ebony Maw sat in a chair before him, the hem of his obsidian robe pooling on the floor like a puddle of black water.
His fingers tapped lightly against the armrest in a slow, steady rhythm.
"What are you researching?" Ebony Maw asked.
The chief scientist's vertical pupils flickered. His lips moved as though he were