Just when everyone thought the threat had been completely eliminated and the battlefield was about to fall silent, something changed!
Deep within the shattered remains of the Black Planet, its surface utterly lifeless, one final energy pulse erupted without warning, extremely faint yet extraordinarily sharp!
This pulse was not an offensive burst of energy. It was more like a desperate signal for escape.
Immediately afterward, a streak of black light, so faint it was almost imperceptible, shot from a fracture somewhere in the planet's core like the last flick of a dying viper's tongue!
It was a highly compressed block of black nanometal measuring less than a meter on each side. Its mirror-smooth surface reflected the dim light of the surrounding Stars.
"Alert! High-priority miniature target breaking away! Suspected core data or Seed Unit!" The Sensors officer's voice suddenly rose, filled with incredulous shock.
"The enemy is trying to escape! Intercept it! It must not leave this area!" Perturabo's command pierced the air like a spike of ice, his composure edged with the bitter fury of having been outmaneuvered.
The instant the order was issued, the densely packed close-defense Turrets and point-defense Laser arrays on the Iron Warriors warships surrounding the debris field responded.
Countless streams of searing gunfire and Laser beams poured toward the rapidly escaping block of black metal like a torrential downpour, igniting brilliant showers of sparks and ripples of energy along its flight path.
Yet every attempt to intercept it proved futile.
The black metal block not only possessed an extremely high initial velocity, but continued accelerating with astonishing efficiency after breaking away!
It seemed unbound by conventional physical laws, tracing an almost perfectly straight line of death through the Void. Its speed increased exponentially, rapidly approaching that despair-inducing cosmic limit!
**"Abnormal target acceleration! Velocity has