The Shattered Relay

Part II: The Looming Horizon
​Back on the bridge, the primary sensor grid was flooded with impossible telemetry.
​"Spatial distortion detected at zero-point-four light-years," reported Maya, the ship’s navigation officer, her fingers blurring across the glass interface. "It’s not a ship. It’s a tear in space-time, and it's expanding."
​Sarah stared at the main viewer. The blackness of space was buckling. Stars behind the distortion bent into warped arcs of light, as if looking through the bottom of a heavy glass bottle. From within the rift, a shape began to emerge—not metal or stone, but a colossal structure composed of folded geometric planes, shimmering with the same blue-white light as the crystal below.
​"They aren't invaders," Sarah realized suddenly, watching the mathematical precision of the entity's approach. "It's an automated collector."
​"Collector for what?" Maya asked, her voice trembling.
​"For planets being altered by artificial means," Kaelen said, stepping onto the bridge, his suit still dusted with alien frost. "Our terraforming attempt wasn't seen as industrial progress. To them, it was a signal that this world was ripe for harvest."
​The alien construct paused ten thousand kilometers out. A massive beam of focused gravity locked onto Triton, and the moon's surface began to fracture. Giant shards of ice, miles long, drifted upward into the void, drawn toward the glowing geometric entity. The Astraea was trapped in the gravitational wake, its hull groaning under the immense tidal forces.
​"If we don't sever the link between the drill and the ship," Maya shouted over the roar of buckling steel, "we’re going up into that thing with the ice!"