“You want data?” she whispered. “I’ll give you data.”

The Lord British made a desperate run for the central crater. Tita fired everything—the Mega Crush, the lasers, the missiles. For a glorious three seconds, the flesh burned. Aoba saw the core. It was a pulsing, crystalline heart the size of a skyscraper.

“The NTSC-U sector is lost,” Tita said, her own Angel—the Lord British —launching from the adjacent bay. “All remaining forces, form up. We’re punching a hole for the Excellion to retreat.”

And somewhere, deep in the Excellion ’s corrupted logs, a single line of code repeated, over and over, waiting for another pilot to find it.

Aoba looked at the tactical map. Three ships left. Then two. Then just Tita and her.

“If I fall back, who stops it?”

Aoba was alone.

The Lord British didn’t explode. It was simply… absorbed. Pulled into the meat like a pebble into mud.

Strue went first. A tentacle the size of a subway train, tipped with a diamond-hard beak, punched straight through her Goliath’s chest. Her scream cut off in a burst of static.

No one laughed. Because no one was sure if she was joking.

“Which is why we are buying time,” Tita replied. “Not winning. There is a difference, Anoa.”

The Bacterian moon spoke to her. Not in words. In need . It was starving. It had crossed the galaxy to feed on the one thing it couldn't synthesize: . The ISO. The games. The memories. All the digital ghosts humanity had uploaded to the orbital gate’s servers.