Obsidian Vein [I]

The scream in the small of Leo's back felt like a white-hot nail driven between his shoulder blades and twisted.

Around the Wanderer-7, the black faces of the basalt pillars peeled open.

…What had looked on approach like slabs of rock and pitted iron came loose from the asteroids in broad silent sheets. 

Silicate skin, black as dead coal and rough as raw ore, unfolded into triangular spans twelve to fifteen meters wide.

Wing-mantles snapped taut against the vacuum, and along their leathery undersides dull violet fissures woke and began to pulse like embers someone had blown on.

Ten of them came loose, then twenty and thirty, and then forty more crawled out of the craters and crevices of every boulder within three kilometers of the hull…

DING!

These were Level 2 Void-Mantas…