The flight from the shattered, smoking ruins of the Siberian permafrost to the edge of the European continent took exactly seventy-five minutes.
Inside the heavily armored cockpit of the flagship stealth transport, the localized, high-definition orbital displays painted a terrifying, real-time picture of their destination. The continent of Europe no longer possessed distinct geographical borders. The Alps, the Mediterranean coastlines, and the massive, sprawling Old World cities had all been completely, violently swallowed by a single, pulsing organism.
It was a Category-Four integration zone.
From sixty thousand feet, it looked like a massive, bruised violet tumor clinging to the curvature of the Earth. A hyper-dense, toxic-purple miasma of billions of airborne spores formed a massive, swirling atmospheric canopy, completely choking out the sun.
