Arboghast

Story so far

The Arboghast was a third-generation destroyer built at the Bush Shipyards thirteen years earlier and refitted as a military science vessel; for eight months she orbited Venus, the source of most of Avasarala's active-scan data on the alien activity there. Then, an hour before the Ganymede fighting — during Holden's raid — she was destroyed in a way no known force can achieve: after an energy spike, a targeted radio sweep, and a brief radiative pulse, the ship was methodically disassembled in roughly fifteen orderly waves, hull plates peeling in neat rows, girders and decks sliding apart, every bolt and clamp held in magnet-like alignment, stripped to the screws in seventy seconds. Her 572 souls were exposed to vacuum and killed; even their suits were taken apart, though their bodies were left intact.

Captured by lunar telescopes and shipborne observers, her death is the clearest proof yet that whatever inhabits Venus is intentional, inhuman, and studying — taking things apart to learn what they do.

Appearance

A thirteen-year-old destroyer-hull science vessel, seen in false-color detail above the Venusian cloud haze — then peeling into neat rows of hull plates, girders, and a suspended cloud of aligned bolts and clamps.

Role

The Venus science ship whose orderly disassembly reveals the alien intelligence's nature and capability.

Relationships