just miss something like that,” Leira said, but Dash raised a hand.
“Hang on, Custodian. You said this perturbation happens about every six hours. How fast would this thing have to be traveling to have that kind of orbital period?”
“A high trans-luminal velocity.”
“So faster than light. A lot faster than light.”
“Correct,” Custodian replied, economical to a fault.
Dash closed his eyes, working angles. “Strange. Scratch that. Odd.”
“Is odd more weird than strange?” Leira asked.
“It is now,” Dash replied with some dignity, then grinned.
“Could it be something orbiting the planet itself?” Leira asked, waving a hand vaguely at the heavens. “A moon or something we just haven’t detected?”
Harolyn answered. “We can see a shuttle-sized piece of Dark Metal a few light-years away. And we missed an entire moon orbiting a planet where we currently have a probe?”
“Good point,” Dash said.
“If it’s an object in orbit, it would be constant,” Harolyn went on. “This isn’t. It’s intermittent, like a signal instead of a solid object. Our techs are calling it too lean to be permanent, and its periodic influence is right at six hours on, six hours off. Like a work shift, but with gravity waves.”
Dash sat up, hands curled into fists. He felt that tingle—just a hint, but still there—of whatever instincts he had left since the close of combat. Forcing his hands open, he snapped a command. “Sentinel, do your pre-flight on the Archetype. I’m heading back up to the Forge. ETA would be as soon as we clear atmo, at full power. Spare no fuel.”
He stood and gathered his fishing gear for the short trek back to the shuttle. Leira fell in alongside, her long legs making loping strides easy.
“It might just be something natural, Dash. Weird, yes, but also natural,” she said. “I mean, it’s hard to believe the Unseen missed anything that would affect a planet they built. It’s a big universe. We’ve barely scratched it, and here we are—um, relaxing by fishing—on a world that’s tucked away like a park. I say we investigate first, then go ballistic.”
“I like ballistic. Or, I used to,” Dash said with a wry grin.
“Me too. Your face tells me this is more of a feeling.”
Dash held up a branch, letting Leira pass under. “Right again. More than a hunch, less than evidence. Right in the sweet spot where I made most of the decisions during the war.”
“The Golden?” she asked, because those two words were enough.
“No idea, unless we missed a few, but . . . I don’t know. Don’t think so. We scoured them like vermin, but like you said, it’s a big universe. And that means we check, we don’t assume. Not with so many of our people drifting out there in the black.”
Leira gave a somber nod, then hissed as a cloud of mosquitoes rose to greet them. “I like life as much as anyone. I just don’t like this species.”
“Could be worse,” Dash said, his expression carefully blank. “They could be spiders with wings.”
Leira pointed at him, her eyes narrowed. “Don’t give the scientists any ideas.”
Dash relaxed and watched the region of space Harolyn and her people predicted would become gravitational.
He’d made the trip here, to Planet Fifteen, aboard the Archetype. He’d flown the massive mech regularly since the war, mainly as a personal indulgence. Dash could just as easily hitch a ride aboard another ship—and, being the Messenger, he could hitch pretty much any ride he wanted—but he preferred flying the mech.
His immersion in the Meld with the Archetype gave him a sense of actually being a massive metal construct racing through space, which was nothing like being jammed into the cramped confines of some conventional ship. Given a choice between the mental freedom of streaking through space as the Archetype and being a passenger, the choice was easy.
Dash would blaze through the darkness every time.
“The anomaly should become active in sixty seconds,” Sentinel said.
Dash grunted an acknowledgment, then considered the tactical situation—a last chance to rearrange things. Not that there was much to rearrange. The Archetype and its smaller cousin, the Swift, piloted by Leira, hung a few hundred kilometers apart, about a hundred thousand klicks from where the anomaly, as Sentinel called it, should manifest.
The Rockhound, with Harolyn and her team aboard, kept station about a hundred thousand klicks further back. That left the probe that had provoked all of this in the first place closest in, keeping a geosynchronous orbit over Planet Fifteen that should let it see what was going on, while still