The Black Gate (The Messenger #11) - J.N. Chaney Page 0,4

keeping it a few thousand klicks away.

“Sentinel, you’re sure there’s nothing in that area of space? Not even any natural debris? I’m amenable to checking rocks if I have to,” he said.

“If there is, it’s beyond my current abilities. That should concern both of us.”

“I’m rarely concerned about anything pertaining to you, except your attitude. At times, you can be—” Dash paused, selecting his words carefully.

“Brilliant?” Sentinel asked. “Perhaps charming?”

“Charming?” Dash hooted. “I had no idea you were so sociable.”

“Fifteen seconds to target, and yes, I am sociable. I simply can’t fit into most parties. I’m rather tall, you might note.”

“Point taken,” Dash admitted. “On target. Go time.” He stared out into the black and found absolutely nothing waiting.

Then there was a shimmering ripple that made the distant stars briefly wobble and smear into streaks of light. A slight shudder ran through the Archetype.

“What the hell is that?” Dash asked.

“Unknown,” Sentinel replied.

It was a distortion of space-time. And that was all Dash could make of it.

“Harolyn, you getting anything here?” Dash asked, watching the stars flutter and dance. The sight filled him with unease. It was unnatural in a way that made the hair on his neck stand at attention.

“Well, the wobble in the planet is back. Whatever this is, it just applied a pretty significant acceleration to it—and to us.”

“Yeah, felt that,” Dash replied, then he watched as data collected by the probe, the Rockhound, and both mechs was slowly fused into a coherent picture. “Heluva kick.”

The anomaly was a region of space about a hundred kilometers across, roughly circular, but with inconstant boundaries. It exhibited an intense gravitational gradient, meaning it had a relatively minor pull more than a few hundred klicks away, but that dramatically increased the closer one got to it. The resulting gravitational lensing caused the shimmering distortion of the stars seen through it.

And that was it.

“The River Styx,” Harolyn said.

Dash searched his memory and came up with a fleeting image from school. “I feel like this is a moment I should have been paying attention to in my immersion lessons, instead of Cassandra Vinton.”

“Let me guess. Redhead?” Harolyn asked.

“Of course. But you were saying something about a river?” Dash asked.

“Styx. It’s an ancient legend from Old Earth, about a river that separates the lands of the living from the land of the dead. In the legends, it appears and disappears.” Dash couldn’t see Harolyn, but he knew she was shrugging. “Hey, there’s a lot of good, Old Earth stuff in the archives.”

“Dash prefers reading about how to sit beside water and throw in strings, hoping to tangle a fish to death, I think. Or at least severe discomfort,” Leira put in.

“You have no idea how fishing works, do you, Leira?” Dash said.

“Don’t particularly want to, either.” She sniffed with some dignity, secure in her disinterest of the elegant art of angling.

“Dash,” Sentinel interrupted. “Tybalt and I have been analyzing the data being sent back by the probe. The central portion of the anomaly, where the gravitational gradient should be at its most intense, is in a state of zero-g. Moreover, there are radiation and particulate emissions emanating from it that suggest nearby stars.”

“Wait,” Dash said. “Nearby stars? How nearby?”

“Within one to two light-years.”

“But there aren’t any stars that close to this one.”

“No, there aren’t.”

“So what are you saying here?” Leira asked. “That there are stars nearby that we can’t see?”

“Substantially correct,” Tybalt, the AI that ran Leira’s Swift, said. He managed to both agree and insult everyone with the same tone—a true artist. “However, anticipating your next question—no, they are not hidden or invisible. Rather, I would suggest that they are on the other side of the anomaly, which appears to be the proximate terminus of a wormhole-like structure.”

“It’s a gate,” Dash said.

“So it would appear,” Tybalt said, and for once, his tone wasn’t a veiled—or open—insult. That made Dash take note. This gate was something new. Perhaps something new and bad.

“We’ve never seen a gate that wasn’t created with obvious tech,” Leira said. “That means someone is creating this one, and as to how, it’s well beyond our tech. Maybe even the Unseen’s.”

“Yeah, they are,” Dash said, a sensation of dread building. World-crushing tech was common for the Unseen. Tech that could shift matter like this gate was well beyond anything Dash wanted to be near. Gates could swing shut.

“And why,” Harolyn said.

Dash watched the stars dancing, their light bending like living ribbons as the gate changed reality. “Harolyn, let’s try sending that