stopped skipping a beat when he turned and found himself looking out into space, with apparently nothing between him and the cold, endless vacuum.
“Something we haven’t seen for a while.”
Dash turned to the voice and found Viktor ambling toward him from the direction of the Slipwing. Dash’s old ship shared the docking bay with the Archetype. She was hardly the most capable ship in the Cygnus Fleet, but Dash didn’t care. It was his one, true indulgence as Messenger, keeping his own ship alongside the enormous mech that had replaced it as his accustomed ride.
Not that there was much of his old ship left. The hull was mostly original, but everything else, from weapons to power plant, had been replaced or upgraded with Unseen tech. She sported a new, self-sealing armor, and even a powerful shield array. The clunky old ship he’d acquired through what amounted to a poker game, a scam, a small amount of credits, and a lot of fast talking, had once been little more than a nondescript tramp, creaking along forever on the edge of simply flying apart. He’d once described her as a few hundred thousand spare parts flying in really close formation. Now, she could probably vie for the title of most powerful human-built ship in known space.
“She’s all set to launch,” Viktor said, wiping his hands on a rag. “I’ll follow you out.”
Dash pointed at the rag. “Are there any systems left aboard her that can actually make your hands dirty?”
Viktor grinned. “One. The coffee maker. It still gets a lot of sludge built up in it, but it makes damned fine coffee—and coffee-making tech is one of the very few things the Unseen apparently never mastered.” He tucked the rag in his pocket. “I just cleaned it out.”
Dash laughed and turned back to the view out of the massive bay. His laughter died away. “You know, I didn’t think I’d ever see this again.”
Viktor nodded. “Yeah. Impressive as hell. But honestly, if I’d never seen the fleet assemble again, I would have been okay with that.”
Dash took it all in, satisfied with the view. Before them sprawled the sweeping mass of the Victory, a huge, A-prime class carrier, along with the sleek, darting shapes of corvettes. A new ship caught his eye in particular—another of the Sabretooth command cruisers that had been christened the Herald. She was successor to the original Herald, a heavy cruiser of Unseen design from the Silent Fleet. One of Dash’s first tasks as Messenger was finding and activating that lost fleet that was hidden away by the Unseen somewhere in the depths of time. Benzel had claimed the Herald as his flagship, fighting her in every important engagement until she’d been destroyed in the last major battle of the Life War. The new Herald now carried on that proud tradition—and, once again, flew Benzel’s flag.
“Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it,” Dash said. “I know there were some saying we should decommission most of the fleet and use the resources for other stuff, but here we are. And we need it.”
“I’m glad we didn’t mothball it,” Viktor agreed. “The whole fleet, ready to brawl somewhere across the galaxy. Any chance for Dark Metal salvage in this first engagement?”
Dash crossed his arms. “Benzel’s taken to calling it the Scrapyard.”
“Just curious, Dash. How long have we known about this place?”
“How long have I known about it, you mean.” Dash shrugged. “Probably since about halfway through the war against the Golden.” He remembered back to being discreetly taken aside by Custodian, to an isolated part of the Forge intended only for the Messenger. The existence of the Scrapyard, a vast field of Dark Metal-laden debris, components, and even ingots about a hundred and nineteen light-years distant from the Forge’s current position, had been one of a number of things revealed to him.
“And we never bothered to go and claim it? I realize it’s heavily guarded, but we did a lot of scraping and scrounging of Dark Metal for the war effort, Dash.”
“Not just heavily guarded,” Dash replied. “Custodian estimates that there’s the equivalent, in firepower, of a Golden fleet as big as any we ever encountered, and maybe even bigger. At the time, it would have been too much of a risk and left us vulnerable to the Golden. I made the call, and it wasn’t easy, believe me. Later, when we were strong enough to realistically take it on, we didn’t