on the fleet.”
“We need more ships,” Benzel said flatly, and Wei-Ping nodded. “The fleet’s in generally pretty good shape, but we have taken losses, and will probably take more.”
“Way ahead of you again,” Dash said. “I’m sending Viktor back through the Gate in the Slipwing to fetch Bercale and bring him back. I want him and his Local Group to figure out a way to start building ships over here.”
The conversation turned to details. Dash left his Inner Circle to it, knowing they’d take his broad strokes of ideas and turn them into an actual plan. As they broke up into smaller groups and launched into a series of animated discussions, Dash had to smile.
He wasn’t just fond of these people, he was proud of them. He couldn’t have asked for better.
Deeper ships, they quickly and painfully learned, were dangerous even in death.
When it came to salvaging debris, and especially Dark Metal, the Cygnus Realm was a slick, well-oiled machine. Long experience scavenging the aftermath of battles—some of them fought literally tens or hundreds of thousands of years earlier—had seen them develop a plethora of procedures and support tech, all focused on retrieving and processing salvage as quickly and efficiently as possible.
There were risks, certainly. Any work in vacuum and no-g was dangerous, especially when working with chunks of debris that were massive, jagged, and sometimes still hot or radioactive. And that was just ship debris. Start factoring in unexploded munitions, unexpended fuel, and even the odd weapon system that was still active, and the danger factor quickly amped up.
Dash recalled one incident in which a Golden point-defense battery had remained intact and active on a shattered chunk of hull, its local power supply enough to let it engage and seriously damage a recovery tug before it was destroyed. That had led to a whole new series of protocols about scanning debris fields before sending people to work in them.
When it came to the debris from Deeper ships, they’d basically been forced back to the drawing board—because it turned out that Deeper wreckage was still alive.
Maybe alive wasn’t the right word.
Active might be more correct. They’d had their first hint of danger when a section of a Deeper hull had suddenly flexed and changed shape, flowing like melted wax when a Realm recovery tug latched on. Confronted by a newly smooth surface, with nothing for its grapples to grip, the tug had wisely backed off and alerted Benzel to the bizarre event.
Immediately afterward, other reports started rattling in from salvage teams about similar things. Pieces of wreckage were changing shape—at alarming speeds. Some open hatches abruptly irised shut, compartments were collapsing like closing jaws, and a spiky protrusion of hull material almost skewered a salvage tech. Benzel immediately pulled all salvage teams back so they could regroup and consider their options.
“Except,” Benzel said to Dash over the comm, “I can’t get any response from Team Nine Alpha. They just seem to have gone off the air.”
Dash had been preparing to launch the Archetype on a patrol. “You want me to go and check on them?”
“If you could. I don’t want to send another team to do it, in case the threat remains active,”
Dash understood. Sending another team to their death wasn’t an option, and the solution was simple.
“On my way.” Dash applied a burst of power to the Blur drive.
Leira, who’d just launched from her mech’s docking bay to join him, came sweeping around the curve of the Forge’s vast hull. “I’ll hang back and cover you, Dash, in case there’s something truly nasty out there.”
He acknowledged, and together they made the short flight to the last reported location of Team Nine-Alpha, about a half-million klicks distant.
As he approached, Dash slowed and zoomed in the view. At first, he saw nothing but pieces of debris, some spinning fast, still carrying the energy of whatever force had blasted them free, others entirely still. As for the salvage team, there was no sign—
“Dash, your two o’clock, about ten klicks,” Leira said.
Dash turned to the icon that popped into his view as Tybalt shared the data with Sentinel. It highlighted a large chunk of hull wreckage about fifty meters long. A recovery tug hung near it, motionless.
“Okay, I’m going in closer. Leira—”
“Got your back,” she said.
He applied a minute burst of power from the Blur drive, then used thrusters to coast in the rest of the way. The tug seemed unharmed—
But a flicker of movement around the wreckage snagged his attention. He saw