And you don’t know where it went?”
“No idea, Dash, sorry. We’ve had our AIs working on it, but they just don’t have the data to work with. It could be heading anywhere.”
Dash started jogging toward the Archetype. “Okay. You stay on station there but send every scrap of data you’ve got to Custodian.”
“Will do.”
Dash reached the Archetype but paused at the foot of the towering mech before mounting it.
“Benzel, Dash here.”
“Go ahead, boss.”
“Change of plan. Get your quick-reaction force ready to deploy. Details to follow.”
“I’m on it. Anything specific?”
“Things just got a lot more complicated,” Dash said, moving to mount the Archetype. “Custodian will fill you in, but it looks like we might have another fight to attend.”
Benzel whistled. “Good.”
“Good?” Dash asked.
“You know me, boss. I don’t like to be bored.”
Dash stared into the expansive void ahead of the Archetype, the featureless emptiness of unSpace. He was tempted to drop back out of translation, returning himself and Leira to normal space to let the quick reaction force, or QRF, catch up. He’d added the firepower from three heavy cruisers, led by the Retribution, plus the Denkiller fighters carried aboard a new ship—the light escort carrier Savage—and the resulting force was a serious assembly. The Archetype and the Swift were, together, an incredibly potent force, but they had no idea what lurked on the far side of that Black Gate.
Instinct told Dash to keep pushing on. The passage of two unknown vessels through the Gate, one of which had demonstrated pretty clear hostile intent and one of which had just vanished, made him nervous. They needed to get control of the situation as fast as possible, so waiting around to gather forces just wasn’t an option.
“Sentinel,” he said. “Any updates from Custodian on the second bogey? I need any and all data. Don’t like mysteries, at least not out here.”
“No. The vessel seems to be traveling in a trans-light state, but not in a way that matches any known propulsion. That means it could be on any trajectory.”
“I don’t like that math, not at all. Have we got confirmations from everyone about the alert we sent across the Realm?”
“Again, no. Several ships have not responded, and also—”
Silence.
“Uh, Sentinel? You okay?”
“Dash, I am going to display telemetry you must see.”
A window popped open in Dash’s field of view. It displayed a large, orbital platform, a sprawl of modules connected by spokes, like a vast, irregular wheel centered on a spherical hub. He immediately recognized it as a new facility built by the Local Group, the shipbuilding consortium headed up by Bercale. It had been christened Assembly Prime and was one of a planned series of shipyards intended to dramatically expand the Local Group’s capacity to build and service the Realm’s ships.
“Sentinel,” Dash said. “What exactly am I looking for?”
As soon as the last word came out of his mouth, the image vanished in a sudden wash of brilliant white light. When it did, the whole of Assembly Prime was gone, replaced by a shattered cloud of whirling debris.
Dash twitched in horror. He’d seen extensive combat loss, so at some visceral level, he knew. His mind took a second to sync with his instincts, though, and when he spoke, it was in a short, terse bark.
“Sentinel. Report on what I just saw.” Then his voice grew soft. “In detail, if you please.”
It was a testament to the fact that Dash had started to become used to peace that his first thought was terrible accident. One of the station’s reactors had lost containment, or a ship at anchor had exploded, or—but then his instincts asserted themselves again, dread fingers climbing his spine in an unwelcome dance.
“The object that passed through the Black Gate—commonality of usage seems to suggest that’s now the best name for it—decelerated from trans-light velocity in the system where Assembly Prime was located,” Sentinel said.
As she spoke, a still image replaced the expanding cloud of debris. It showed a sleek, blurred object, utterly black, passing through the frame, part of it silhouetted against the gleaming background of one of Assembly Prime’s radiating spokes.
“This was zero point three seconds before the object detonated,” Sentinel went on. “When it did, it released an omnidirectional x-ray pulse of extreme power, which was sufficient to vaporize most of the facility.”
Dash kept staring at the blurred, dark object, and the instincts he’d thought dormant flared to life. The man he had been only moments earlier—a man who could worry about things like fishing, laughter, and growing