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 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.”