“That will not happen. I prefer jets over a physical crutch. It looks more militaristic,” Sentinel said.
“Are . . . are you telling me you’ve got secret style?” Dash laughed.
“Possibly. I will let you know.” Sentinel sounded dignified as ever.
“Well then, I’ve got job security and an assurance of style. Don’t worry about any minor disagreements,” Dash said.
“Still doesn’t excuse me sounding like I’m blaming you for some new bad guys.”
Dash shrugged. “I’m a super-powered, nearly invincible mech at heart, sort of. Besides, we don’t know that these are bad guys. They destroyed a drone that kind of popped up right in their faces. For all we know, they might be very nice people who overreacted—or it might have been an automated point defense. Wars have been started for the wrong reasons, and we can afford to proceed with caution through this—ah, what are we calling it?”
“The Black Gate.”
Dash gave her a look. “The Black Gate?”
“That’s what I heard the Orion pilots have taken to calling it.”
“Huh. Kind of ominous, but I guess it fits.”
They rode the rest of the way in silence, each with their thoughts. Despite his hopeful words, Dash did not have a good feeling about this so-called Black Gate, or whatever lay beyond it. It seemed awfully coincidental that it appeared inside one of the systems that the Unseen had specifically designed for habitation by the Cygnus Realm—which had been responsible for the final defeat of the Golden.
In other words, maybe the final defeat of the Golden wasn’t as final as they thought. Maybe this Black Gate was a Golden failsafe, something designed to strike back despite them having been utterly destroyed. Or maybe they hadn’t defeated all of the Golden. Space was a big place, after all.
The elevator stopped, and the doors opened. Dash stepped out, Leira at his side.
“Messenger,” Custodian said. “There is an urgent message from the commander of the Orion mechs guarding the anomaly near Planet Fifteen.”
Dash cut his eyes to Leira. They’d stationed a flight of four of the Orion mechs—essentially, scaled-down, somewhat generic versions of the Archetype and the other mechs—near the Black Gate as a quick reaction force. The Orion mechs were nowhere near as capable as their bigger brethren, but they were still potent fighting machines in their own right. Four of them should be enough to handle anything likely to come their way—emphasis on should be.
“Go ahead.” Dash quickened his pace toward the docking bay that had become the Archetype’s home.
“Dash, Randal here. Look, we just had two objects emerge from this anomaly—we’ve been calling it the Black Gate—”
“The Black Gate’s a great name for it, sure. What sort of objects?”
“Not sure. Sleek, about ten meters long, so dark and stealthy that we almost missed them. We intercepted them, and one turned onto a trajectory straight for us. No comms, no signals, nothing. It was tracking, too—locked onto Orion Three, my wingman, so we finally said to hell with it and fired a warning shot.”
“And?”
“It accelerated. Came straight at us, banging away with a full suite of active sensors. We finally fired on it, tried to disable it, but it blew apart. Nothing left but fragments. This all happened over about thirty seconds, so we didn’t have time to check in, send a SITREP, anything.”
“That’s okay.” Dash waved at Leira as she peeled off, hurrying for the Swift, which had its own docking bay apart from the Archetype. “Sounds like you guys did everything right. Anyway, gather up as much of the wreckage as you can, and make sure you document it all—” Dash stopped. “Wait. You said two of these things came through the Gate. You’ve only mentioned destroying one of them. What happened to the other one?”
“That’s the thing. It went trans-light, but not in a way we were able to track. So it’s gone.”
“Shit. 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.