The transit through the Gate was an anticlimax. One moment they were in home space. The next, they weren’t. The transition was smooth, silent, and completed in a matter of seconds, with a brief shift in the starfield. Ahead, a new pattern emerged, each bright point of light moving or changing color, but still familiar enough to leave Dash able to exhale in a long, slow breath that bordered on relief. As they sailed away from the Gate—which appeared, at this end, much the same as it did at the other—Sentinel set about calculating their position. She was looking for the characteristic strobing of various reference pulsars, while also twisting and turning the patterns of stars through a multitude of orientations, trying to find a match in their own star charts.
“It will take several seconds to determine our position with any accuracy,” Sentinel said. “We are far from home, Dash. Cygnus Realm space isn’t even on my scans, and it’s likely we are no longer in the spiral arm of the Milky Way.”
Dash scanned the tactical display, keeping a close eye on the threat board as he did. So far, it remained dark. “This is . . . I don’t recognize anything.”
“Yes. A very long way.”
“Dash,” Leira said. “We probably shouldn’t stray too far from this Gate. I get the feeling we’ve traveled a lot farther than when we used the gates built by the Golden.”
“Yeah, I—”
The threat board lit up. Three contacts were inbound at high acceleration. And they were close—a lot closer than Dash had expected. The sensors on Assembly Prime weren’t full-fledged Unseen tech, but a hybrid setup. Dash had just assumed that the Archetype’s sensor suite, probably the best in the Cygnus Realm fleet, wouldn’t be so easily fooled. They had more warning, but not much.
“Incoming hostiles,” Dash said. “Leira, let’s go.”
“Arming up. Tactics?” Leira was already busy.
“I have the lead.” Dash applied power, accelerating the Archetype on an intercept course. Leira fell into the wingman’s slot, engines burning bright as the Swift began to bristle with readiness.
“Sensor returns are weak,” Sentinel said. “Firing solutions are slow to develop—”
“Stealth, and a type we’ve not seen before.” Dash scowled at the slow crawl of the dark-lance’s firing solution toward any reasonable level of confidence. “Time to shake their cage.” He loosed a salvo of missiles.
They raced off, coordinating themselves into a complex attack formation that would ensure intercepts no matter how hard the enemy maneuvered. A few seconds later, Leira let fly a fusillade of missiles, streaking toward the enemy at stunning acceleration.
Their enemy. The Cygnus Realm hadn’t had one of those for a while now.
The sleek enemy ships split, taking off in three directions. Dash sent a command to the missiles to focus exclusively on the middle and right targets, while angling toward the ship on the left. He snapped out an experimental dark-lance shot, despite having a confidence level of only just over fifty percent. He was rewarded with a hit anyway. The beam chewed through the other ship’s hull, raking open a long gash. The ship immediately began to slow.
“Good to know we still pack a punch on this side of the street,” Dash muttered.
“Maybe stealth is all they’ve got,” Leira said.
“Or, maybe,” Sentinel put in, “they are just as unfamiliar with our tech as we are with theirs. That could represent a significant advantage.”
“Advantage us, then, and we’ll take it. I like data, and I like data from confirmed kills even more.” Dash veered the Archetype again and lined up a shot on the middle ship. His own missiles, racing toward detonation, rearranged themselves to offer a clear path.
Another hit. Again, the enemy ship staggered, then slowed. A moment later, it was caught in a ferocious series of detonations from Dash’s missiles, pounding it into quiescence, a battered hulk drifting along on its own inertia.
Dash turned his attention to their third foe, just in time to see Leira skewer it with her dark-lance, then he watched as her missiles erupted around it, reducing it to a tumbling hulk.
“Well, that was easy,” she said.
Dash nodded. “Yeah. It was, wasn’t it.” He slowed the Archetype, instincts tweaked by the brief exchange of fire. That had been too easy.
“Leira, stay sharp. I want to take a closer look at these guys.” Dash powered the Archetype toward the nearest of the wrecks. Its power emanations were near zero—
But not actually zero.
Dash slowed the Archetype and finally came to a relative halt about ten klicks away from the spinning wreck. He checked the dark-lance and found its firing solution at nearly 100 percent. It was the same with all of the Archetype’s other weapon systems. A derelict ship, sitting squarely in the sights of some of the most destructive energy ever generated by something that wasn’t a natural phenomenon—and every nerve in Dash stayed humming with the anticipation of battle. He was a creature of instinct, so he listened.
“Sentinel, any sign of Benzel and the QRF yet?”
“No, not yet. However, Tybalt and I now have a reasonably good fix on our location.”
“And?”
“We are currently in the Scutum-Sagittarius Arm of the Milky Way galaxy, between fifteen and thirty-five thousand light-years from the Forge, in the Orion Arm.”
“Oh.”
“Come again? Thirty-five thousand light-years?” Leira asked in a hiccup.
“And quite the range of possible distances, fifteen to thirty-five thousand light-years,” Dash said. “Can you narrow that down a tad?”
“We will continuously refine our location, of course, based on—”
Something slammed into the Archetype, setting off a barrage of alerts. Dash immediately spun around, looking for whatever was attacking him, his pulse spiking immediately with a massive adrenaline dump.
The mech’s surveillance scanners showed another of the sleek ships, one they must have missed. As soon as he saw it, the targeting scanners strove to lock on, but as before, their enemy proved as elusive as a trout in a pond.
“Shit! Sentinel, where the hell did he come from? Is their stealth that good?” As he said it, Dash snapped out a dark-lance shot, this time missing. The enemy ship jinked hard and fired back, a coherent x-ray beam that flared against the mech’s shield, some of the spillover ripping across its armor. Now it was Dash’s turn to bank, then he fired again.
“This does not appear to be a new combatant,” Sentinel replied. “Rather, it would appear that the first ship we disabled has re-engaged.”
Dash glared at the enemy ship, which circled the Archetype, engines flaring in brilliant blue light. “Can’t be. We tore a great big hole in that one. This one looks totally fine.”
“Nevertheless, it is the only possibility.”
Dash jerked the Archetype hard to one side, firing the distortion cannon to pull both him and the enemy vessel closer together. At the same time, he deployed the power-sword, the massive blade crackling to life with incandescent energy.
“Dash, another one of these ships is coming back online,” Leira said. “They’re somehow repairing themselves!”
“Yeah. Not just bad guys but regenerating bad guys.” He powered hard toward his target. “A new wrinkle we could have lived without.”