Prologue

Beneath the Night Sky

"Someone got here first, sir."

"What do you mean, agent?"

"It's like a bomb went off in here, except the building's still standing. Transmitting video feed now."

Lockheed raised his device, a viewscreen appearing above his other hand to show him what the optical array mounted on the pistol's barrel was recording. The bunker was wrecked. Cracks spread like black, crumbling spiderwebs between head-sized holes in the reinforced concrete walls, testament to the sheer power of the projectiles that had impacted against them; projectiles they had to be, as sheer magic damage would have vaporized the objects struck instead of leaving debris.

Turning to survey the bunker's entrance, Lockheed made certain to record the state of the foot-thick steel door, which was battered and mangled so badly that it had been torn completely free of the frame, moonlight spilling through the gap. The disabled cutter outside had gone down before half of its 60 meter length had even cleared the doors of the camouflaged hanger bay, its engines smashed to pieces by physical assault, the hull holed and breached. Still, the ship had been intact enough for him to identify. Chance's Bastard had been infamous in local space for all of the worst reasons. Assassinations, piracy, extortion; there wasn't a job that the ship's crew would turn down.

Not anymore, though. He turned back around, aiming his device past the shattered barricades and furniture, at the broken bodies behind them. He picked his way through the carnage, scanning the device around as he stepped through the first interior chokepoint. "Sled. Estimate times of death?"

The viewscreen over his wrist flashed, gridding the dozen bodies in red lines as information scrolled rapidly through the field. "Confirmed. Cessation of organized metabolic function occurred approximately two point three hours ago, over a three minute period."

Sankt Kaiser. "You get that, command?"

"Copy, agent. Sensors are picking up no other lifesigns or active energy signatures. Continue your investigation."

"Yes, sir."

He found the rest of the Bastard's crew in short order, dead where they fought. Most of the bodies suffered from similar wounds, either blunt force trauma from what appeared to have been a solid sphere less than two inches around, or a flat impact no larger than his clenched fist. A few, however, had been ripped clean through, blood and gore scattered in wide arcs from the halved torsos. It was around these messier, bloodier corpses that Lockheed found the footprints.

Lockheed stepped wide around the shattered remnants of mage devices and bloody remains while Sled recorded the information and ran through calculations. A wireframe model formed on the screen, matching the size and gait required to make the bloody trail of prints. "A child did this."

Sled beeped once. "Unconfirmed. An individual between one point two and one point three meters tall is responsible for the footsteps." Lockheed shook his head, following the trail to the far wall of the bunker. The footsteps stopped there, thick and congealed and surrounded in fallen droplets, as though whatever made them simply vanished into thin air and left the blood behind.

Something made him look at the wall itself, Sled helpfully providing a lightsource. Carved into the very concrete, waist-height, were words, a language that he recognized but didn't understand. "This is ancient Belkan."

"Confirmed. Translating."

So the sun must rise, so the sun must set

Beneath the night sky, all things come to light

Beware, should the darkness choose to shine upon you

"What do we have, agent?"

Lockheed looked up from his holoscreen, where Lockheed was displaying the results of its forays into the fragmented memory core recovered from one of the bodies of the Bastard's crew. "Not very much, Captain. I'm relatively certain that this device belonged to the pirates' leader, but there's a lot of physical violation to the components. I can't even tell what the active form was supposed to be." He tapped in a few commands, and expanded the holoscreen for Captain Scryer's ease of perusal. "If I had to guess, I'd say he tried to parry whatever killed him. Didn't work, obviously."

Scryer leaned forward, glancing over the screen. "Is there anything of use?"

Lockheed nodded, pointing at a string of numbers. "I'm pretty sure these are dimensional coordinates, as well as planetary. Not any particular format that I recognize, though."

The captain narrowed his eyes, reading the numbers. "...outdated is right. I know this format. It dates back to the Wardens."

That comment made Lockheed's head snap back around, looking up at Scryer. "Are you sure, Captain? The Wardens collapsed almost ten thousand years ago."

"My family is full of history buffs, Lockheed. I grew up studying the Wardens, and I know these coordinates. It was the center of their empire." Scryer straightened, tapping his wrist-comm. "Ensign Renault? Set course for Mid-childa."