Blue swirling light flooded in through the viewports. Yvian watched the Gate Effect take hold. it was strange. There was no sense of motion. The light just fluttered in random patterns with varying levels of brightness. It was like the Dream of the Lady was drifting in a shining sea.

  Even now, Yvian didn't know what the Gate Effect was or how it worked. No one did. A ship entered the Gate. There was light for thirty seconds. Then the ship came out in a different Gate light years away. Yvian had been travelling the void for years now. She'd used Gates literally thousands of times. They still creeped her out. Meeting the being that made the things hadn't changed that.

  The entire fleet had made the Jump at the same time. Yvian couldn't see a single one of them. It was always like that. Even when two ships entered a Gate right next to each other, they were alone within the Gate itself. Cut off. Comms didn't work either. Not even Nexus Nodes that used quantum entanglement. Yvian would have thought those worked anywhere, but not in a Gate.

  Twenty more seconds. The Peacekeepers hadn't wanted to give their pn away by sending a scout ship, so she'd be going in blind. Yvian had no idea what they'd be up against. She decided to be ready for anything. "Shields up," Yvian intoned. The commands activated her armor's personal shields. They would drain her armors' power fast, but she could shut them off if nothing killed her or blew up the ship in the next few minutes.

  Kilroy was already at flight control. Two more Peacekeepers were on weapons. Yvian had set up her command console for manual flight, but she wouldn't need to do anything until Mims got the Last Hope to send out its anti-tech field.

  "Lady Blue," Yvian whispered. "If you can hear me, we could really use your help." She doubted the Caretaker Entity would actually do anything, but it never hurt to ask.

  Yvian had barely finished the sentence when the Dream broke out of the Gate. The eerie blue of the Gate Effect gave way to stars and the bckness of the void. Yvian's gaze went to the sensors. Then she caught motion out of the corner of her eye, and snapped her gaze right back to the viewports. The exploding viewports. The transparent material of the ports shattered inward, shards of it ricocheting off Yvian's shields. Machines rocketed into the ship.

  Guardian units. They had the same construction as the Peacekeepers, taking the shape of fit metal men. Their faces were bone white, expressionless and immobile, like someone had clued a mask to the front of their heads. Their eyes glowed with crimson light.

  The Guardians were Reba's personal troops. They had originally been Peacekeeper units, but the Synthetic had reprogrammed them. They were every bit as dangerous as Kilroy, and they worshiped Reba like a god. Yvian had only dealt with them once before. Once had been enough.

  The Guardians wore the same suits and fedoras as Peacekeeper units, but the colors had been swapped. White shoes, white scks, white jacket. Bck dress shirts with a white tie and fedora. They shot Yvian a dozen times before she even registered they had assault rifles.

  The Guardians started exploding. There was no sound. The Dream of the Lady had been decompressed. It was a good thing, too. The Peacekeeper units were bsting them apart with Bigger Better BFGs. If there had been air, the shockwave of the rounds might have killed Yvian.

  A quarter of a second ter Yvian couldn't see the Guardians. A wall of Peacekeeper units was in front of her, still shooting. Yvian checked herself. Her personal shields were down to sixty two percent, but the rest of her was fine. Thank the Bright Lady she was paranoid.

  "Guardian units!" Mims yelled over the comms. "We've got Guardian units and the Xill are shooting at us. Everyone brace for anti-tech field."

  "Negative!" A Peacekeeper unit answered. Yvian suspected it was Kilroy. "Mother Lissa is wounded. A pulse will shut down her void armor's life support!"

  Mims didn't answer. A moment ter all the Peacekeepers stopped fighting. Crunch. Mims had deployed the anti-tech field anyway.

  "Yvian!" The humans voice crackled in Yvian's helmet. Nothing as delicate and complicated as a computer would work in an anti-tech field, but primitive radio sets worked just fine. "I can't shut down the field or we're all dead. Get your ass to the Unchained Melody and save Lissa."

  "I'm on it," Yvian acknowledged. The viewports were still clogged with Guardians. Units and pieces of units were bouncing off the bulkheads at high speed. They weren't moving on their own anymore, but they were still rge metal objects moving fast. The ship's artificial gravity was slowing them down, but it also meant they were crashing into Peacekeeper units and making a huge mess of the bridge. Yvian debated trying for the door anyway, but wading through a ship full of frozen Peacekeepers would take too much time. Instead she pulled out her Bigger Better and activated her jetpack.

  A slug from the Bigger Better smashed through some of the Guardians clogging the viewport. The momentum of the slug propelled them backwards, opening a hole. Only after she fired did Yvian realize the inertial dampeners in the gun might not have worked. Without them, the recoil from unching a half kilogram of metal at ten kilometers a second would have destroyed the gun and turned Yvian into a fine paste. Yvian shook her head. Dumbass. Oh, well. No point worrying about it now.

  Yvian exited the Dream of the Lady. The void was full of machines. Yvian couldn't even guess how many Guardian units were bouncing around. There were so many it took her a few moments to see past them and pick out the rest of her fleet. The Sound of Silence was the first one she saw. The giant spherical ship was a hundred kilometers away, but even at that distance she could see it had been swarmed by Guardian units.

  The Sound was being surrounded by eight pixen battlecruisers at a distance of about a kilometer. Yvian looked down the scope of her Bigger Better. The Unchained Melody wasn't one of them. Crunch. Yvian knew the battle pn, but she hadn't memorized where each ship in the formation was.

  Yvian couldn't help but notice the huge wave of charged particles coming towards her fleet. Lances and columns of burning green and red and yellow crashed through the void. They were coming from every direction but the Gate. The Xill. Yvian panicked for a moment. Then she realized most of it was going to miss. The ships had been taking evasive maneuvers, and the Xill had been far enough away that those maneuvers had worked. The Xill had been shooting before Mims activated the anti-tech field. Now they were frozen just like the Peacekeepers and the Guardians. At least Yvian hoped they were.

  While Yvian was searching for the Unchained Melody, Mims was demanding a status update from the rest of the fleet. The news was not encouraging. Nearly all the pixen pilots were dead or wounded. The only survivors were a half dozen paranoid pilots that had turned their personal shields on like Yvian had.

  It took a full desperate minute for Yvian to locate Lissa's ship. The Unchained Melody was the same model of cruiser as the others, but it had been fancied up with gold filigree all along its hull. Yvian flew to it as fast as she dared, dodging inert machines as she went. She slowed down when she got close. She didn't want to run face first into the Melody's shields.

  The shields. That was going to be a problem. Yvian's voidarmor had a function called SHIELDBREACH that could get her past them, but it wouldn't work in the anti-tech field. Screw it. Yvian aimed the Bigger Better. The Unchained Melody's shield generators should be in the same pce as on Yvian's ship. Three shots and the shields were down.

  Yvian had a little trouble getting onto the bridge. The Melody's viewport was just as clogged with Guardians as the Dream had been. Yvian ended up angling her Bigger Better so the round would travel through the ceiling of the bridge after she fired. A few more shots and she was in.

  Yvian rushed to Lissa. Her sister was on the deck. There were telltale patches in her voidsuit, the thin material having sealed itself over holes burned through the armor. Yvian couldn't tell if Lissa was alive, or how bad she was hurt. Honestly, there wasn't much she could do for the woman anyway. It wasn't like Yvian could take Lissa's helmet off in the vacuum to perform first aid.

  Yvian went to the Unchained Melody's command chair. The console had been set up for manual flight control. Yvian took control and turned the ship around. Back towards the Gate.

  "Mims, it's Yvian," she reported. "Lissa's down, but I can't see how bad it is. I'm taking the Unchained Melody behind the Gate. That should shield us from the anti-tech field so we can put her in a medpod."

  "Good thinking," said Mims. "Take evasives while you're at it. We've got fighters coming out of the Gate. Human pilots, I think. I'm dealing with them, but I don't want you getting got in the meantime."

  Mims was dealing with them? How? Yvian got her answer as the Unchained Melody turned about. She could see a beam of white light punching out the back of the Sound of Silence.

  Of course. Mims wasn't flying the Sound of Silence. He was communing with the Lucendian ship the Silence was carrying. The crystal ships didn't need traditional sensors, and their beam weapons were powerful enough to cut a space station in half.

  Yvian couldn't use the sensors, but the Gate was easy to find. A two thousand kilometer circle filled with glowing light was hard to miss. Yvian set the acceleration to full and pointed her viewports at the bottom edge of the Gate. Then she took her Bigger Better and expended the rest of her ammo blowing Guardian units apart. She incidentally put more holes in the bridge, but it was a small price to pay. The Peacekeeper units could kill the motherless sons, but could they get them all in the tenth of a second it would take to kill Lissa or Yvian? Yvian didn't want to find out.

  It only took a few more minutes to reach the Gate. Yvian looped around it. The second the Gate was between Yvian and the Sound of Silence the Peacekeepers came back to life. So did one of the Guardian units. Yvian had blown half of its chassis off, but the machine still managed to raise its gun. It didn't have a clear shot at Lissa, but it shot Yvian twice before the Peacekeepers tore it apart. Thankfully Yvian's personal shield was still active.

  A Peacekeeper unit gently lifted Lissa, then disappeared. Another unit turned to Yvian. It said, "Peacekeeper unit 8181462 will take Mother Lissa Kiver to the Motherlover."

  "The what?" Yvian frowned.

  "The Motherlover is one of the Gdiator css fighters docked in the Unchained Melody," the machine crified. "Mother Lissa Kiver will be pced in a medpod and the ship will unch. Peacekeeper unit 8181462 will keep the Motherlover behind the Gate, where it will be shielded from the effects of the anti-tech field.

  "Oh." Yvian nodded. "Motherlover. Cause you love Lissa. That's kind of sweet, actually."

  "Negative." For a moment, the Peacekeeper's eyes fshed yellow before going back to combat red. "Peacekeeper unit Kilroy chose the name specifically to annoy Big Daddy Mims." The unit paused. "Peacekeeper unit 8181462 has pced Mother Lissa Kiver in a medpod. Her condition is stable. The Motherlover will be unched by the time you take the Unchained Meldoy back around the Gate." The machine's eyes fshed purple, then back to red. "The device on this ship will be needed. Please proceed now."