Although this book is like a Transformer movie, it’s still pretty good, not that Transformer movies were bad, just a little excessive, in my opinion! Newton “Dash” Sawyer is still flying around in a gigant mech built by the Unseen. These were a race of technologically advanced people who built a civilization of artificial entities that eventually called the “Golden”. The Golden then decided they didn’t need the Unseen and went to war with them. They succeeded in wiping the Unseen completely from the universe and now have decided that all biological entities must be eradicated.
Dash kind of crashed into an asteroid that held the Archetype (gigant mech). The mech came equipped with an almost sentient AI who needed a human interface to operate the Archetype, so Dash fell into that role and became the Messenger. Now he has to find power cores to enable the full function of the Archetype. He’s also found the “Forge” which was the floating factory that built the Archetype. It also needed power cores to fully function so Dash and his crew have been searching for such with some luck.
Now that the Forge and the Archetype are almost fully functional, they want to build more Archetypes if possible. The Forge says it can be done, but only if they have enough Dark Metal. And it just so happens that a distant signal has been received that might prove to be a source of Dark Metal.
So, this book describes the efforts of Dash, Leira, Amy, Conover, Viktor, and a group of Monks from the Order of the Unseen acquire some Dark Metal and being preparing for another war against the Golden. It’s a pretty exciting story, but there’s actually very little use of the Archetype in this book. It’s kind of a secondary character to what happens since it can’t fit in the places Dash has to go. It also can’t protect Dash and his associates so they are going to have to fight their battles alone and against some Golden creations! Could be that someone dies!