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Before they were Old Guns, they made first contact… After humanity's deep space probe Squanto goes missing in the Gauntlet, Staff Sergeant Martin Kelvin and Sergeant Frank Cage are pulled from leave to search for the vessel. Three teams have already vanished in the quantum corridor where time fractures and physics breaks down. But Squanto didn't just find a path through; they found something waiting in the darkness. The blood-marked wreckage holds humanity's first contact with a new alien race—one that phases through solid hull and can't be killed by conventional weapons. Martin, Frank, and their squad will pay the price for finding passage through the Gauntlet. Some doors were never meant to be opened. Read the prequel novella to Old Guns, the new high-octane military sci-fi saga by USA Today-bestselling author J.N. Chaney and New York Times-bestselling author Nicholas Sansbury Smith.