Farthest Shore: A Mecha Scifi Epic (The Messenger Book 13)

by J. N. Chaney

  The display didn’t noticeably change.

  Dash gave a wry smile. “Space is really, really big, isn’t it? Let’s try a factor of a thousand.”

  The blue icons started to creep across the display, millimeter by millimeter.

  “Make it one hundred thousand.”

  The Arkubators now crawled across the display, a few centimeters every second.

  “Dash, what are we supposed to be looking at?” Harolyn asked.

  “Take a look at these Arkubators, then you tell me,” he said, still smiling.

  Harolyn gave him a puzzled look but crossed her arms and studied the big display. The duty ops personnel working the Command Center had all paused in what they were doing and were watching now, too.

  Ragsdale suddenly pointed. “There, that Arkubator. It’s not like the others.

  “It’s not moving. Or, it barely is, anyway,” Leira said, stepping close to the display.

  “More to the point, it’s barely moving relative to us, here, at the Forge. That suggests it’s basically parked,” Dash replied.

  “Okay, so what does that mean?” Leira asked, tracing Arkubator’s path with her finger. The map rippled like a pond touched by a summer breeze, then settled, the blue line still once more. It had lengthened to about two centimeters in the time it had taken the other Arkubators to move tens and, in some cases, hundreds of centimeters across the display.

  “I think it’s empty, basically just a hull.”

  Harolyn gave the display a doubtful look. “That could just mean it’s a wreck.”

  “That’s true. But it could also mean it’s unfinished.” Dash turned to Al’Bijea. “Either way, it could be the basis for your substrate since these Arkubators are easily the size of Passage. But there’s only one way to find out.”

  Leira gave Dash a thin smile. “My dear, I say this only because of your natural, ah, enthusiasm, and with the deepest affection. But, are you batshit crazy? It’s more than a thousand light-years away and might be full of, I don’t know, spiders with wings and other beasties and things with fifty-eight eyes. And fangs. Don’t forget the fangs.”

  “Fifty-eight is really specific,” Dash said, chuckling.

  “You know what I mean. Remember what was aboard the first Ark? And the second?” Leira’s face scrunched and tightened in distaste at the memories.

  “Fair points, but hear me out. We only have to get there. We don’t have to bring it all the way back, even if we could take it in tow, which we probably can’t. We have the Stalwart and a few other ships follow, packed to the overheads with engineers and equipment, and they start work on the trip back. We save time, salvage a mass of material, and set the Oksa on their path to home.”

  Ragsdale looked at Al’Bijea. “What do you think? You’re the one who’d be doing all the building and engineering.”

  Al’Bijea gave a delicate shrug. “There are too many variables to be able to say. However, I would say it’s certainly worth considering, and that means it’s worth taking a look.” He turned to Dash. “However, a thousand light-years is an awfully long way.”

  Dash sniffed and waved a hand. “Considering some of the distances we’re having to deal with when it comes to these Deepers, one thousand light-years really isn’t much at all.”

  “Ah. I will take your word for that.”

  Dash put his arm around Leira’s waist and flashed her a grin. “See? It’s nowhere near as bad as you thought. The Oksa have far fewer than fifty-eight eyes. And they’re way friendlier.”

  War, Dash thought, really wasn’t that exciting. It mostly consisted of long periods of doing nothing, or doing nothing interesting, anyway. That definitely included one thousand light-year trips to a mystery ship floating out in the middle of nowhere.

  The trip had been uneventful, as in, utterly, entirely without any notable events at all. It had been long hours of translating through the void of unSpace, punctuated by occasional returns to real space to allow the AIs to get navigational fixes. Then do it again. And again.

  And again.

  This time, though, there was something to see. The Archetype, accompanied by the Conover’s Pulsar and Amy’s Talon, had dropped back into real space and immediately registered a solid contact. The star system itself was as unremarkable as anything else about this little exercise, a yellow-white G-class star with four planets, one vaguely terrestrial, but whose atmosphere was rendered unbreathable by sulfur compounds. The others were a gas giant and a couple of airless rocks.

  “This is the sort of place the Unseen would have stashed one of their Silent Fleets,” Amy said.

  Dash muttered agreement. The mothballed fleets of Unseen ships known as the Silent Fleets still made up the backbone of Realm forces. They’d been placed, cold and dark, in orbit around distant, uninteresting stars and had remained there for thousands of years, waiting to be reactivated. Dash wondered if that was why this Arkubator was here, if it was unfinished, or otherwise not operational, and had just been stashed in this out-of-the-way place.

  “The Arkubator is giving off no emissions and has an ambient temperature essentially the same as that of the space around it,” Sentinel reported.

  Dash studied the enhanced imagery of it while accelerating to lead the three mechs to rendezvous with it. “So it’s completely dead.”

  “Kinda spooky, actually. Big ship like that, way out here, dark, cold,” Amy said, then made a shivering sound. “Gave myself goosebumps there.”

  The Arkubator showed utterly no signs of life as they approached. The three mechs halted a few klicks short of its massive flank, scanning it warily. It just remained big, silent, and inscrutable.

  “It’s about as big as Passage, isn’t it?” Amy asked.

  “Yeah, it is. And it looks intact,” Dash replied, leading Amy in a slow circle around the enormous ship. Conover hung back in overwatch while probing at the Arkubator with the Pulsar’s more extensive suite of sensors. “Sentinel, are you detecting any damage at all?”

  “Other than minor impacts that have scored the hull and micrometeorite abrasion, no.”

  “So it’s intact and apparently utterly lifeless.”

  “I’d agree with that, Dash. Kristin and I have scanned the hell out of this thing, and there’s not a hint of life, power, or anything else anywhere aboard,” Conover said.

  They continued a slow examination and conducted more scans, then passed all their data on to the follow-up force when it translated into the system. The Stalwart led two heavy cruisers and three assault carriers. All of them were packed with engineers, construction crews, structural components, powerplants, air and water reclamators—essentially everything that would be required to make at least a portion of the Arkubator habitable.

  About ten minutes after the Stalwart’s arrival, Al’Bijea’s voice came over the comm.

  “Unless we’re missing something here, this seems ideal for your intended purpose, Dash,” he said.

  “Sounds good to me. Once you guys get here, Al’Bijea, I’ll let you take charge. Wei-Ping, you and I are going to lead a boarding party, just to make sure there aren’t any nasty surprises waiting inside, like things with fifty-eight eyes.”

  Wei-Ping’s reply was a puzzled one. “Fifty-eight eyes? What? What the hell are you talking about, Dash?”

  Dash laughed. “Never mind. You had to be there.”

  The Arkubator continued the theme of creepy but ultimately boring.

  The boarding party, a thirty-strong contingent from the Stalwart led by Wei-Ping and accompanied by Dash, wended its way through the cavernous interior. They found nothing but a lot of nothing. Which was good, Dash had to keep reminding himself. The alternative to boring was exciting, and exciting in wartime was by no means necessarily a good thing.

  After four hours of poking about, Dash stopped and compared notes with Wei-Ping. He peered at her through the visors of their vac-armor helmets, making a huh face.

  “Don’t know about you, but I’m satisfied there
’s nothing here,” he said.

  “Agree. And I mean nothing. It’s just an empty hull.”

  “So it’s perfect for what we want. But you still somehow sound disappointed.”

  “It’s the privateer in me, Dash. When I board a ship, I expect to get something in return for it—”

  A comm transmission cut her off. “Wei-Ping, we found something interesting. Based on IFF transponders, we’re about forty meters ahead of you, to your right.”

  “Yeah, I see you. Do you mean interesting-interesting or interesting-dangerous?” she asked.

  “More like interesting-valuable.”

  Wei-Ping grinned. “Ooh, I like the sound of that.”

  They moved to join the search team that had discovered the interesting-valuable whatever. As soon as they saw it, both Dash and Wei-Ping instantly knew the team had been understating it.

  “Is that what I think it is?” Wei-Ping asked.

  Dash leaned in for a closer look. Spools wrapped with thin cable were stacked in an otherwise empty compartment. Okay, that was the interesting part. What was the valuable part?

  Oh.

  “If what you think it is, is Dark Metal, then yeah, it’s what you think it is, Wei-Ping,” he said, his voice quiet.

  They looked around. There were at least twenty of the spools.

  “There must be thousands of kilos of Dark Metal here!” Wei-Ping said, laughing, her teeth bright behind her visor in the bay’s gloom. “Jackpot! Just like the old days!”

  Dash gave her a wry look. “You mean salvage? The sort that you found on other peoples’ ships?”

  Wei-Ping winked. “Yeah. Let’s call it that. Salvage. But this is the best kind.”

  “Oh? And why’s that?”

  “Because it doesn’t fight back.”

  14

  “Once this is done, Dash, you won’t be the only one with a souped-up mech,” Amy said, a smug grin on her face. She stuck out her tongue. “So there!”

  “Yeah, I’m tired of looking at Dash’s butt,” Conover put in, which brought the conversation slamming to a sudden halt. Even some of the techs working nearby in the Forge’s fabrication bay stopped and looked, slow grins spreading across their faces.

  Dash turned to Conover, who’d just stood, stammering. “I’m mildly hurt, but I’ll carry on, kid.”

  “Thanks, boss,” Conover sputtered.

  Amy and Leira laughed, then drained away in the face of what filled their view.

  Four of the five big mechs—the Swift, Talon, Polaris, and Pulsar—stood in the fabrication bay, in the midst of receiving Dark Metal Two upgrades, so they could eventually be fitted with hexacores. The Dark Metal they’d retrieved from the Arkubator had given them enough feedstock that they could run the Shroud at full output. And they could do it continuously, not in the fits and starts they were used to, as their Dark Metal supply waxed and waned.

  “It is quite a sight, isn’t it?” Jexin said, pride brightening her voice.

  Dash put his hands on his hips, allowing himself some pride of his own. “Well, considering that the Cygnus Realm started out as me, Viktor, and Leira aboard the Slipwing, yeah, it’s one hell of a sight.”

  Conover sidled up beside Dash. “You said you weren’t going to call me kid anymore.”

  “What?”

  “You just called me kid a minute ago. You said you wouldn’t do that anymore.”

  Dash turned to look at Conover. Gone was the young, awkward man he’d picked up on Penumbra, making him the fourth effective citizen of the Cygnus Realm. This Conover had gained a couple of inches in height, lost a few pounds, and gained a cargo hold's worth of self-confidence. Yes, he was still awkward, in a goofy, charming way. But Dash could also see the toll the Life War and now their conflict with the Deepers had taken. For such a young guy, his eyes held a glimmer of the sort of sad inevitability normally reserved for older men who’d seen too much, like Ragsdale.

  And probably like Dash himself.

  Dash put his hand on Conover’s shoulder, but in an earnest way, this time. “Conover, these days, if I call you kid, it’s out of genuine respect. It’s a title I reserve for you alone. You’re the only one entitled to it.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Really.”

  Conover smiled, the redness receding from his face. He looked about to say something, but one of the senior techs interrupted.

  “Conover, wonder if you could take a look at something for us. We’re having trouble working out why the Pulsar’s auxiliary stabilizers are showing green on the board but are refusing to power up.”

  “Did you ask Kristin?”

  “Yeah, but she’s not hooked into that system yet.” He shrugged. “Orders from on high. The AIs weren’t to be connected back into upgraded mech systems until they were deemed stable and signed off.”

  “Orders from on high?” Conover asked, shooting Dash a glance.

  “Hey, don’t look at me,” Dash said. “I just fly ’em. I don’t fix ’em. Probably Custodian’s doing.”

  As soon as he said it, Custodian inserted himself into the conversation. “It was. It’s standard protocol whenever any of a mech’s systems are changed in a way or to an extent that meets established criteria.”

  Dash crossed his arms and gave a sudden nod of understanding. “You know, it strikes me that Custodian’s been holding back on us.”

  “How so?” Custodian asked.

  “You’ve got the owners manuals for these mechs stashed away in your archives, don’t you?”

  “If, by owner’s manuals, you mean the schematics for the various mechs, then of course. You’re free to consult them anytime you wish. The owner’s manual for the Archetype comes to just under twelve thousand standard pages. I could produce a hardcopy for you, but my understanding is that you just fly ’em, you don’t fix ’em.”

  Dash laughed and turned back to Conover. “I know these techs like taking advantage of your fancy tech-enhanced eyes. Go ahead, see if you can help them out.”

  Leira sidled up beside Dash as Conover walked away.

  “I think he’s the one,” she said.

  “The one? The one what?”

  “Your successor as Messenger.”

  Dash turned a surprised look on her. “Uh, no, that would be you.”

  Leira smiled. “I’m your second-in-command, ready to take over if I have to. But I think Conover’s the future Messenger.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you and he have a lot in common. In fact, if you think back to when you were a boy, I’m willing to bet you were a lot like Conover—awkward and kinda dumb but also really, really smart.”

  Dash looked back at Conover, walking with the tech across the vast expanse of the fabrication bay. He tried to imagine Conover doing the things the Messenger—that he—had to do. He couldn’t.

  But, when Dash was that age, could he have done those things, either?

  It made him think back to the first time Custodian had introduced Dash to the remote, isolated part of the Forge intended only for the Messenger. It had struck him even then that Conover had potential he was only just beginning to show. In the time since, he’d proven himself again and again across a spectrum of abilities, from nerdy science wonk to hardened warrior.

  “You might be right,” Dash finally said, but his voice didn’t carry any pleasure at the idea. Being the Messenger wasn’t a job he would wish on anyone.

  Dash watched as the Pulsar slid clear of the fabrication bay and was cleared by the Forge’s traffic controllers to navigate. He kept the Archetype well clear of the other mech, which now had a hexacore installed. They’d done hours of static testing on the Pulsar and its upgraded systems, and now Conover would take it for its first flight test. Dash wanted it well away from the Forge, though, before even attempting any powered flight. So, despite the clearance to maneuver, Dash insisted on keeping the maintenance remotes, acting as tugs, in place.

  “How does the mech feel, Conover?” Dash asked.<
br />
  “Uh, like it’s being towed at a walking pace?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Well, everything’s green, and all systems are running at full standard power. No blips, no harmonics, nothing seems to be doing anything but running perfectly,” Conover replied.

  Dash boosted the Archetype away from the Forge into clear space. They’d outlined a test range about ten million klicks from the Forge, which meant they had some flying ahead of them. But given the subtlety of the fault that had been plaguing the techs and their work, Dash wanted to be sure the Pulsar was truly flight-worthy before clearing it for ops.

  It made him worry a bit about the Archetype, as well.

  “Conover, tell me again just what was wrong with that DM2 circuit you helped the techs with. Something about a gap?”

  “Yeah. The way the upgraded power-buses are made for the mechs didn’t account for a slight discrepancy in the DM2 metallurgy we’re getting from the Shroud and the theoretical value. The Forge’s fabricators didn’t account for it, so micro-fractures formed in the DM2-infused alloy. One had grown wide enough that a charge trickled across the gap to make it look like the diagnostics were green. But it was really a choke point, preventing the bus from conducting a full charge—”

  “Okay, gotcha, and let me stop you there. How big a problem is this? Will it affect all the mechs? Could it affect the Archetype?”

  “Well, now that Custodian knows about the variance, he can accommodate it. And as for the Archetype, we mostly used existing DM2, not stuff we manufactured ourselves. So it should be fine.”

  “I am keeping vigilant for discrepancies between the reported status of the Archetype’s systems and their actual performance,” Sentinel put in.

  “Me too!” Kristin added.

  The tugs finally released the Pulsar, the maintenance remotes hurrying back toward the Forge. Dash had Conover apply the minimum thrust possible, nudging the mech into motion under its own power.

  “Okay, Conover, nice and easy. We’re going to take our sweet-assed time flying out to the test range, got it?”