The Messenger Box Set: Books 1-6

by J. N. Chaney

  Uncomfortable looks, and then nods all around as the enormity of a scorched galaxy made wealth seem trivial. Being rich in a graveyard was worthless.

  Viktor nodded. “We could go back to the Pasture and look for more Unseen technology. Perhaps it will provide something useful.”

  “Useful?” asked Dash.

  “There’s a wealth of Unseen tech sitting there, the possibilities beyond compare. We may discover something useful.”

  Leira slapped both hands to her knees and grinned. “Sounds risky. I’m in.”

  Dash laughed. “Well, I’m a courier. Risk is what we do!”

  Leira tapped a contemplative finger on her chin. “Wait, with all due respect to Conover here, based on the arrangement you made with his aunt back on Penumbra, he’s basically a tourist.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Conover said. “I want to see the Pasture and what’s in it. That’s what tourists do, right?” he asked, glancing at Leira. “Want to see stuff?”

  “Well, it kind of is my ship,” Dash said. “And I did kind of save your lives. Now,” he went on, raising a hand as Leira opened her mouth to object, “I’m not saying you owe me anything—well, except for the payment for that job I signed up for, the one where I flew in and saved your asses. If you don’t want to come along, I’m not going to force you. Any of you.” He shrugged. “It’s just that doing it alone is going to be tough.”

  Viktor lifted a shoulder, admitting defeat. “I guess that’s that.”

  Dash grinned. “There you go. We’re a team now!”

  Leira chuckled. “Great. Can we get matching shirts?”

  “Hah,” Dash said, then turned to the nav to call up a chart showing the broad expanse of space around the Globe of Suns. “Okay, so let’s start thinking about how we’re going to do this. The first obstacle is the Shadow Nebula.”

  A chime cut him off. It was the comm. Dash frowned and checked the display. Someone had just sent a message—an unSpace message, in fact, addressed to the Slipwing specifically. There was no originator ID.

  He glanced at the others. “Could be a glitch, I guess.”

  The comm chimed again. Dash sighed and opened the channel, ready to dismiss the transmission.

  But it wasn’t a glitch.

  “Who are you?” he asked the reptilian face on the vid.

  “I am Nathis, of Clan Shirna.” It spoke in deep tones, pronouncing each word with an aristocratic air.

  Dash blinked and looked at the others. “What can I do for you, Nathis?”

  “Tell me where the desecrators are, that I might retrieve what they stole and see to their punishment.”

  “Uh, desecrators? Sorry, you’ll have to be more specific,” he evaded, forcing himself not to glance at them.

  “Do not feign ignorance,” Nathis snapped, and Dash noticed patches on either side of his neck were reddening as his voice hardened. “We know that you responded to the call from the desecrators for rescue, and that you subsequently fled with them after their ship was destroyed. I could label you a desecrator as well, but I accept that you may simply have been interested in profit.” He said the word as though it left a rancid taste in his mouth. “Therefore, if you turn over the desecrators for judgment, along with the sacred relic they have stolen, you will be forgiven your sins.”

  Dash stared at the vid. “You want me to just hand these people over to you for some sort of trial?”

  “No, of course not.” The patches on Nathis’s neck took on a more subdued, purplish hue and his face changed. Dash thought it might be his version of a smirk, or as close to a smirk the severe alien probably ever got. “There are no trials. There is only judgment, and for desecration that is death.”

  “I suspect lawyer isn’t a popular career choice for your people.”

  “I do not know what a loy-er is, nor do I care. I care only for the judgment of the desecrators.” Nathis looked off-screen and said something that the comms couldn’t decode or was just too quiet to make out. “You are now being sent coordinates. We will wait there for you.”

  Dash marveled at the sheer arrogance. “You really believe I’m just going to show up and hand these people over to you, don’t you?”

  The neck patches reddened slightly. “Yes, I do.”

  “Well, you see, it’s more complicated than that.”

  Nathis scowled—at least, Dash assumed the pinching of his reptilian features was a scowl—and his neck patches darkened. “Yes. Of course. Profit. Very well, we will pay you.”

  To Dash’s chagrin, his first and immediate thought was, how much? But he shoved it aside and shook his head. “No, this isn’t about profit. This is about—well, you can’t seriously believe I’m going to bring two people to you so you can execute them.”

  “They are desecrators,” he said simply, as though that meant something to Dash.

  “Yeah, yeah, and that’s all terrible. But it’s not going to happen.”

  The neck patches flared bright red. “Then you will be labeled a desecrator as well and subject to the same judgment.”

  “Know what? This conversation is going nowhere, and I have better things to do. You want to round up us desecrators, come and get us.”

  Dash snapped off the comms and turned back to the others, still standing in the back of the cockpit. He smirked. “What an assho—"

  Leira cut him off. “Why didn’t you just tell him you’d already dropped us off and had no idea where we are now?”

  “I…well, because.” Dash stopped short. “Where were you and your good ideas thirty seconds ago?”

  “You should realize,” Viktor said, “that they probably tracked the origin of your transmissions and know exactly where we are now. Which means,” he continued, “the next ship to drop out of unSpace here is probably going to be them.”

  “Yeah,” Dash said, “I know. We should get the hell out of here before neck-patches there shows up.” He turned back to the controls. “The question is, where to?”

  Conover looked confused. “Aren’t we going to the Pasture?”

  “It’s probably the last thing Nathis and Clan Shirna would expect,” Leira agreed.

  Dash called up charts showing the clear unSpace lanes to the Shadow Nebula. “What the hell. If we’re going to do this, then let’s do it.” He started punching commands into the nav. As he did, he muttered, “I don’t get paid enough for this, I really don’t.”

  8

  The passage of the Shadow Nebula was a trying combination of tedious and nerve-wracking. The voluminous clouds of thick dust and gas made observation and detection difficult in real space, and that carried over into unSpace as a gravitational echo effect that confused the scanners. It worked in their favor as the Slipwing was also harder to detect. But Dash worried about blundering into some massive Clan Shirna warship, not realizing it was even there until they were in range of its weapons. And although remaining in unSpace left them relatively safe from such harm, they still had to periodically drop out of it to let the nav confirm their course. And that was also a problem, as the stars the nav normally used for location-fixing were obscured by the nebula, so they had to rely more heavily on inertial navigation.

  It all left Dash with a headache. The trip was boring, but still it demanded his full attention. Fortunately, Leira could settle into the pilot’s seat and take the helm, giving him a break.

  During one such interlude, he wandered back to where Viktor and Conover were poring over an open panel in the engineering bay, flicking their attention back and forth between schematics on a dataslate and a tangle of exposed cables, conduits, and other components.

  “How’s it going, guys?” Dash asked, polishing a spindle-apple against his shirt. The fruit was a delicacy, available only on the planet called Skydrop, and this was his next-to-last.

  Conover looked up in Dash’s general direction. His eyes had gone white again, which meant he was seeing schematics and diagrams. At least that was how Dash understood his bizarre lenses worked. Viktor ju
st shook his head.

  “We’re trying to tune your Fade so its emissions match those of the various types of radiation Leira and I measured in the Globe of Suns, around the Pasture,” the old engineer explained. “That way, we can keep a bigger footprint in real space and remain more aware of what’s going on, so we’re not flying quite so blind.”

  “But someone,” Conover said, “has heavily modified these systems.”

  “We’re having some difficulty,” Viktor said, shooting Dash a sharp glance. “The rewiring from the Fade installation was done pretty haphazardly.”

  Dash paused with the spindle-apple near his mouth. “Hey, hey, out here in space it’s real. You do what you’ve gotta do to keep things running. It’s not like I have a friggin’ engineering team on board to do this stuff.”

  “That’s for sure,” Viktor muttered, tugging at a cable. It popped out of a socket with a fat, blue spark. “Why would you ever cross-connect the Fade’s auxiliary control circuits to—is that the power tap to the galley?”

  Dash shrugged and bit into the apple. As he chewed through the mouthful of sweet, tart fruit, he smiled. “Oh, yeah, I remember doing that. See, I had this cute customs inspector on board at Tannhauser, and she was a big fan of hot spiced chai, but the induction heater in the galley was offline, so I—”

  “Never mind,” Viktor said, shaking his head. “You’re just lucky your Fade system never needed to switch to its backup controller at a crucial moment.”

  “Actually,” Conover said, “luck is correct. Based on how you’ve rewired and hacked these systems together, you had a 65% chance of losing primary control of your Fade.”

  “Yeah, okay, I get it,” Dash said. “Don’t cobble crap together. Trouble is, sometimes that’s the only way out of trouble, isn’t it?”

  “He’s right,” Viktor said to Conover. “Sometimes it’s the only way. But,” he went on, holding up a finger, “when you are finally out of trouble, you should put things back the way they should be.”

  Dash mimed a salute. “Yes, sir. Message received, sir.”

  “Anyway,” Conover said, tracing a conduit and comparing it to a schematic, “once we’ve got this untangled and put back together, the Fade should not only work more efficiently and use less anti-deuterium to run, but it should be harder to detect.”

  Dash nodded. “Well, that’s good, because we’re only a shipboard day or so away from exiting the Shadow Nebula. Be nice to have everything up and running when we’re most likely to run into Clan Shirna, wouldn’t it?”

  Viktor frowned. “That’s a problem. We’ve got at least a day’s work here, maybe two.”

  “Yeah, well, I’d rather not hang around this nebula any longer than necessary.”

  “We’ll do our best,” Viktor said, but his face was doubtful.

  Dash waved it off. “Eh, I know you engineering types always inflate the time it’s gonna take to do stuff, so you look like miracle workers when you get it done sooner.”

  Viktor shook his head. “No, we don’t do that. That would be irresponsible.”

  Dash started to say it was a joke, then decided against it and left them to it.

  They’d all jammed into the cockpit, despite there being repeaters back in the crew module that would let Viktor and Conover watch what was happening in some semblance of comfort. Everyone seemed to want to be together when they made their first translation back to real space after leaving the Shadow Nebula.

  Dash glanced at Leira, who was sitting in the copilot’s seat and ready to take control if needed. “You ready?”

  She looked back at Dash, her eyes wide. “Wait,” she said, pointing at a panel, “is that the Fade control, or is that the power management system?”

  “What? No, that’s the nav…”

  Leira was grinning.

  “Very funny,” Dash said, smiling back. “Okay,” he said, “here we go.”

  Eyes glued to the scanners, Dash brought the Slipwing back into real space. He just stared at the scanner’s vid. “Wow.”

  “Yes,” Leira said, “Wow is right. Welcome to the Globe of Suns.”

  The vid depicted a sweeping starfield, dozens of stars wheeling in a stately orbit around a common gravitational center. The nearest was close enough to show an incandescent white disc, the corona glowing like a halo around it. The rest were hard, dazzling points of light, an array of them so closely packed that Dash couldn’t see how they didn’t just all spiraled into one another in a colossal orgy of stellar catastrophe. Sure, he was used to seeing stars, so much so that he didn’t really see them at all anymore. But never had he seen so many, so close.

  “Yeah,” Dash said, “that’s incredible.”

  “And that,” Leira said, pointing at the vid, “is the Pasture.”

  It didn’t look like much, not at this distance—just a patch of empty space circumscribed by the slow procession of stars making up the Globe of Suns. He amped up the scan resolution.

  Once, Dash had seen a whirlwind tear through a settlement on Owen’s World. The planet was plagued by powerful storms, and this one had pulverized an entire community, turning buildings, ramps, walkways, essentially everything not rooted in bedrock, into a whirling cloud of debris. There’d been hundreds of pieces, thousands, forming a spinning wall of shrapnel.

  It hadn’t even been close to this.

  There was silence, except for the sound of the Slipwing’s machinery.

  “So,” Dash finally said, “you flew into that?”

  “We did,” Leira said.

  “Wow,” he said again.

  “If you aren’t comfortable you can do it—”

  “What? No, pfft. I told you, I can fly the Slipwing anywhere, and do it blind,” Dash said.

  “You sure?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Leira nodded and Dash turned his attention back to the scanner.

  It was amazing, Dash thought, but sitting here marveling at it wasn’t getting them any closer to accomplishing what they’d come here to do. He reached for the Fade controls then heard Conover’s hissing intake of breath and paused. Glancing back at the kid and Viktor, he said, “Um, anything I should know?”

  Conover looked at Viktor, then both shook their heads. “No,” Viktor said, “we should be fine.”

  “Should be?”

  “Just go ahead.”

  Shrugging, Dash punched in the command to engage the Fade. The scan resolution immediately crashed, but Dash was able to maintain enough of a coherent picture to start the Slipwing on a trajectory to the Pasture. By using the Fade, he didn’t need to engage the fusion drive. Which was good, because its exhaust would be an immediate giveaway, the way it had been for Leira and Viktor when they’d tried to sneak out of here.

  Even through the diminished scan resolution induced by the Fade, they could see the Pasture approaching. Dash had studied it as best he could, trying to discern a pattern to the gross movement of all of the objects making it.

  “Okay, folks,” Dash said once it was time, “we’re coming out of Fade now.”

  He touched a control and the half-rumble, half-whine of the Fade died. Normal space returned to surround the Slipwing.

  “Okay,” he said, as the Pasture resolved into a mess of conflicting signals. “And that isn’t good.”

  “I told you,” Leira said. “Between the radiation from all these stars and whatever those emissions are from the Pasture itself, scanners aren’t reliable. It gets a lot worse once we get inside.”

  “No problem. I’ve got this.” Dash applied gentle reverse thrust, slowing the Slipwing. “We’ll just hang out here for a while, gather as much data as we can, and then—”

  A harsh blast of noise cut him off. He glanced at the scanner’s vid. Three contacts had just entered the scanner’s diminished range, approaching on a fast intercept trajectory. They read as ships, but none like Dash had ever seen before.

  “What the hell are they?” he snapped.

  “Echoes. And they’re clos
ing in fast,” Viktor put in. “Small, quick attack ships,” he explained at Dash’s blank look. “Stealthy, elusive. We ended up calling them Echoes. No idea what Clan Shirna calls them.”

  “They must have been waiting for us,” Viktor said, shaking his head. “Didn’t you say coming here is the last thing they’d expect us to do?”

  The three of them looked at Leira, who shrugged. “It really wasn’t logical for us to come here, into the heart of their territory. I guess Clan Shirna’s just not logical.”

  Dash rolled his eyes and turned back to the controls. “You didn’t pick that up from the whole, we’re going to find you and kill you filthy heathens thing?”

  “They called us desecrators, not heathens.”

  A chime cut Dash’s reply off. An incoming transmission. The face of Nathis, or someone who looked exactly like him, appeared on the comms vid.

  “Desecrators are compelled to desecrate,” he said, his neck patches bright crimson. “Surrender to us now, confess your transgressions, and we will be merciful, your deaths almost entirely painless.”

  Dash input a command and the Slipwing’s fusion drive lit with a dull rumble and an abrupt surge of acceleration, one too great for the dampers to entirely suppress. Dash set a trajectory for the nearest rim of the Pasture.

  “Dash,” Leira said, “don’t you think this is a good time to just bug out of here?”

  “Come all this way, just to give up? I don’t think so. Besides, that Nathis just pisses me off.”

  “Those Echoes are fast. I don’t think you’re going to outrun them.”

  “Don’t need to outrun them.” Dash made a minute adjustment to their heading. “Just have to outfly them.”

  “This is their territory,” Leira started to say.

  “Yeah, but they don’t go into the Pasture, right? That’s that whole Maelstrom thing we read about. So they’ll be no better at flying in there than we are. We’ll probably never get another chance this good.”