by J. N. Chaney
“Installations such as this one are protected from discovery. Had you not had the Archetype assisting you, you simply would never have found it. This prevents primitive races from inadvertently running afoul of them, as well as protecting them from the Golden.”
Dash reached the other side of the massive sphere and knew that the power core was just ahead. A short flight of steps—steps that were just a little too short for his human gait—opened up before him and, at the top, sat a crystal cylinder resting on a slab of what looked like copper. Inside the cylinder was another rod, virtually identical to the one he’d dug out of the black comet.
He climbed the steps and stopped, then he reached for the rod, but hesitated.
If there were any traps or defenses, this would be the most likely moment they’d trigger.
“Have I mentioned how nerve-racking this little expedition has been?”
“You have successfully communicated your discomfort, yes.”
“As long as we’re clear on that,” Dash muttered, then reached for the cylinder. As soon as his gloved fingers touched it, the cylinder winked out of existence, and Dash was able to grab the power core.
“Dash—”
Dash yelped and jumped. The AI had spoken the instant he grabbed the core, startling him. He wondered if it was deliberate.
“What?” he snapped.
“There has been a development. Several ships have just entered real space at the edge of this system and are inbound on a high thrust trajectory.”
“Damn it.” Dash turned and headed back the way he came. “How long until they’re a problem?”
“They are a problem now,” she replied.
“What I mean is, how long until they become an actual threat?”
“Long enough for you to return to the Archetype, if you hurry.”
Dash swallowed. “On it!”
As Dash wove his way among the enigmatic machines and constructs of the Unseen, it struck him that it was too bad he hadn’t been able to keep the place’s defense system operational—and on his side.
Dash raced along the corridor until he reached the opening that led onto the asteroid’s surface. Without thinking, he plunged out of the installation at full speed and immediately launched himself into space.
He’d forgotten that the gravity inside the place was artificially one G, but only a tiny fraction of that outside of it. His momentum was carrying him into what would be, at best, a long, arcing fall back to the surface; at worst, he might end up in orbit, or even achieving escape velocity altogether.
That was not good. The incoming ships that Dash had identified as Clan Shirna vessels as soon as Sentinel showed him, were only minutes away from reaching particle beam range of the asteroid. The Archetype may be able to shrug off a blast of highly energetic neutrons, but Dash would evaporate like an Elysian eye-beetle in a fusion exhaust. In other words, POOF.
He fired the suit’s thrusters, desperately trying to regain control, and ended up spinning, but he was able to work his way back down to the asteroid’s surface, about a hundred paces away from the towering bulk of the Archetype. Still clutching the power core, Dash started a low-grav shuffle, moving as fast as he could back to the giant mech without losing control again.
“Dash, I recommend that you board the Archetype within the next minute to avoid being caught on the surface unprepared.”
“Working on it.” Dash reached the mech and was about to clamber aboard when he realized he really had no idea how to install the power core.
No. Wait. Yes he did. Like the one he’d retrieved from the black comet, it slotted into the Archetype’s other thigh. It would be a lot of effort for him to do it himself, though, and he just didn’t have the time.
Fine. Dash dropped the core onto the gravelly surface of the asteroid then re-entered the Archetype.
And not a moment too soon. Particle beams swept across the surface of the asteroid, leaving glowing trails of molten rock and clouds of superheated plasma. One struck the Archetype, plowing a furrow across its back and right shoulder. The Clan Shirna ships had opened fire as soon as they could, at extreme range, so they weren’t all that accurate, but that would change very quickly.
Dash settled into the cradle and once more became the Archetype.
Wincing at the wound across his back, he reached down, grabbed the core, and seated it in place. Again, power surged through the mech. It reached a peak of about a third of the big machine’s full power, and also activated several new systems, including a point-defense beam for close-in protection.
A shield. Not the low-grade energy shield he’d had on the Slipwing. This one harnessed the power of the black hole. An actual energy shield, something engineers had been trying, and failing to produce, for—well to create an unprecedented level of protection. Grinning in his cradle, Dash raised it around himself and launched into space, just as a salvo of missiles came thundering in, detonating across the asteroid’s surface. The searing flashes of energy washed over the Archetype, followed by showers of pulverized rock. The shield flickered and flared under the onslaught, but held.
Dash emerged from the gaseous aftermath of the multiple explosions, soaring into space and aiming himself directly at the enemy.
The enemy turned out to be about a dozen Clan Shirna ships, which wasn’t a surprise.
Missiles and particle beams flared against the Archetype’s shield. It continued to hold, but Dash realized that enough energy delivered quickly enough could overwhelm it. When the mech was fully powered, it would be a different story, but the mech wasn’t fully powered, so Dash swerved and dodged and wove among the Clan Shirna ships, lashing out with the dark-lance, and a new spatial distortion cannon that created deep, instantaneous gravity wells wherever he aimed.
It pulled the Clan Shirna ships off their trajectories, making them tumble and spin as they fought to regain control. In a few moments, he’d managed to destroy about a third of the attackers; now, amid a whirling cloud of debris, the survivors abruptly pulled back and retreated, but not too far.
Dash destroyed a single incoming missile with the point defense system, then paused. He let his attackers disengage, because it gave the Archetype a respite to regenerate its weapon systems, and him a chance to collect his wits. Flying through space as though he was a bird in the air was exhilarating, of course, and he was getting more and more used to it, but it still left him a little dazed in the wake of such a complex string of maneuvers. Fortunately, the Archetype seemed to be adapting to him, too, becoming ever more of a natural extension to him.
“There is a transmission from one of the enemy vessels,” Sentinel said.
“Oh, really? I’ll bet I know who it is, too. Go ahead, put him on.”
An inset window opened his field of view, holding the image of a familiar figure.
“Hey, Nathis! We’ve really gotta stop meeting like this. I mean, people are going to start talking.”
“Spare me your feeble wit,” Nathis shot back, his claws flicking with disdain as he gestured to the screens.
With each passing moment, his anger colored his pebbled skin a darker shade of green.
Nathis was more dragon than alien in that moment, his white fangs exposed from a thin upper lip. “Your crimes are now breathtaking in scope. You have stolen an artifact that is—”
“Whoa, hang on here. I didn’t steal anything.” He did a somersault. “See? I’m fully…um, integrated, or connected with this thing. Oh, and it’s called the Archetype. And it’s not exactly something I could just sneak into and fire up. It kinda—well, I guess you could say it chose me.”
“Preposterous.”
Dash grinned. “Jealous that you're not the one flying around in space? Oh, and is it ever sweet to do that—”
“You may think you are invulnerable, undefeatable, but I can assure you, you are not.”
“Well, let’s test that, shall we?” asked Dash.
He launched himself at the remaining Clan Shirna ships.
He actually had to give Nathis credit; he learned fast. All of the ships fired the particle beams at once, striving to pour fire into the Archetype’s shield as it closed. Dash felt the shield reaching saturation, unable to radiate the incoming energy away as fast as it was pumped in. He started dodging, disrupting his opponents’ firing solution, but it also slowed his approach to them, so it wasn’t a net gain. He finally gave up and just bore in, loosing missiles, dark-lance blasts and spatial-distortions as he did.
The dark-lance tore apart one ship. Two more were pulled into a sudden gravity well and collided. Missiles blew another to fragments. As he swept by the remainder, his shield failed and he took particle beam hits all over, making him yelp and cry out. He kept going, opening the distance again. But the surviving Clan Shirna ships didn’t follow. Instead, they scattered, heading back out-system.
“Had enough, guys?”
One ship was leaving on a very different trajectory than the rest. Instead of departing along a conventional course, this one seemed to be launching itself along a path that would take it out of the galactic plane. Of course, that didn’t mean much unless it translated into unSpace, which it did. The other Clan Shirna ships did, too, but that one ship was now on its way out of the galaxy, along a course perpendicular to the spiral arm.
His connection with Sentinel informed him immediately that unlike the Echoes, these ships had the translation ability.
“Where the hell are you going?”
Was it Nathis? His transmissions had been generated from all of the Clan Shirna ships, a pretty standard ploy to avoid letting your opponent know which ship you were on. So it might be Nathis. But where was he going?
Dash took off after it, ignoring the other ships as they likewise entered unSpace. It struck him that this might be a ruse; maybe the ship he was chasing was entirely automated and was just a distraction. Or maybe it was a sacrifice, intended for Dash to chase so the others could get away. Hadn’t he tried to do the same in Halfwing?
What convinced him to chase after it wasn’t anything rational or logical. Nor was it any deep wisdom or insight from the Archetype. No, it was just a good, old-fashioned gut feeling.
Flinging himself into unSpace, Dash raced after the retreating ship. It should have been tough to do that, at least without specialized equipment he could never afford. But the Archetype let him see the Clan Shirna ship ahead, racing through the dimensionless infinity of unSpace.
For now, he could only follow, since the concept of closing in unSpace was meaningless. In the meantime, Dash and his quarry tore out of the galactic plane, eventually leaving the galaxy altogether.
“So where are you going?” he asked the distant ship. “Just what the hell are you up to?”
Time passed. Dash began to think this was a fool’s chase, just a desperate attempt to lead him nowhere, to waste his time so Nathis could…do what, exactly? The answer to that was probably behind him, but his gut told him to stay the course, for at least a while longer.
And his gut paid off. Without warning, his target translated back to real space. Dash did the same and found himself not in the middle of intergalactic nothing, as he expected. Instead, he was immersed in a whole lot of dangerous something.
17
Dash swerved to avoid a hurling mass of ice and rock, which shouldn’t be here. There should be nothing here. The galaxy sprawled across space, a vast pinwheel of glowing dust and uncountable stars, but here, outside the galaxy, there should be nothing at all. He dodged another massive chunk of rock. As he did, he saw something else drifting toward him, something he didn’t recognize at all, except that it was obviously artificial.
What the—?
Except he did know what it was. Even though he’d never seen anything like this before, or heard of it, or even imagined it could actually exist, he knew that it was a dark matter mine. And it wasn’t another piece of Unseen tech. This had been built, and apparently put here, by the Golden.
It was one thing to face the relatively clunky, primitive weapons of Clan Shirna and their ilk. It was quite another to deal with Golden technology, which was every bit as sophisticated and powerful as that of the Unseen.
Dash zoomed away from the mine and found himself closing on another. They seemed to be mobile, but not fast. In fact, there was an array of them, and they were reconfiguring themselves to hem him in, make it so he couldn’t possibly escape without detonating at least one of them.
In other words, this was a trap.
He fired the dark-lance at a mine, trying to open a gap. It struck the sinister device but, to his horror, it had no effect.
He doubted the Archetype’s missiles would be any more effective, so he picked a point and activated the distortion cannon. Three of the mines abruptly plunged into the resulting gravity well. An instant later, they erupted in an explosion of…nothing. But Dash knew it only seemed to be nothing; the blast effect was to essentially neutralize certain fundamental physical properties of reality for a moment, such as the strong nuclear force that held matter together. An icy rock caught in the affected region simply ceased to exist, its atoms ripped apart as protons and neutrons simply collapsed into their component quarks.
Dash gaped for a moment. That had been awesome, in the truest sense of the word. Awesome, and utterly terrifying. Missiles and ice were one thing, but he could already imagine what the distortion cannon might do to flesh and bone.
He shook away his stunned awe. The gap in the encroaching mines was already closing. He zoomed through it, desperately hoping that he was far enough away from any of the mines to avoid detonating them.
One of the mines did explode, though that didn’t really seem to be the right term for it, and the distortion effect brushed against the Archetype’s shield, which had fully regenerated. The shield prevented any damage to the Archetype, but at the cost of effectively nullifying it, putting it back into a regeneration cycle. So Dash could take a hit from one mine, but certainly not from two.
He glared at the Clan Shirna ship, dodging among rocks and ice chunks as it sought to open the distance from him. “You clever son of a bitch,” he muttered at it. “This was a trap, and you led me right into it.”
He was actually kind of impressed. This ship had lured him here, to a place that was a true threat to the Archetype, knowing that the mines would probably end up destroying the mech, too. That was ballsy, which meant it probably wasn’t Nathis, who just didn’t seem like the self-sacrificial type.
But it begged a question—how did the Clan Shirna ship even know about this place? And why was this odd collection of miscellaneous bodies and super-dangerous mines even here, in the intergalactic void, to begin with?
“I really need to talk to that guy,” Dash said.
“The probability that the Clan Shirna ship will survive this region is extremely low.”
“Yeah, I see that, Sentinel. Which means instead of destroying him, I have to try to only disable him, and also protect him at the same time.”
Dash zoomed after the Clan Shirna ship, determined to catch it and get some answers.
The dark-lance was out. It would almost certainly destroy the other ship. That left Dash with the missiles—which were beginning to run low—and the distortion cannon. He fired the latter, targeting a point behind the Clan Shirna ship, creating a gravity well that tugged it backward, slowing it down, while yanking him forward, closing on it.
In a space battle, vectors were important as weapons, and Dash was using both.
He decided to get a little closer and use a missile, which had enough ability to discriminate targets that he could have it attack his opponent’s drive, and could also scale its blast effect in a way that would limit damage.
He readied the missile, then fired the distortion cannon again. The gravity well it created winked into existence just as the Clan Shirna ship started a hard lateral burn of its fusion drive, trying to make a wrenching course change to dodge behind some large hunks of rock. The combined
effect was to send it spinning out of control. The pilot started mad thruster burns, trying to regain control, but he didn’t have enough time. The Clan Shirna ship struck one of the rocks and bounced off, trailing debris.
The Clan Shirna pilot made a last, desperate burn of his fusion drive, slowing his damaged ship enough that when it struck another of the massive rocks, it slewed across the surface and came to rest jammed under a huge outcrop. It vented atmosphere in a shimmering cloud of vapor but seemed to remain mostly intact.
Dash stopped the Archetype a few hundred meters over the crashed ship. As far as he could tell, its engineering section had been mostly demolished, but the rest of it looked only moderately damaged. And there hadn’t been enough atmosphere blown into space to account for its entire internal volume, which meant that a lot of the ship must remain habitable.
But he wasn’t going to be able to do much of anything while still aboard the Archetype—certainly not find the answers he wanted. That meant Dash would have to dismount and enter the damaged Clan Shirna himself, on foot.
Dash found himself reluctant to leave the big mech. The loss of its power and protection made him suddenly feel very small. As he approached the crashed Clan Shirna ship, shuffling his way across the barren rock, he reflected on how hazardous this really was.
Not only was the ship itself dangerous—for instance, its fusion core, if not shut down, could breach at any time and turn him into vapor—but there might still be living Shirnas, as he’d thought to call them, on board. The fact that all of this was happening in the utter darkness of intergalactic space, lit only by the diffuse glow of the sprawling Milky Way galaxy that filled a good chunk of the sky, only made it all the more disconcerting.
He stopped short of the wreck. Of course, maybe everyone on board was dead. It was likely to become nothing more than a ghost ship, like the ones described in hoary tales in grubby little on-world bars.
Dash shook his head and hefted his slugger. Unfortunately, the Archetype had no bizarre and wondrous weapons aboard that could be man-packed, so all he had was the default one strapped to his vac suit. It had ten rounds of self-propelled ammo, and that was it. In comparison to dark-lances and distortion cannons, it felt like he’d armed himself with a handful of rocks.