The Messenger Box Set: Books 1-6

by J. N. Chaney

  “I believe I have an answer for that,” Sentinel said, apparently responding to Dash’s thought. “Much of the Harbinger seems to be constructed of dark metal.”

  The Meld provided Dash with a flood of information he didn’t really understand. He saw that Harbinger had backed off, presumably to try a new strategy, now that the Archetype had functioning weapons again. “Pretend I don’t know what dark metal is,” he said. “Which, incidentally, I don’t.”

  “Dark metal is a super-dense alloy developed by the Golden. The Creators theorized that it was created using the power of dark energy. In addition to being inordinately strong, and yet light for that strength, it also tends to deflect energy.”

  “So that’s why the dark-lance doesn’t do much to it. Make a note to inform me of the efficiency of all our weapons. After, of course, this brawl.”

  “Duly noted, and you are correct. The quantum effects of the dark-lance are greatly diminished by the properties of dark metal.”

  Dash scowled. That also meant missiles, which did most of their damage by radiant energy blasts, would also have limited effect. The distortion cannon would still work fine, but this dark metal was probably strong enough to resist being yanked apart by its gravitational pull. The best he’d be able to do was tug the Harbinger around a bit.

  “Meantime, that thing’s damned chest cannon hurts me just fine,” Dash said.

  As though his words had triggered it, the Harbinger loosed another bolt of super-hot plasma. Dash dodged, so only the fringe of the blast caught him. Again, it did little damage.

  So, a stalemate. He couldn’t do much to the Harbinger, but, as long as he stayed near the brown dwarf, it couldn’t do much to him, either.

  “It’s going to either attack the Forge, or go after Leira,” he said.

  “To draw you away from the brown dwarf.”

  “Exactly. And what do you know. There it goes.”

  The Harbinger had abruptly turned and raced away, heading back in-system.

  Dash took a deep, resigned breath. “Well, I guess just sitting around here isn’t going to do much good, is it?”

  He launched himself after the Harbinger.

  “Leira,” Dash said, “what’s your status?” He expected her to say, I’m almost back at the Forge—and was then going to warn her that the Harbinger was inbound. But there was no response at all.

  “Leira? Can you hear me? What’s going—”

  “I’m here,” she said, her voice tight and a little breathless. “I was just back in the engineering bay.”

  “Still having some instability in your fusion containment?”

  “Not anymore, because I’ve shut it down entirely.”

  “You’ve what?” Dash shook his head. She couldn’t shut down fusion containment, at least not without shutting down the drive as well.

  “Leira, have you shut down the drive?”

  “I had to. I was going to lose containment if I didn’t. Maybe Viktor or Amy could do something about it, but it’s beyond me, Dash. And going poof in a fusion explosion wasn’t high on my list of things to do.” She tried to sound casual, even flippant about it, but Dash could hear the tension in her voice.

  “Okay,” he said. “That’s…not good, but at least it means you’re probably safe from the Harbinger. Let’s face it, your threat profile has dropped significantly. That’s a good thing, given what’s happening out here.”

  “Not that I ever was much of a threat.” She paused. “I’m not as safe you might think, Dash. See, I was inspired by your nifty aerobraking stunt around that gas giant, and all the time it saved. I thought I’d do a gravitational slingshot around the system’s star, kind of the same way. I’d have to burn a lot of fuel to match the Forge’s orbit after, but it would have saved me a pretty good chunk of time getting back there.”

  Dash’s stomach tightened. “What are you telling me, Leira?”

  “I needed to do one more burn, to correct my trajectory for a proper orbital insertion around the star. But I couldn’t. So, in about an hour, the star’s gravity is going to pull me further and further toward it, close enough to be nothing but slag. If I try to do anything about it by lighting up the drive, though, I’ll blow up the ship. Either way, Dash, I’m afraid the Slipwing and I are going to go poof anyway.”

  24

  Fortunately, Conover’s eyes did still work, being interfaced directly with his biological functions. He could therefore see the dramatic fall-off in the drone’s internal activity. It remained operating at a much lower energy level—but it was by no means entirely dead. Some portions of it were either somehow shielded from the station’s security effects or could just power through them.

  The seconds ticked past. Conover focused on the drone, trying to commit as much of what he could see happening with its tech to memory. A bead of sweat rolled down his forehead, then the side of his nose. He breathed as little as he could, trying to not foul the few minutes of usable air left inside his suit. In the space between heartbeats, something clicked.

  The power switched abruptly back on. His suit systems resumed their pervasive hum and whine. Compared to the absolute silence, they sounded like a fusion drive being lit.

  “Viktor,” Amy said, “did that work? Did that power core come online while things here were shut down?”

  “No, Amy. I’m afraid not.”

  “Shit.” She turned back to Conover again. “Well, looks like we’re going to have to do this the hard way.”

  But Conover ignored her. Instead, he watched as the drone came back fully back to life, its systems repowering, energy flowing through it in silent malignance.

  “Custodian, power everything down again,” he snapped. “And leave it powered down! Do it now!”

  Dash just stared at the situation for a moment. Finally, he said, “Leira, are you sure? You can’t get containment stabilized at all?”

  “Like I said, if I had Viktor or Amy here, maybe they could so something. But I’m no engineer. I’ve tried all the things I know how to do. And yes, before you ask, I’ve queried the computer. If there’s any way of fixing containment, it involves some trick or fancy, offbeat idea that I just don’t know.”

  “What about thrusters? They should give you enough of a nudge.”

  “Maybe if I was further from the star and had more time, but—no. I’ve run the numbers. It won’t be enough.”

  “Translate away?”

  “Dash, come on. You know as well as I do, I’m way too deep in this system’s gravity well. There’s no way the Slipwing has enough power to translate into unSpace from here.”

  Dash went back to staring. She was right, of course. Even the Fade wouldn’t help her. Sure, it would push her partly into unSpace, but enough of her and the Slipwing would remain in real space that they’d both be vaporized by the star anyway.

  “Leira, wait a second. Sentinel, we translated here, to this brown dwarf, through the Darkness Between. Can we do the same thing to get the Slipwing and help Leira out?”

  “No. She is much too deep into the star’s gravity well. As I said, it was barely possible with respect to the brown dwarf.”

  “The Unseen seem to be able to pretty much ignore the laws of physics, except when we really need them to. That’s unacceptable,” Dash growled.

  “The Creators are no more capable of ignoring the basic physical properties of the universe than you are. Their technology might create that impression, but that is not the case.”

  “Disregard. I’ll think it through. My instinct better work overtime.”

  Dash faced a stark choice. He could race after Leira, which would leave the Forge undefended. Or he could chase the Harbinger and try to save the Forge, but if that—and recovering from the inevitable damage—took more than about fifteen minutes, he wouldn’t have time to reach Leira before she and the Slipwing became a cloud of glowing atoms.

  If only the Forge could defend itself.

  “Viktor, any progress?”

  “Not
yet,” he replied. “I know that’s not the news you want, but Amy and Conover are working on it.”

  Dash felt like punching something, but he sucked in a calming breath. Losing his temper achieved nothing. “Any idea how long?”

  “Sorry, no idea.”

  It was Leira or the Forge.

  Simple logic said the Forge, of course. Losing it before the war against the Golden had really even begun would be a devastating blow. Maybe even a fatal one. That meant trying to save Leira instead quite possibly meant dooming all sentient life in the galactic arm to extinction by the Golden.

  But it also meant that Leira would die.

  “Leira,” Dash said to no one. “I’m sorry.”

  Amy stared at Conover in confusion. He could tell that much, at least, in the wan dregs of sunlight that spilled into the breach from outside, now that their suit lamps were dark. He saw her lips move, then she shook her head in frustration. Reaching up, she grabbed Conover’s helmet and pulled him toward her.

  What the hell? Did she suddenly want to hug him?

  There was a clunk as her helmet touched his.

  “Conover, what’s going on?”

  Oh. Right. Their suit comms didn’t work, but sound could conduct directly through their helmets if they were touching. She sounded far off, her voice a muffled buzz, but he could understand her.

  “The drone,” he said. “As soon as it started powering up, it also started reconfiguring itself. A bunch of signals were sent to its drive.”

  “Why? Was it going to try to leave here or something?”

  “I doubt that. But if you wanted to make a ship—because it’s just really a small, autonomous ship—blow up, how would you do it?”

  “Aw, hell. Right. By making the drive overload or fail in some way.”

  “Yeah. So if Custodian drops this security field, the drone probably explodes, instead of letting itself be deactivated. We don’t know how much damage it would do, or how long it might take the Forge to recover from it.”

  “But even with the security field on, it’s still able to stop that power core from working.”

  “It seems so, yeah.”

  “So we’re screwed?”

  Conover looked at the drone. “Not necessarily. We can try to get inside it and deactivate it manually, which is kind of what we came here to do in the first place.”

  “Well, we’ve only got a few minutes of air inside these suits, so we’d better get to it, then.”

  They moved apart and knelt beside the drone, one to each side, leaning forward so their helmets touched.

  “This thing might still blow up,” Conover said, as Amy extracted tools from her suit pouches and harness.

  “Conover, save your breath. Every word uses a little more air. Just business from now on.”

  “Oh. Yeah, you’re right.”

  Amy went to work on the drone. Fortunately, she’d already disassembled the one that had infiltrated the Forge earlier, so she knew how to get at the guts of the thing, at least.

  Once inside it, he’d have to guide her with what he could see, to try to finally deactivate it.

  And they had to do it all in the next few minutes, because after that, they’d be dead, asphyxiated by the residue of their own biological functions.

  Dash raced on, his trajectory noncommittal. A little adjustment one way, and he could chase after Leira. A little the other, and he’d be on the Harbinger’s tail. He had about another five minutes before he had to make a choice and go with it.

  But there really wasn’t any choice at all, was there?

  Dash tried swallowing that hurtful lump his throat away, but it wouldn’t go. He finally just whispered, “Sorry, Leira,” his voice thick with emotion as he changed his course to run down the Harbinger.

  And when he finally caught it, he was going to kill it. Even if he had to punch it into scrap, he was going to kill this damned Harbinger. And then he’d go on to find the rest of the Golden, and he’d kill all of them, too. For humanity. For Leira.

  There were people Dash didn’t like. There were people he avoided. People he would never, ever trust. People who owed him, and people he owed.

  Despite all of that, he’d never hated anyone before. He hadn’t even hated Clan Shirna, or Nathis. They’d been a massive pain in the ass, yes, and he had no regrets about what he’d done to them, how many of them he’d killed. They’d made their choices. He certainly could have hated them, had every reason to, but he hadn’t. They were just greedy, ambitious bastards. He knew lots of those. Even in nonhumans, they still had very human traits, like ruthless greed.

  Now, though, he did hate someone.

  He hated the Golden. Hated them. All he knew was that they wanted to destroy everyone and everything, so they had to be destroyed first.

  The Unseen weren’t too far behind, either, though his feelings were filled with uncertainty. They might be the only thing that could stand against the Golden, offering the only way of stopping, and eventually destroying them, sure. But they’d sucked Dash into this whole mess, this war, and sucked Leira, Viktor, and the rest of them in along with him. They’d never asked him; finding the Archetype might have saved his life, but Sentinel had never explained the ramifications of accepting the Meld and becoming the damned Messenger.

  And then, just to make sure an already stupidly difficult task was even harder, they’d held back information, pieced out the tech he needed to even have a chance in what amounted to a damned scavenger hunt and, as a result, plunged him and his friends into terrible situations they’d barely been able to survive—and they’d done it over and over again.

  And because of it—because they always seemed to fall just short of giving Dash and the others enough information or capability to really succeed—it was going to cost Leira her life.

  Ahead of him, the Harbinger raced toward the Forge. It, too, had apparently given up on Leira as a lost cause. It had obviously decided to destroy the Forge while it was still vulnerable.

  Dash was not going to let that happen. If they were going to lose Leira, then the Harbinger would pay the price for it.

  He only hoped the Golden had given it the ability to feel pain.

  Conover pointed at one of the numerous, nondescript black modules filling the interior of the drone, then made a pulling motion with his hand. Amy attacked the module with a tool, eventually working it free. It popped out and she put it aside.

  “Anything?” she asked, her voice thin and distant through their helmets.

  “Not yet.”

  She waited while he scanned the guts of the drone. The trouble was that it seemed to be able to keep whatever function was stopping the power core down in the engine room alive, despite all their efforts. Its oddly generalized tech seemed to allow it to shift things around in response to whatever they tried, keeping its effects distributed among different parts of itself as fast as they tried to deactivate it. It might have actually learned from the other drone they’d disassembled, studying how they approached it, and then developing ways to counter that. Or it might have something to do with the Forge’s security field, and the fact it wasn’t able to target the drone specifically, so they couldn’t isolate its functions into a few components and just remove them.

  He considered grabbing a hammer and just trying to smash things to render it inoperable but suspected no force they could apply could possibly damage it. The Slipwing’s weapons had barely affected them, after all, and even the Archetype had had to work at destroying them.

  He followed the flow of power, then pointed at another module. Amy went to work on it. That was the other problem—each module took about five or ten seconds to work free, and their time was running out.

  Conover coughed. The air he was breathing in had become warm, moist, and stale. They’d been at this for nearly two minutes now; even without talking, and minimizing their movements, his exhaled carbon dioxide was nearing a critical concentration. Another two minutes, maybe three, and what he’d be breathin
g would no longer be life-sustaining. He’d start suffering from anoxia, his mental faculties would quickly decline into apathetic confusion, and he’d soon pass out. Not long after that, he’d die, and Amy would die with him. Humanity would likely follow soon after, be it in months, or years, or however long it took the Golden to spread their lethality through the galaxy.

  “Anything?”

  He blinked, wincing as his eye suddenly stung. His suit heat might be dead and, if he wasn’t going to run out of air first, freezing to death was an eventual certainty. In the short term, though, it was excess body heat that was the problem, making him slick with sweat. It rolled down his face, threatening to blind him. But it was the way his mind had completely wandered off task that really alarmed him. Grimly, he made himself scan the drone, forcing himself to concentrate on the ebb and flow of energy through its components.

  “Nothing.”

  He pointed at another module, one whose removal offered some promise of blocking the drone’s functions, and made that tugging motion again. Amy, though, just let the tool rest by her side.

  “This isn’t working, Conover. I’m starting to lose my concentration. We can do another two or three modules, I think, and that’s it.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?” Conover asked.

  “For not being able to solve this. I’d convinced myself that I could fix any problem. I got cocky. But this is just beyond me.”

  “Don’t talk so much. Air, remember?”

  “Does it really matter?”

  Conover was going to say, Of course it matters, but it really didn’t, did it? So, instead, he just said, “Probably not.”

  “Anyway, I don’t really want to spend my last few minutes being all gloomy and quiet,” Amy said. “That’s just not me.”