by J. N. Chaney
“That’s for sure.”
He didn’t know what else to say. But Amy just chuckled.
“So you think I talk too much. Truth comes out, eh?”
“No! I think you talk just enough.”
There was silence again.
This time, Conover was the one to break it. “I’m sorry, actually, Amy. I’m sorry we got you into this.”
“Into what?”
“All of this. The Unseen, the Golden…where we are right now. If it wasn’t for us, you’d still be safe back at Passage.”
“Are you kidding? I wouldn’t have missed any of this! To see all this amazing tech—the Archetype, and the Forge, even these stupid damned drones and that Harbinger thing—that’s stuff I could only dream about!”
“Yeah, but—”
“But nothing. This has been amazing. Don’t get me wrong—I’m definitely not anxious to keel over here, dead. But if you’d said to me, you can spend the rest of your life, years and years of it, fixing leaky hatches and broken power couplings on Passage, or you can spend a few weeks instead seeing all of this awesome, utterly mind-blowing stuff—” She chuckled again. “Yeah, that’s not even a question that needs to be asked.”
Conover blinked, then blinked again. It took some effort now to assemble his thoughts into anything coherent.
“Okay,” he said. “I guess I’m glad for that, anyway.”
“Besides, then I never would have gotten to know you.”
Once more, Conover blinked. Had she just really said that?
“I’m glad I got to know you, too, Amy.”
Conover wondered how Dash was doing. And Leira. And what Viktor and the monks were up to.
“I am a little scared, though,” Amy finally said.
Conover let impulse guide him and put his gloved hand on her arm. “Yeah. I am, too.”
“Maybe this drone just exploding would have been better. Quicker, you know?”
Conover nodded, though she couldn’t see it, of course. Except she could. He hadn’t even remembered lifting his head, so now it was their faceplates that touched. He looked straight into Amy’s eyes, just a few inches and an eternity of hard vacuum away.
“I’m okay with it being like this,” he said. “You know, these last few minutes.”
She blinked, slowly, but smiled. “Maybe you’re right.” She nodded. “Yeah, you are.”
He smiled back but wasn’t even sure why. What was he smiling about, anyway? Wasn’t this really, really bad?
He wasn’t sure anymore. Wasn’t sure of anything, except that he was suddenly so tired and needed to sleep.
Amy’s eyes fluttered closed.
So Conover closed his, too.
The Harbinger was slightly faster than the Archetype. Dash needed to slow it down.
I can do that, he thought.
He fired the distortion cannon, its pulse of gravity yanking on the Harbinger, slowing it slightly, while also pulling the Archetype slightly ahead. He did it again.
Again.
Each time, the gap between the two mechs diminished. The Harbinger abruptly stopped and spun about, apparently deciding that Dash would, eventually, overtake it with enough shots.
“Yeah,” Dash said. “Time to end this, one way or the other.”
He raced in toward the Harbinger. It, in turn, flung itself toward him, their massed weaponry streaking through space at speeds no human could tolerate. Except for Dash.
He fired the dark-lance, snapping out shots as fast as the weapon could recycle. At the same time, he unleashed a salvo of missiles. Another. The Harbinger staggered under the dark-lance hits, but kept coming at him. As it did, the missiles raced in. Its point defense system took out a few, but it finally had to loose a blast from its chest cannon to counter the rest. Dash already knew it took some time for that big weapon to recuperate, so he poured on the speed. Seeing three of the missiles strike it and detonate, he smiled grimly. None of this, he knew, was really doing much damage to the Golden mech, but it was keeping the thing occupied.
Trailing bits of glowing debris, the Harbinger recovered from the missile blasts and resumed charging at Dash.
“Yeah. Bring it on, you bastard. Let’s do this up close and personal.”
Thirty seconds to what would be a collision, if one of them didn’t pull away.
Twenty.
Ten.
Dash didn’t waver.
Sentinel said, “Collision alert."
“No shit!” Dash said, and pushed the Archetype even harder. His mech was bigger, heavier; hopefully, slamming into the enemy mech at their combined speeds would do enough damage to it to put it out of action, even if it killed him.
But the Harbinger suddenly shimmered—and then vanished.
Dash raced through the empty volume of space where the other mech had been only seconds before.
“No.”
He started to spin around, frustrated fury boiling through him, desperate to find it so he could kill it. But there was no sign of the Harbinger. It was gone.
“No. No!”
25
Conover opened his eyes. He saw…a ceiling. It was sheet plastilene, scavenged from some old cargo pods. His aunt had told him that if he wanted a place to sleep, he’d have to install a new roof on the shed out behind her shop. So he had, and he’d done a decent job—at least, a half-assed decent one. He was no engineer, though he wanted to fancy himself as being one, someday.
He looked around. The clutter of the shed loomed around him, hemming him into a cramped, little space near the back.
He was in bed. At his aunt’s. Oh. So he was still on Penumbra.
That meant everything that had happened—everything about Dash, and Leira, and Viktor, the Slipwing; everything about the Unseen and the Golden, the Archetype and the Forge—
It had all just been a dream?
And Amy? She’d just been part of the dream, too?
“Duh, no,” Amy said, grinning her goofy grin at him. “None of that was a dream, dummy. It was all real.”
She knelt beside his bed—in a vacsuit. Weird. He could see her grin clearly through the faceplate, even though the light suddenly seemed far too dim for his aunt’s shed on Penumbra.
“But I’m here, still in bed,” he said. “I just woke up.” He gestured around. “I’m still here at my aunt’s place.”
“No, you’re not. You’re still kneeling beside that drone in the Forge. Oh, and you’re also dying.”
He frowned. That seemed to make sense. “But how could I be here, if I’m there?”
“Because this is all just a hallucination, of course. The neurons in your brain are firing like crazy, because they’re all starting to die. Soon, you’ll see a tunnel, and a bright light, and then that’s it.” She shook her head. “And that’s how much of a rational, analytical guy you are, you know. You can’t even die from anoxia without explaining it to yourself first.”
Conover opened his mouth to say—something, he wasn’t sure what, but it would be some sort of protest, only the whole world shuddered suddenly.
“What was that?”
Amy shrugged. “Beats me. I’m just a figment, remember? I only know what you know.”
Another shudder came, more forceful.
Conover gave Amy a puzzled frown. “Okay, I have to admit, I never expected dying to be quite so weird.”
He stopped as a dazzling light suddenly filled the world. It washed away the bed, the shed, even Amy. It also provoked a searing pain that erupted behind his eyes, threatening to blow his head apart.
“Conover? Can you hear me?”
The light faded a bit, and now he could see a face. It wasn’t Amy, though.
“Conover!” the voice said. “Just breathe. In. Out. Just like that.”
Through the blasts of pain detonating inside his head, Conover realized he recognized that face. It was—
“Kai?”
The monk nodded behind a helmet faceplate. “You recognize me—that�
�s good. Look, just keep breathing while I check on Amy. In and out. Nice and slow.”
Conover wedged himself up from where he’d been sprawled. He was far from his aunt’s shed on Penumbra. He was still in the breached compartment on the Forge, still beside the now partly disassembled Golden drone. And Amy was also here, also pulling herself upright, back to her knees.
“I’m hallucinating again,” Conover said.
But Kai turned to him and smiled. “Perhaps. I don’t know if you’re hallucinating or not. But I do think I got to you two just in time.”
Dash spun in a fast circle, desperately trying to find any sign of the Harbinger. Gravity, he thought. It has a gravity signature. Find that, find the Harbinger.
Something slammed against the Archetype from behind.
“Unless he finds me,” Dash said. He didn’t think. He’d been jumped in seedy bars and grungy backstreets often enough to have it down to reflex—just grab-lean-pull-flip the guy attacking you over your shoulder. This was fighting dirty. Dash was made to fight dirty.
A colossal blast of energy erupted somewhere behind and above Dash. As he finished the move, he realized it was a shot from the Harbinger’s chest-cannon, one that would have hit him from behind at point-blank range. Instead, the colossal energy discharge just vented into empty space as he flung the Golden mech, and its weapon, around.
He followed through, swinging the Harbinger around and down until it was in front of him. Just letting his instincts keep flowing, he followed up with a punch to the side of its head and a knee into its back, both blows connecting with metallic gongs that reverberated through his senses. The enemy mech doubled backward, while his blow slammed a massive dent into the side of its head.
Which was when conscious thought took over from sheer instinct again, and Dash thought bar fight.
Okay, that, he knew. He spun the Harbinger around. It responded fast, lashing out, slamming a fist into his shoulder that rattled the Archetype deep in its components. At the same time, it tried to pull back, breaking contact. Dash thought, oh, no you don’t and clinched it back closed, slamming his own fist into its head, over and over—just like he had in that grubby taproom on Gamora, when that bounty hunter had tried to take him for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Dash had pounded the man’s head until he dropped, giving him a chance to flee to the Slipwing and get himself away. He’d never been back to Gamora since, but the thrill of the fight lived on in the moment with each colossal punch he delivered.
“Yeah, no time for nostalgia,” he muttered, hitting the Harbinger again with a thunderous blow. Again. Its dark metal seemed far more vulnerable to his hits than it did to shooting. Bit by bit, it twisted and crumpled under the repeated hammer blows from the Archetype’s fists.
Good.
And despite its nimble quickness and the AI controlling it, the Harbinger lagged, its counter blows uncoordinated and slow compared to his. It might be tech so sophisticated Dash might not even be able to begin understanding how it worked, but it had never been in a bar fight on Gamora.
Even better. A grim, humorless smile on his lips, Dash swung again. And again.
He pulled back a massive fist, then let it fly, and his smile deepened as it landed.
“Kai?” Conover asked, wincing at the throbbing pain his own voice provoked in his head. “Are you actually here?”
“Well, we all only view the universe from our own, limited perspective, so who’s to say if anyone is really here.”
“Kai,” Amy said. “Just quiet a second, okay? I’m waiting for my head to stop exploding. Also, ease up on the theology.”
“Philosophy, perhaps,” Kai said.
“Whatever. Leave off on the complicated stuff. Still feeling the aftereffects of anoxia,” Conover said. “Too much carbon dioxide, not enough oxygen. Causes headaches.”
“Really? I hadn’t noticed,” Amy said with black humor.
As Conover’s brain sparked back to life, it lit up with questions—and urgency. “Kai, how did you get here? And how are we breathing again?”
“And talking?” Amy asked. “Our suits are still dead.”
“Viktor knew your suits would be rendered inoperable by the Forge’s security field, which means you’d quickly run out of air. He worked with Custodian to come up with a solution.” Kai pointed at small devices, of obviously Unseen make, that had been plugged into the auxiliary ports on their suits. “Custodian was able to make these. They will apparently give us about thirty minutes of breathable air. They also allow us to talk.”
Conover shook his head. The knives being driven into his brain had started to slowly withdraw, the blinding pain subsiding. “Why are you here, though? Why didn’t Viktor bring them?”
“He wanted to, but I persuaded him that he was far more likely to be needed in the engine room, I believe it’s called? We of the Order may be able to read the Unseen’s writings, but we know nothing about engineering.”
“Have you ever even worn a spacesuit before?” Amy asked.
“Actually, I haven’t. I must admit that it is rather nerve-wracking, but also quite exciting. The journey here on a maintenance remote was most exhilarating.”
Conover shook his head again. “You took a terrible risk, Kai. This isn’t something you just do.”
“I know. But it’s a risk I was glad to endure. After all, it gives me yet another opportunity to oppose the foul works of the Enemy. Speaking of which, ah—” He pointed at the drone. “I assume that is the thing that most immediately concerns us. Viktor was adamant that we disable it as soon as possible. Dash continues to battle the…Harbinger, correct? But the outcome remains far from certain.”
“Okay then,” Conover said. “Let’s get back to it.” He picked up a tool and handed it to Kai. “Since you’re here, you can help.”
Kai flashed a wicked smile. “Participate directly in the defeat of the Enemy? Just tell me what to do.”
Dash struck over and over at the Harbinger, leaving crumpled dents in its hull. He didn’t think about it, didn’t plan his moves—he just acted, driven by raw gut instinct, and using moves honed over more barroom brawls and street scuffles than he could easily count. At first, his unpredictability and apparently uncoordinated shoves, kicks, slap, punches, and body checks dominated the fight; the Harbinger’s AI just couldn’t keep up. But it was beyond smart, could take in vast amounts of information, and soon began to fight back, harder and harder.
Dash realized he was essentially teaching the damned thing how to brawl, and the worst part was, it learned quickly.
After a heavy blow to its chest, he shoved himself back, opening some space. He’d damaged its deadly chest-cannon, but not for long. He had to find a way to end this, quickly and decisively.
Which meant he had to find a way to keep fighting his battle, and not the Harbinger’s. It clearly outclassed the Archetype in a duel at range, and that’s where they were headed. Not only was damage to his own mech starting to pile up but Dash himself was starting to flag. He wouldn’t be able to stay in this close battle much longer.
He needed a breather.
“Sentinel, we’re going back to that brown dwarf now!” he said, gasping from the exertion of flinging himself through one brawling move after another in the Archetype’s cradle.
Without waiting for an answer, he spun around, launched himself, and was abruptly back to the x-ray saturated space surrounding the brown dwarf, its glowing, swirling surface looming over him.
“Do you once more expect the Harbinger to follow you here?”
“Honestly, no. I just need a minute to take a few breaths and think.”
“Then it will proceed toward the Forge, meaning you have accomplished essentially nothing.”
“Except buying some more time,” Dash snapped back. “Which I hope Viktor and the others are putting to good use. That mech is also beaten up pretty badly, so it’s probably limited in terms of movement.”
He broke off as the Harbinger winked into ex
istence and immediately threw itself at him.
“Or maybe not.” Dash lifted his fists to greet the enemy.
Conover forced himself to ignore the dregs of his anoxia hangover and concentrated instead on the flow of power through the drone. It kept shifting, adapting itself to everything they tried. With Kai’s help, they’d now managed to gut the thing pretty thoroughly, but it didn’t seem to make any difference. The damned thing’s functionality seemed as robust as it had ever been.
He cursed in frustration. “This just isn’t working.” He sighed. “Maybe we should just let it blow itself up.”
“Why would it bother, though?” Amy asked. “Whether it’s fully powered up or not, it seems to be totally on top of things here. It really doesn’t have to do anything at all, right?”
Conover gave a bitter nod. Amy was right. Everything they’d done, including almost dying, had been a complete waste of time.
“The Enemy is insidious and deceptive indeed,” Kai said.
Conover started to lean back, away from the drone. He wasn’t actually giving up.
Was he?
No. Wait.
He looked back at the drone.
Whether it’s fully powered up or not, Amy had just said, it seems to be on top of the situation. It really doesn’t have to do anything, right?
And Kai—The Enemy is insidious and deceptive indeed.
Hard on the heels of that came another memory.
It was a good decision, he remembered Sentinel saying regarding the first drone, to remove this module from the drone and put physical distance between the two. The module persisted in its attempts to communicate with, and activate, other drone systems as I accessed it. Fortunately, Custodian was able to block those attempts from reaching the drone itself.
They’d been extracting modules from the drone, and just tossing them aside. Meanwhile, Conover’s attention had been fixed on the drone itself, and the modules still in place inside it. His eyes, when he used them to study tech, effectively had no peripheral vision.