The Messenger Box Set: Books 1-6

by J. N. Chaney

  “Somebody definitely knows what they’re doing here.” Amy nodded. “I’ve been checking out their tech. Not much of it is what I’d call new, but it’s all kept in good repair. I saw a water reclamator in one of the other domes that looked about a hundred years old. Half its parts looked homebrewed, but it was still chugging along. Really good water, too. Didn’t have that usual, nasty reclaimed taste, you know?”

  “Oh, you mean that hint of recycled urine?” Leira said. “That subtle flavor that makes the water on board a ship so special?”

  “Yeah. Exactly that.” Amy stuck out her tongue. “I hate that, blech.”

  Dash smiled. He knew exactly what she meant. No matter how much he tweaked the Slipwing’s reclamator, the water always had at least a glimmer of something…that didn’t bear thinking about.

  “Looks like you did okay with the gear we needed, though,” Leira said, gesturing at the cart piled with their supplies. “You and Viktor got all that stuff for a lot less than I thought it was going to cost us.”

  Viktor laughed. “Don’t look at me. That was all Amy. Turns out she drives a pretty hard bargain.”

  “I know,” Conover said. “I watched her buying that climbing gear. I swear she had the vendor trying to lower the price even more, and she put him off.”

  Dash couldn’t help smirking at the slightly dreamy look he gave Amy, but she just shrugged. “Hey, you don’t last long as a freelance mech engineer on Passage if you can’t get a decent rate on parts, repair bays, and maintenance drone time. But I don’t want to actually rip anyone off. They’ve got mouths to feed, after all. I’m just. . .opportunistic.”

  “Dash, over here,” Ragsdale called. He stood near another moving path that led out of the area; this one opened onto several bays holding the boxy, multi-wheeled trucks called buggies. Dash noticed he’d changed into gear more suited for trekking around outside, where the environment was less controlled. It included a wide-brimmed hat that made him reminiscent of a character in one of those ancient vids with men riding big quadrupeds called horses and shooting one another with crude slug-pistols.

  “This way,” Ragsdale called out, pointing at the nearest buggy bay on the right. “We’ll get your gear loaded and then get rolling. It’s a long trip, at least a full day and probably more. The sooner we start, the better.”

  “It’s not really that far,” Amy said, as she and Conover maneuvered the cart carrying their stuff toward the bay. “Maybe a hundred and fifty clicks from here?”

  Ragsdale offered her a thin smile. “And if we had roads to follow, it might be a quick trip. I’m afraid we’re not quite at the road-building stage yet. At least, not to where we’re going.”

  Amy curled her lip as she shoved on the cart. “So I’ve come millions and billions of kilometers just to plant my butt down in a seat and bounce across a boring landscape for hours on end.”

  Conover laughed just a little louder than the rest of them. “Your bum will be fine.”

  “That’s what you think,” Amy grumbled, but the corners of her mouth were turned up.

  8

  The buggy proved to be more comfortable than Amy predicted, traversing the rugged terrain on eight big, pneumatic tires. A clever system inflated and deflated the tires on the go, while switching power among the wheels, maintaining the best possible traction while also smoothing out the ride. Unfortunately, smoothing out the ride was a relative thing; it didn’t actually mean the ride was smooth. The buggy tilted, pitched, and bounced along a track cut through the jungle, following a set of ruts left by other vehicles making previous trips. A few times, the driver had to ease the vehicle along a steep hillside, the whole thing tipping alarmingly to one side. Dash felt his toes trying to dig themselves into the floor, the view to one side of the buggy becoming sky, the other wet muck and tangled foliage. Again, the vehicle had an answer for that—a series of counterweights that slid to the high side and stopped it from toppling over.

  Ragsdale and the pair of Specials accompanying him grinned wickedly at their unease. “And this is the easy part of the trip,” the Security Chief said, laughing. “Just wait until we get to the rough part of the road.”

  “Invigorating. Like a traveling fair, but without all those pesky vendors,” Dash remarked drily.

  “Huh,” Ragsdale said, giving him another look of appraisal. They fell into a silence, watching the smear of jungle outside, bumping by at an alarming speed.

  For hours.

  The sun set, plunging them into starlit darkness. Dash and the others dozed, but fitfully, being jolted awake whenever the buggy slammed over some rocks, or pitched down into a deeper rut, or suddenly reared, climbing a steep ridge, its powerful motors whining. At one point, Dash blinked himself awake because the buggy wasn’t rocking and jolting around. It was dark, so he put on the helmet he’d acquired back in Port Hannah and flipped down the night-vision screen. Looking outside, he saw the driver had eased the whole vehicle into a river, which now carried them downstream on its broad current. The trail actually resumed on the other side, far enough downstream to account for the drift as they crossed.

  When dawn finally lightened the sky, Dash woke to find they’d left the jungle behind, and now rumbled across a rocky hardpan, the big tires thumping over rocks and cracks in the earth where the desiccated ground had split open.

  He looked at Ragsdale, who was reclining across a bench seat, reading a…book. Dash recognized it, although he’d only seen a few of them. They were ancient technology—writing encoded on flat, flexible sheets made from compressed vegetable matter. He’d heard there were some preserved from the time of Old Earth that were worth astronomical fortunes. But aside from those, which were really no different than any other old, rare artifact—an investment—he didn’t see the point. Data-pads were just so much more durable and convenient.

  Ragsdale noticed Dash watching him. He looked at the book, then back at Dash. “Never seen one of these before?”

  Dash looked at his companions, all still sprawled asleep. “No, I have. Just seems kind of…clunky, I guess. I mean, what happens if that thing gets wet?”

  “It’s inconvenient, but I like it. Don’t ask me why. Outdated way of reading, perhaps, but there’s something about the feel of the page in your hand that speaks to me,” he explained.

  The buggy slowed and then stopped.

  Dash looked outside. They seemed to be at the top of a high ridge. The land fell away in a dramatic sweep both left and right. Ahead, a broad plain separated them from a rugged line of broken hills making up the horizon. He glanced toward his own data-pad and the map data it contained but recalled that the crash site lay on the far side of the depression before them, near those distant hills.

  Viktor blinked and sat up. So did Amy. Leira shifted in a way that told him she was about to wake up, while Conover—

  Snored.

  Dash turned back to Ragsdale. “Not too much longer, I guess.”

  The man answered with just a sly grin.

  Dash frowned. “What?”

  “Remember how I said we hadn’t got to the rough part of the road yet?”

  “Yeah…”

  Ragsdale stuffed his book into his pack and sat up. “Well, now we have.”

  As if on cue, the driver started the buggy again. It immediately pitched forward, as though it was toppling over a cliff.

  Viktor snapped out a curse. Amy yelped. Dash sucked in a breath so violent it hissed.

  The buggy plunged down the slope, going neither left nor right, and instead taking a straight shot toward the distant bottom. It was, Dash realized, the best way to avoid rolling the whole vehicle over, but it still flopped left, then right, then left again. Dash heard the counterweights on the roof slewing back and forth as they fought to keep the buggy from tipping. Leira and Conover were both jolted wide awake, staring wildly and just hanging on.

  The brutal, punishing ride went on and on. The vehicle ruts they followed had been rounded and deepened by what must be r
are, but intense falls of rain; the periodic deluges had also eroded deep channels in the dun hillside, while also dislodging rocks, some almost as big as the buggy itself.

  It didn’t end when they reached the bottom, either. What had looked like a flat plain, across which Dash thought they might be able to just roll at good speed, quickly eating up the rest of the trip, turned out to be as bad as the slope behind them. Maybe worse.

  As they pitched down into a hole, then wobbled to the right as the buggy climbed back out of it, Dash looked at Ragsdale.

  “Please tell me this smooths out!”

  “This is the smooth part—”

  A tremendous lurch cut him off. The buggy slewed sideways, dropped nose first, then slammed to a halt. Everyone aboard was flung forward; if they hadn’t been belted in and hanging on, they would have ended up in a pile around the driver. The tough cargo nets holding all their gear in the back of the buggy stretched, creaking ominously.

  Silence hummed, and the air was spangled with dust even inside the buggy. Dash looked around. “Everyone okay?”

  Everyone nodded. Conover, his hair stuck up in spikes, blinked stupidly, apparently not quite yet really awake. He finally turned and gaped back at Dash.

  “Are we there yet?”

  “You know,” Dash said, “I’m way better with spaceships than I am with things with wheels. But this thing looks stuck to me.”

  They stood atop a small rise, staring down at the buggy. The driver had apparently edged it too close to the brink of a ravine, which had given way in a spectacular tumble of debris below them. That sent the buggy nose first down the slope until it slid onto a massive boulder, where it got hung up. The particular way it had gotten caught left only the front two of its eight wheels actually touching the ground. When the driver had tried backing them out, he’d only churned the air with tires touching nothing.

  “Not enough traction,” Amy said, crouching and studying the vehicle with a critical eye. “Have to get at least two more of those wheels touching something they can grip.”

  Leira tossed her a bemused glance. “You worked with a lot of all-terrain vehicles back on that space station, did you?”

  Amy stood and shot her cousin a very funny look. “It’s called not being dumb? Knowing that wheels spinning in midair aren’t going to help you actually go anywhere?”

  “Easy, cuz. Just asking,” Leira said.

  “Okay. Just a little, um—”

  “Off after that ride? Me too,” Leira said.

  The motors whined as the driver tried again. One of the wheels planted on the ground caught and held this time, sending a shudder through the buggy. It wasn’t enough to actually dislodge it.

  Dash looked at Ragsdale. “So what do we do? Call for help?”

  “Nah. These things get stuck all the time.”

  “Really?”

  Ragsdale shrugged. “Well, that’s what I’ve heard. I’ve never actually seen one get stuck myself.”

  Dash wiped his forehead. Even as early in the day as it was, the heat was starting to become oppressive. He was glad for the tough, rip-proof fabric of their expedition outfits, but the trade-off was that they held onto the heat. Ragsdale had briefed them right before they departed about all the important survival stuff they needed to know—keeping hydrated, avoiding sunburn, and the like—but the reality, Dash realized, was going to be a lot more unpleasant than even the Security Chief had let on.

  Leira sidled up to him. “You know,” she said, her voice low and quiet, “you could just call Sentinel, bring the Archetype here, and use it to pick this buggy up and put it back on its wheels.”

  “I am available should you need me,” Sentinel said. “Signals are clear in this location, although I do not recommend exposing your advantage over an immovable wheeled vehicle,” Sentinel said.

  “To be fair, it’s quite stuck, and I’m losing weight in this heat,” Dash answered.

  “In one of your messages to a woman wearing a bikini, you stated that you were ‘buff as hell’. Will this mild weight loss not assist in this goal?” Sentinel asked.

  “No—and, I’m suspending your snooping privileges until further notice. Also, that was some time ago, and the, ah lady in question didn’t answer.”

  “True. She did not. I will honor your request, but I am available in your future attempts to get buff,” Sentinel said.

  “Thank you. I’ll take that under advisement.”

  Dash returned his eyes to Ragsdale, who’d moved back to the buggy as the driver dismounted; the two of them now conferred, pointing at the wheels, then at the broken ground. The two Specials he’d brought along had climbed back up out of the ravine to keep an eye out for something, which made Dash ever more alert. Ragsdale had warned of some potentially dangerous wildlife in the jungle but said that the desert was almost entirely barren of life.

  Dash shook his head at Leira. “Let’s keep that as a last resort. Ragsdale is already suspicious of us. I’d like to keep him as a potential ally—at least for now.”

  “He’s a spy, Dash.”

  “Of course he is. Wallis needs to keep tabs on us. Do you blame her?”

  “Not a bit. But it means he’s not really with us at all.”

  “Don’t be too sure of that,” Dash said. “These people might be really wary and distrustful, but they want to know what’s going on with that signal…how much it’s a threat, and how much it’s an opportunity.”

  “Which is something else we haven’t really talked about. What happens when we get to the wreck? How much do we let Ragsdale know?”

  Dash could only shrug. It was, indeed, a gaping hole in what amounted to their plan. “Since we don’t really know what we’re going to find, I’ve got no idea. I’d say we try as hard as we can to not let on anything about the Golden or the Unseen and stick to our cover story about our employers and their advanced tech.”

  Leira refocused on Ragsdale, who was now engaged in an animated discussion not just with the driver of the buggy, but also with Viktor and Amy. Despite being spaceship engineers, it seemed the operative word here was engineer, because neither seemed to be able to resist getting involved in the problem of righting the buggy.

  “He’s not stupid, Dash,” Leira said. “If we find anything more than just unidentifiable wreckage, he’s going to figure we’re not on the up and up.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Dash shrugged again. “We’ll just deal with it when the time comes, I guess.”

  “Dash!” Amy called, clambering across the rocks toward him. “That buggy’s really stuck. Why don’t you just call—”

  “For help?” Dash cut in. “Well, if we have to, I guess we can send a message back to Port Hannah. But is there no way we can get this thing unstuck ourselves?”

  Amy stopped, perched atop a boulder a couple of meters away, her mouth a quizzical twist to one side. Dash knew where she was going to go with that—calling for the Archetype—but he really didn’t want to involve the big mech if he could avoid it. So he gave her a look that he hoped said let’s not go any further with this.

  “I am happy to provide suggestions if you like?”

  Dash shook his head. “Not yet. We can figure this out.”

  Amy’s mouth straightened and she winked with a subtlety that surprised him. “Well, we could, if we could find something to hook its winch up to. Trouble is”—she gestured around—“there’s nothing. No big trees, no rocks big enough that the winch cable will reach, nothing.”

  Dash looked past her, frowning at the buggy, pitched nose down with its back end high in the air. “Looks to me like that big rock underneath it is the problem. It’s kind of hung up on it, right?”

  She glanced back and nodded. “Yeah. It’s holding all but those front two wheels off the ground.”

  “So why not hook the winch cable up to it? Seems to me the buggy could winch its ass-end back down, get those rear four tires back onto the ground there, and just back up.”

  Amy turned back again and
stared at the buggy for a moment, hands on hips and head falling into a contemplative tilt. Then she turned back to Dash, opened her mouth, and closed it again before awarding the buggy a final lingering gaze.

  “This tactic will work,” Sentinel said.

  “I know. Just needed Amy to get there on her own. She’s an engineer through and through. And—there it is,” Dash said.

  Amy turned back to Dash, a brilliant grin on her face. “That’s beautiful! Perfect! Dash, you’re a genius.”

  As Amy raced back to Viktor and the others clustered near the buggy, waving her arms and pointing back at Dash, he glanced at Leira. She was giving him a wry look.

  “Genius. Pfft.”

  “Hey, they never thought of it.”

  “That’s because they’re engineers. They’ll always find a solution, but it’s usually not the simplest one.”

  “You’re saying I’m simple, or simply a genius?” Dash asked.

  “Maybe a little of both.”

  “That works.” He smiled at the explosion of activity.

  They watched as the driver remounted and activated the winch. Amy handed the cable up to Ragsdale, who climbed up the incline of the buggy’s roof, pulling the cable behind him. When he reached the back of the vehicle, he dropped the cable to Viktor, who pulled it back to the big rock and starting working it around it. Within a few minutes, they had the cable hooked around the boulder and were ready to start easing the buggy back onto solid ground.

  “So, what have I missed?”

  Dash and Leira turned to find Conover picking his way down from the top of the ravine toward them.

  “Me being a genius, for one,” Dash said.

  “Thank you,” Sentinel said.

  “You’re quite welcome.”

  Conover gave him a bemused glance but kept looking around, finally saying, “Huh.”