The Messenger Box Set: Books 1-6

by J. N. Chaney

  “It seems that way because every one of your human senses is being challenged. This is not a punitive event, Leira. It is necessary.”

  “You make it sound so…so simple,” she said. “Doesn’t seem like Dash had this much trouble when he started flying the Archetype.”

  “Ah, yes. Ego. Sentinel and Custodian have been clear that it is an unfortunate attribute of organic species in general, and your species in particular.”

  She paused with the glass just short of her lips, then lowered it again. “What do you mean?”

  “Your ego is your sense of self-worth or self-esteem.”

  “Yes.”

  “Essentially, it is the value you place upon yourself.”

  “I know what ego is,” she said, eyes narrowed. “And that’s not the issue. It’s my performance.”

  “You are evaluating yourself in the context of another individual’s achievements. In this case, the Messenger.”

  “I am not.” Leira stopped and frowned. “Am I?”

  “Yes, you are, which is strange and inefficient. Your performance with respect to the Messenger is not an issue. Your performance with respect to the Golden, however—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I get it.” She sighed, crossed her arms, and glanced up at the ceiling. “Am I going to have you inside my head from now on? Because of this Meld thing?”

  The prospect of the snooty AI—because the word snooty absolutely nailed Tybalt’s stiff and always slightly disapproving behavior—being co-resident in her own mind made Leira decidedly uncomfortable. When the searing pain of the “interface” had faded and she had the tech required to allow her to Meld with the Swift and Tybalt implanted, she’d been intrigued, even a little excited. Now, though, it seemed she’d need to share her headspace with the AI, at least to an extent. The fact that he was something of an asshole hadn’t occurred to her as a pitfall. Sentinel sure didn’t seem as…well, snooty.

  “Which is because Sentinel was created for the express purpose of waiting to Meld with the Messenger and, therefore, had to be somewhat generic in terms of her personality,” Tybalt said. “I, on the other hand, am more distinctly tailored to accommodate your particular way of thinking.”

  “Okay,” Leira said. “First of all, I get the whole Meld thing when it comes to piloting the Swift, or understanding Unseen or Golden tech and history and such things. But I’m really not comfortable with you being able to just…I don’t know, read my mind any time you want.”

  “Leira, I—”

  “And second, what do you mean you’re tailored to my way of thinking?” she went on, deliberately cutting Tybalt off. “What’s that supposed to mean? What, exactly, is my way of thinking?”

  “To clarify,” Tybalt said, “I am not truly capable of knowing all of your thoughts—even if I was inclined to know them, which I am not. Frankly, the majority of your thought processes are irrational, to the point of being bizarre.”

  “Hey!”

  “For instance, your preoccupation with the mechanical aspects of your species’ reproduction is especially puzzling.”

  “Okay, whoa! Stop right there! I am not preoccupied with—ah, that.”

  “Every time you observe one of the males of your species, a portion of your mind evaluates them according to a variety of criteria, including age, physical characteristics, bodily odors—”

  “Stop…right there.” Leira put her hands on her hips, then adjusted them, and then crossed and uncrossed her arms. Twice. “I do not do that.”

  “But you do. Of course, upon further consideration, it does seem that most of those thought processes are performed by your brain in an autonomous, subconscious manner.” After a pause, Tybalt went on, “You are not even actually aware of them. Instead, they appear to happen automatically, as the basis of a biological imperative. Interesting.” There was another pause. “I am curious then—of all of the male humans present on the Forge, with which one, or ones, would you most consciously like to engage in the act of reproduction?”

  “You have got to be kidding me. Do you really expect me to answer that?”

  “Of course. Why would you not? It would be interesting to compare your conscious and unconscious thought patterns regarding the matter.”

  “Look, Tybalt, there is no way…”

  Her voice trailed off. Damn it, the AI had her intrigued now.

  “What the hell am I thinking?” she muttered, shaking her head. “No. We are not going to discuss this, Tybalt. My concern is keeping you out of my thoughts in the unlikely event some random flash of, ah, biological memory flares up in my mind. Nothing more.”

  “You may choose to suspend the Meld whenever you wish.”

  “I—oh. Wait. Really?”

  “Yes, really.”

  “How?”

  “In the same way you would interact with the Swift—including firing its weapons, a fact that still seems to elude you. You simply have to will that it be so.”

  “Will that it be so?”

  “Indeed.”

  Leira tried to envision kicking Tybalt out of her mind. She got a nasty little thrill out of it but immediately wondered if it had worked, or if he could still read her mind, which made her wonder if she’d just invited him back in.

  “Perhaps, Leira, we can agree that you will verbalize your desire to suspend the Meld, and that it will remain suspended until you verbalize your desire to restore it again,” Tybalt said. “That will have to suffice until you have developed the mental discipline to do it the correct way.”

  “I finished school years ago,” Leira said. “But this feels like I’m right back there, being lectured.” She sighed. “Okay. Fine. Let’s suspend the Meld. Get out of my head, Tybalt.”

  Silence.

  “Are you still there?” she asked.

  “I am. However, I can now only communicate with you by audible means, like this.”

  Leira narrowed her eyes at the ceiling. She pretty much had to take the AI at his word, didn’t she?

  What a huge, arrogant, condescending ass Tybalt was.

  Her eyes flicked back up at the ceiling again, waiting for a reply.

  “I realize that you are probably thinking all sorts of dire things about me,” the AI said. “However, I am not currently capable of interacting with those thoughts.”

  Leira sighed again. “Fine.” She walked over and retrieved the VR set from where she’d thrown it, but she hesitated before putting it back on her head.

  “Tybalt, you said that you had been tailored to my thought processes. What does that mean, exactly?”

  “Custodian and Sentinel analyzed your words and deeds as they have experienced them and then determined the personality to give me that was best suited to interacting with you.”

  “So they think I work best with a smug, full-of-himself know-it-all?”

  As soon as she voiced it, she realized that she had, in a way, just described Dash—hadn’t she?

  “My personality is designed to challenge you, to provoke you into following productive lines of thought, and to point out shortcomings and deficiencies in your intent. Would you really rather I just accede to your every whim?”

  Leira opened her mouth, meaning to say, Yeah, kind of. But she didn’t, because Tybalt was actually right. She didn’t need an AI for that—at least, not one more complicated than the simple virtual assistants that took care of basic ship functions for the Slipwing.

  She put the VR set on. “Okay, Tybalt, you can come back into my mind. Now, let’s try this simulation again.”

  As the cockpit of the Swift popped into existence around her, it struck Leira that having Tybalt looking over her shoulder, ready to assist her as another Golden attack on the Forge materialized, wasn’t entirely terrible.

  Leira put the VR set down on the table, grabbed the flask containing the plumato wine, and poured herself a glass.

  “I earned this,” she said, licking her lips.

  “You are rewarding yourself for a performance that was,
at best, adequate?”

  She sniffed, said, “Damned right I am,” and took a swig.

  The door slid open, admitting Dash, Viktor, and Kai.

  “Hey, Leira,” Dash said. “How goes the sim training?”

  “There,” Tybalt said. “You are currently experiencing the unconscious evaluation I described, with particular emphasis, I might add, on the Messenger’s—”

  “Get out of my head, Tybalt!”

  Dash gave her a puzzled look. “What was that all about?”

  “Oh. Tybalt noticed that I tend to evaluate everyone when I see them…you know, critically. Because I’m too…critical. Judgmental. That sort of thing.”

  As she spoke, Leira felt herself turning a shade redder. She braced herself for the AI to go on speaking, and was ready to cut him off again if he did, before he said something truly embarrassing. But Tybalt held his virtual tongue.

  “I see,” Dash said. He paused a moment, then shrugged. “Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that we’re leaving the Forge for a while. Kai has a line on an Unseen data repository that might give us a whole lot of answers to stuff well before we might manage to unlock it all here, on the Forge.”

  “Okay, but the Swift isn’t ready yet,” Leira said. “Custodian said it would be another couple of days before it’s ready to fly.”

  “I know.”

  She put down the plumato wine and picked up the last nutrient bar. She’d eaten the others, satisfying the ravenous hunger that seemed to come from the vigorous, full-body workouts flying the Swift seemed to require. “Well, it’ll be nice to have one last crack at flying the Slipwing.”

  “Yeah, about that,” Dash said. “You’re not coming this time. You need to stay here and keep working with Tybalt, get yourself as ready to pilot the Swift as you can.”

  Leira had the bar unwrapped, but she lowered it without taking a bite. “What? Who’s going to fly the Slipwing then?”

  “Amy will.”

  “Dash, she’s not ready.”

  “And she never will be if we keep letting you fly her, Leira. Just like you won’t be ready to fly the Swift.”

  “But—”

  “Dash is right, Leira,” Viktor said. “We need to start thinking bigger picture. Your place is here, looking after the Forge and working with Tybalt.”

  “I understand your desire to get to grips with the Enemy of All Life, and I applaud it,” Kai said. “But this really is the best course of action.”

  Leira snapped out a frustrated growl and bit into the nutrient bar. “This sucks,” she said through a mouthful of what tasted like sweetened wax—not exactly a treat, but for some reason, she really liked the damned things. “I feel like I’m being sidelined.”

  “Hardly sidelined, Leira,” Viktor said. “More like your role has changed. We need you ready to pilot the Swift.”

  She chomped into the nutrient bar. “M’guess.”

  “That said, if you continue consuming nutrient bars at the current rate, it will be necessary to revise the configuration of the cradle interface aboard the Swift to accommodate your revised girth,” Tybalt added.

  Leira gaped at the ceiling. “Did you just call me fat?”

  “No, I am saying that you will potentially become so, given your intake of calories.”

  “Custodian, I have a question,” Leira said, swallowing.

  “Proceed,” Custodian replied.

  “Can you melt Tybalt back into slag and start over? I don’t like this model.”

  “Tybalt seems to be functioning normally. That would, therefore, be a wasteful use of the resources of the Forge.”

  She turned her glare on Dash. “How come you don’t have to put up with this sort of crap from Sentinel?”

  Dash, who was clearly trying very hard not to laugh, shrugged. “Sentinel and I have an understanding.”

  “We do?” Sentinel asked. “And what is the nature of this understanding we have?”

  “That I’m the boss.”

  “Ah.”

  “Ah? That’s it?”

  Leira smirked. “Maybe you don’t have quite the understanding you thought you did.”

  “Yeah, well, at least Sentinel and I don’t seem to need couples counseling the way you and Tybalt do.”

  Leira shrugged but somehow suddenly felt protective of her AI, no matter how snooty he might be. “It’s just early days. We’ll get along just fine.”

  “At least Sentinel doesn’t think I’m, ahh…thick.” Dash held his hands up, grinning.

  Leira put her hands on her hips, but Viktor interposed himself. “Before we find you two taking this outside and settling it like mechs, how about we sort out the details of our trip to Orsino, and that Unseen data archive, hmm?”

  “Close call. It’s unseemly for us to fight like—well, like the couriers we are,” Dash said, laughing.

  “Agreed. Wouldn’t want to sully our image,” Leira said, but she gave Dash the stink eye just for good measure.

  Viktor rolled his eyes at Kai. “Maybe we should just leave them both behind and let the grown ups”—he shot both Dash and Leira a bemused glare— “get the job done.”

  Kai grinned. “Indeed. Perhaps we should just lock them both in this room and not let them out until they make up.”

  “We’re at peace, gentlemen,” Leira said, looking at the half-eaten nutrient bar. Sighing, she wrapped it back up and tossed it on the table.

  As they left to find the others and start working out the details of their upcoming trip, Dash leaned close to Leira. “By the way, what was Tybalt talking about when he mentioned your unconscious evaluation? With particular emphasis on my…what, exactly?”

  Leira smiled sweetly back at him. “Your ego. Apparently, it’s the biggest part of you—by far.”

  4

  As soon as the Archetype dropped out of unSpace, Dash scanned the system ahead. He immediately located the obvious binary planets of Orsino and Brahe, along with another dozen or so rocky bodies, all much smaller. Strangely, he found only one gas giant—a dim, cold world far from the star, on the very edge of the system. Conversely, starward of the binary pair, a massive asteroid field whirled around the star, a chaotic swirl of rocks that would render navigation through the innermost part of the system almost impossible.

  What he didn’t see was any evidence of Golden activity. That didn’t mean there was none, of course, but at least there weren’t flotillas of ships or drones, or threats like the Harbinger, the mech that attacked the Forge. But the Archetype did sense Dark Metal on the moon, Orsino, and somewhere else. Now that was odd. Dark Metal signatures were generally pretty specific once the stuff had been detected. This particular return shimmered and wobbled across the heads-up like Dark Metal that just couldn’t decide where it wanted to be. It skittered across only a few degrees of view, but that still represented a volume of space big enough to hold millions, maybe tens of millions of ships, but with no two ever being in visual distance of one another.

  With a flicker on the heads-up, another ship fell out of unSpace. It was the Slipwing, right on time. They’d agreed that, when approaching a new system, the Archetype would lead and reconnoitre, raising the alarm if the system wasn’t safe. Absent any such alarm, the Slipwing would follow, but stay in the netherworld sandwiched between real space and unSpace using the system called the Fade. No one had balked at the caution, though. If they were going to land in a pile of crap, better for the Archetype to lead the way.

  “Okay, guys,” Dash said. “I’m still reading nothing except some Dark Metal on Orsino, and some more somewhere else in the system. Can’t seem to resolve the second one very well. Conover, what’s your spiffy new Dark Metal-o-tron getting?”

  Conover’s sensor array was good—and might even be a little better at resolving Dark Metal at short ranges than the Archetype was. At this distance, though, Dash could imagine Conover just shaking his head.

  “Pretty much the same. Which is weird. This second signature”—Conover paused as he s
tudied and tweaked his detector— “isn’t behaving right. It’s like something containing Dark Metal is constantly jumping around the inner system.”

  “Yeah, among all those rocks close into the star,” Dash said. “Well, let’s keep a close eye on that and head in-system. Amy, stay well behind me, in case whatever Conover’s weird signal is turns out to be something nasty.”

  “Got it, Dash!” Amy replied, the enthusiasm in her voice making Dash smile. The novelty of flying the Slipwing had worn off Dash long ago, but Amy’s delight around piloting her was undiminished. He assumed it would eventually fade—probably. When it came to Amy, everything seemed fun and exciting, always.

  What a way to view the world, with such unjaded glee. Dash found it easier to understand an ancient and bitter alien war than Amy’s constant grin.

  The Archetype leading the way, they started in-system, Orsino dead ahead.

  “There are power emissions down there,” Conover said, as the Archetype and the Slipwing slid into orbit around Orsino. “Solid returns, too. Something’s pretty active on the surface, all in one small area.”

  “Yeah, I see that,” Dash said. “Now, let me guess—they’re coming from right where we want to go, aren’t they? Kai?”

  “Based on the data stores about this place back on Shylock, yes, they are. The Unseen archives are in the same place these power emissions are coming from.”

  “Of course they are. They couldn’t be on the other side of the planet for once, could they.”

  “Dash,” Viktor said. “I’ve been searching the colony registry, but it’s not showing any settlement here. What I did find, though, on the Needs Slate, was a job listed by something called the New Vistas Mining Co-Op. They were looking to contract cargo ships for deliveries to and from here.”

  “Were looking?”

  “The listing expired a couple of months ago.”

  “Okay, so we’ve got some miners down there,” Dash said.

  “Or some of their equipment still generating power, anyway,” Viktor replied.

  “They wouldn’t just leave a bunch of perfectly good stuff behind, would they?” Amy asked.