The Messenger Box Set: Books 1-6

by J. N. Chaney

  “Is it likely to be a Golden trap?” Leira cut in.

  “It would fit their pattern of behavior, yes,” Tybalt replied.

  “Tell you what. Let’s just assume it is a trap and proceed accordingly,” Dash said.

  The two mechs swept starward, their trajectory almost perpendicular to the plane of the system’s ecliptic, to avoid the worst of the debris. Dash watched as the fitful Dark Matter signals slowly resolved and strengthened. He also kept an eye on the threat display, a new feature he’d asked Custodian and Sentinel to add to the Archetype’s heads-up. It fused the entire threat situation around the mech into a single, easily digested summary of the nature, direction, range, and overall degree of danger from anything classified as enemy activity.

  Right now, it was blank.

  “Okay, so it looks like the strongest returns are coming from the thickest part of the debris cloud, just starward of that biggest of the three…uh, protoplanets, I guess you could call them?” Dash said.

  “Protoplanets is, indeed, the correct term,” Sentinel said.

  “You don’t need to sound surprised at my knowledge of astronomy,” Dash said with a grand wave.

  “I believe that achievement should be celebrated.”

  “Okay, now you sound like a primary school teacher I once had.”

  “Dash,” Leira cut in. “Those signals have resolved into three different targets. Three very small targets, at that.”

  Dash studied the heads-up. “Yeah, I see that. Small, as in—holy crap, they’re, what, two meters across?”

  “A two-meter body composed of Dark Metal would still be an extremely significant find,” Sentinel said.

  “Yeah, I know. I just can’t help thinking that’s the perfect size for, say, a mine.”

  “You did say to expect a Golden trap,” Tybalt said.

  “Yeah. Well, on that note—Leira, you stay back, keep a wide view of things, and be ready to raise the alarm. I’m going to take the Archetype in for a closer look.”

  “Will do.”

  The Swift decelerated, falling away behind the Archetype. Dash maintained his current speed for as long as he could, then decelerated in turn, trading velocity for maneuverability as the debris field thickened around the mech.

  The threat display lit up, tracking fragments of rock and metal—mostly iron and nickel, so probably the remnants of a planet’s core—that were on collision courses with the Archetype. Dash nudged the mech as he worked his way into the debris field, yawing from side to side, pitching up and down, accelerating and decelerating in bursts. The display would clear, then fill again with new collision warnings. When the Archetype was within a hundred klicks of the target fragments, he just gave up and plowed on, relying on the mech’s shield to protect it from damage.

  “Okay, so we’ve got a piece that seems to contain Dark Metal there, and one there…and one over there.” Dash’s eyes flicked across the heads-up and settled on the closest. “Let’s check out that one first.”

  “Dash, a bit of a problem out here,” Leira said. “I’ve confirmed it with Tybalt, and we can’t get a reliable firing solution to cover you because of all the crap between us.”

  Dash looked across the heads-up and nodded. “Yeah. This part of the asteroid field is pretty dense.”

  “It’s not the only thing that’s dense in there.”

  “Oh, wait, give me time to stop laughing so hard,” Dash said, his voice flat. “Anyway, you might as well come in then, and we’ll just work through these targets faster. The less time we spend here, the better.”

  He saw the Swift accelerate, nimbly dodging rocks along the way. As Leira worked her way toward him, he turned his attention to the fragment of rock returning the Dark Matter signal. Studying it closely, he could see it was…a fragment of rock. There wasn’t much else to note about it.

  On impulse, he reached out and nudged it with the Archetype’s fist. The rock veered off its current trajectory and began to drift slowly away.

  “Well, that was pretty uninteresting,” Dash said.

  “What were you expecting to happen?” Sentinel asked.

  “Considering what we’ve come through so far, pretty much anything. Don’t get me wrong, though. Uninteresting is good.” He zoomed in on the fragment until it filled the heads-up. “And that is one damned uninteresting rock. I don’t see any sign of Dark Metal at all.”

  “Which means it is likely contained within the fragment.”

  “I’m hoping that’s true.” Dash considered it for a moment, then grabbed the fragment with both the Archetype’s massive hands. With a powerful twist, he sheared the rock in two.

  What it revealed left Dash staring.

  “Okay, that’s not uninteresting at all.”

  The shattered rock drifted away, revealing more and more of what had been contained inside the fragment. It was a mass of some sort of metallic mesh, with an oblong ingot of Dark Metal embedded in it.

  “What the hell is that?” he said.

  “Until a more detailed analysis is completed, I can only speculate. However, given the weak signal from what is obviously a relatively pure ingot of Dark Metal, I would suggest the mesh provides some sort of dampening effect. Without it, this quantity of Dark Metal should have been much easier to detect, at a considerably greater distance.”

  “So somebody hid it here?”

  “Presumably the Golden, as only they would have the material-science skills to construct such a dampening mesh.”

  Dash made a huh sound. “Leira, are you seeing this?”

  “Yup. Tybalt’s showing it to me now. It must be some sort of Dark Metal—storage? A cache of Dark Metal hidden away here?”

  “I guess, sure. Well, the Golden’s loss is our gain.”

  “I’ve closed on another fragment. I’ll check it out.”

  Dash waited, giving the threat display an occasional scan. It remained dark.

  “Okay,” Leira said. “I’m going to break this thing open.”

  Dash watched as the Swift gripped the second fragment then flexed its massive arms, applying relentless force.

  The fragment shattered, bits of debris spalling away.

  “Yeah, this one’s the same. Metal mesh encasing a—”

  The threat display suddenly lit up. At the same time, another large fragment of rock just a few klicks away broke apart, revealing something metallic. Dazzling bolts of energy pulsed from it, slamming into the Swift.

  “Leira! Shit!” Dash targeted the source of the shots with the dark-lance and fired. At such close range, the beam had enough power to simply turn it to quantum vapor.

  “Leira,” Dash called out. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. The shield absorbed most of it. A little superficial damage is all.”

  “I guess that was the trap we were worried about,” Dash said. “Kind of underwhelming, actually.”

  “Messenger, I do not believe that was the trap, as you call it,” Sentinel said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I believe this is the trap.”

  The threat indicator lit up like a fusion exhaust. All around them, fragments were shedding their rocky coverings, exposing more pieces of tech. Dash spun the Archetype to face the nearest, aiming the dark-lance. But he winced as the heads-up turned searing white. At the same time, the hull temperature of the mech shot up, boiling off armor. “Shit, what is that?”

  “A laser,” Sentinel replied. “An extraordinarily powerful one, likely of limited use.”

  Dash dodged the Archetype hard to one side, pulling the mech out of the beam. Incandescent vapor trailed from it as it maneuvered; parts of its surface still glowed.

  Another beam engulfed the Swift. Dash heard Leira curse, but his attention stayed fixed on the weapon that had just shot him—and the others now coming online. He fired the dark-lance; this time, the beam danced across the surface of the laser platform, chewing a glowing furrow in its armor. The laser fired again.

  Dash groaned
at the sudden wash of heat across the Archetype, flashing through his Meld so he could feel it—in the sense that he knew it was painful, without actually being painful. He hated that aspect of the Meld; after all, pilots usually didn’t experience pain—even abstract pain—when their ships were damaged. But it made him respond instinctively, and he dodged again then flung himself at the laser platform.

  More shots erupted from all around him. Dash jinked and spun and somersaulted, avoiding most of them. The ones that hit burned away more of the Archetype’s armor. Now, warnings were beginning to rise from internal systems.

  He reached the first platform, spooled up the Archetype’s power sword, and swung it. The blow slammed into the platform, tearing through its armor and smashing it into inert silence. But another beam struck the Archetype, causing more systems to falter.

  “What the hell?” he snapped. “Lasers? Who uses lasers anymore?”

  Essentially just beams of coherent light, lasers had long fallen out of favor as weapons; they were simply too easy to counter, their power rapidly falling off with range. But these were something else—lasers, yes, but emitting so much energy so quickly that even the Archetype couldn’t radiate it away fast enough. If it wasn’t for the Dark Metal laced throughout the mech’s body, it would be nothing but molten scrap by now.

  “I am attempting to adjust the shield.” Sentinel said. “It is normally transparent to visible light, and therefore—”

  Another beam slammed into the Archetype. The right leg’s actuator system gave a final protest, then died.

  “—and therefore offers no defense.”

  “Just keep the weapons and drive online!” Dash snapped back, powering the Archetype toward the next platform. He unleashed a barrage of missiles as he did, which bought him time as the platforms shot them down. He crashed into the next platform hard, misjudging his approach because he couldn’t use the mech’s right leg to vary its center of gravity, which threw him off. He punched out anyway, pummeling the platform with fist and sword, turning it to sparking wreckage.

  “Leira, what’s going on with—”

  “Kinda busy,” she cut in. “Talk later!”

  Dash launched himself at the next platform. Debris whirled about, a storm of rock fragments and shattered pieces of Golden laser platforms—including bits of Dark Metal. Dash spun and rolled, pumping out missiles and dark-lance shots, dodging hard, flinging himself from side to side and back and forth as he wove his way through the maelstrom. He caught glimpses of the Swift, parts of it glowing cherry red, a shimmering wake of vaporized armor trailing behind it.

  Dash hit another platform, feet first this time, crashing into it just as it fired at point-blank range. Dozens of the Archetype’s systems died; most of them immediately flickered back to life, but some stayed dark.

  How many more of these damned things—

  “Dash? You okay?” Leira called.

  He was gasping too hard to reply, and just grimly kept his focus on the threat display.

  Which had also gone dark. Shit, had it failed too?

  “Dash? Answer me.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine—more or less.” He looked around. The threat display remained dark, but not because it had failed. There were just no more intact laser platforms. “Vaguely pissed, though. Not a fan of new and exciting things associated with the Golden.”

  Dash blinked away sweat and caught his breath. He’d fought a lot of fights in the Archetype now, but few that gave him such a workout.

  “Sentinel, give me a full status report,” he said. “On the heads-up. What do we have left?” He sucked in a breath at the systems that were down. “Oh, not good. What do we have left that’s working?”

  The status summary flashed up on the heads-up. Augmented by the Meld, it gave him a clear picture of the state of the Archetype. It wasn’t good, but it also wasn’t nearly as bad as he’d feared.

  The Swift drifted into view. It had one arm cocked at an odd angle, and one of its feet had been fused into a lump of slag.

  “Okay, let’s hope that that was the trap,” Leira said.

  Dash took a last long breath then released it. “Agreed. But I don’t want to hang around here and find out. Let’s gather up as much of this Dark Metal as we can, especially those pure ingots. And then let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “Yeah,” Leira replied, her voice emphatic. “I definitely need a shower.”

  “I’m right there with you.”

  “In the shower? I don’t think so.”

  Dash chuckled. “You’re no fun.”

  2

  Dash ambled into the War Room, whistling—he wasn’t sure what, just some old tune from his younger days. Amazing, he thought, how much a shower and a full stomach can do for one’s state of mind. That was especially true with a shot of whiskey on top of it, made from Freya’s latest creation, a wheat-corn hybrid, itself hybridized with some plant retrieved from the wrecked Golden ship near her home, Port Hannah, on Gulch. The stuff was amazing, but would also absolutely wreck you, and quickly, if you drank more than an ounce or so at a time.

  “Dash!” a voice boomed. “The conquering hero returns!”

  He turned and found himself only centimeters away from a broad grin that gleamed with more than a few gold teeth. Dash smiled back but shook his head.

  “Hardly. Just fought a few weapons platforms. Would have been a lot harder without Leira having my back, too.”

  “Bah! You need to learn how to brag, or at least embellish your exploits more. Ask any of the Gentle Friends and they’ll tell you about the multitude of ships they’ve cap—uh, relieved of their bulky, excess cargo.”

  “If I did, I’m sure it would add up to more ships than actually travel around the galactic arm,” Dash said with a wry smile.

  “I’d be disappointed if they didn’t,” Benzel said, laughing.

  Dash looked around the War Room. It stood empty, except for him and Benzel.

  “Am I early?” Dash asked. “I could have sworn we agreed to meet at—”

  “No, no, you’re on time. I’ve been left to bring you to the others.”

  “Oh, and where are they?”

  Benzel answered by making a follow me gesture.

  He led Dash out of the War Room and along a series of corridors. Bemused, Dash just followed along. They soon reached a part of the Forge that was color coded green, being devoted to botany and the cultivation of plants. Dash hadn’t been here in a while and was immediately struck by how much more cultivated it had become. A riot of plants, spilling fronds and leaves into the corridor, filled the air with a damp, green smell. Some flowered, painting vibrant colors across the mass of foliage. The rest of the Inner Circle had gathered here, and they greeted Dash with nods and smiles.

  “We’ve got a jungle in the making here,” Dash said. Freya, wearing an apron with pockets that were packed with various implements for tending plants, brushed dirt off her hands and nodded.

  “The Unseen put a lot of effort into making this place plant friendly. Custodian’s been showing me some pretty sophisticated systems for feeding, watering, and generally ensuring the welfare of”—she gestured around them—“well, this. And this is only one compartment. There are dozens more, and apparently even more that aren’t powered up yet. It’s incredible!”

  “What’s incredible is that whiskey you gave me,” Dash replied. “But, yeah, this is pretty damned impressive. How much of this is actually edible?”

  “Almost all of it.”

  Dash gave a puzzled frown and looked at a leafy green thing that seemed just that—green leaves. “This is edible? Really?”

  “I’ve cultivated everything here with a view to it being part of our food supply. That doesn’t mean you can just go stuffing any of it into your mouth, though. Some of these plants need some processing before they can be eaten. Some of them are just meant to have micronutrients extracted from them.”

  Dash nodded at that. He knew about micronutrients; anyone w
ho spent extended periods in space did. It wasn’t enough just to have stuff to fill your belly. More than a few spacers had loaded their ships with plenty of food, only to fall ill from vitamin or mineral deficiencies. But it did spark another thought.

  “Are any of these plants actually poisonous?” he asked. “Because if so, we should probably make sure they’re marked or something.”

  “Way ahead of you,” Freya replied. “Anything that could be harmful in its native state, because it’s poisonous, or can cause skin irritation or whatever, is confined to a series of compartments that are off-limits to anyone but me—and probably you, too, since this place seems to be all about the Messenger.”

  “That’s fine. I’ve got no great desire to go randomly tasting plants anyway, believe me.” He looked at the leafy green thing again. “So this is actually edible. Like, I could put this in my mouth and eat it.”

  “Sure.”

  Dash pulled off a leaf and bit a piece of it.

  And spit it out just as fast.

  He shot Freya an accusing look. “That tastes like feet.”

  “You’ve tasted feet?” Her head cocked in a feminine leer.

  “Well, not the whole foot, but toes, yeah. I’ve tasted toes,” Dash said, grinning.

  “Clean toes taste pretty good,” Freya said.

  “Weirdo. And that tastes like another part of the human anatomy,” Dash said.

  “Of course it does. It needs to be dried, ground up, and used as a food additive. In its native state, it tastes like shit.”

  “You could have told me that.”

  Freya shrugged. “You could have asked. Weirdo.”

  Dash gave a mock glare at the others, who were snickering and giggling. “So, what—did you guys want to meet here just to watch me gag on some leaves?”

  “No one forced you to eat that,” Viktor said, grinning. “And no, Freya asked us to meet here because she wanted to, well, show us this.”

  “It’s an awful lot of plants,” Amy said. “Oh, and don’t feel too bad, Dash. I made the mistake of trying something, too. Have you ever tasted a dirty, sweaty sock? Because I think have now.”