The Messenger Box Set: Books 1-6

by J. N. Chaney

  “The next target star system is now just ahead,” Sentinel cut in. “We will be translating back to Real Space shortly.”

  Dash’s smile faded. “Back to business. No sign of Golden activity?”

  “There is none,” Sentinel replied.

  “Okay.” Dash flexed his arms and legs, hands and feet, causing the same movements in the big mech. Everything checked out as status green—not that Unseen tech ever seemed to fail in any significant way. But he did it anyway, for his own peace of mind more than anything else.

  The two mechs dropped out of unSpace.

  Searing, bluish-white light flooded the heads-up, the glare immediately diminishing as Sentinel stepped it down.

  “That is one big freakin’ star,” Dash said.

  “Catalog number GCS134563-A27,” Sentinel said. “An O-class supergiant. Surface temperature is forty-two thousand Kelvin. The exclusion zone around the star, within which the safety tolerances of the Archetype and the Swift would be exceeded, extends one hundred-million kilometers from the star.”

  “Meaning don’t go in there, or we’ll be fried,” Leira said.

  “You know, I can’t help feeling that something dramatic and catastrophic is going to require us to do just that,” Dash said. “At least, that’s how it always seems to work out.”

  “It will comfort you to know, then, that the only signal indicating something artificial is well outside that zone. It appears to be a station orbiting one of two planets in this system.”

  Dash scanned the heads-up. The vast, superhot star was certainly impressive. So were the two planets, both massive, rocky worlds, their atmospheres long ago having been scoured away by the star’s radiation, leaving them pitted, barren, and airless. But the lonely station was the only sign that anyone had ever been here.

  “Okay, then,” Dash said. “Looks like that’s our destination. Leira, standard routine. I’ll lead, you hang back to cover me.”

  “Roger that.”

  Dash flung the Archetype toward the distant station.

  Dash had honestly expected there’d be trouble. The apparently abandoned station would suddenly come to life and start shooting, or something would unfurl or power-up on the rocky surface of the nearby planet and start shooting, or something, anyway. That seemed to be the way these trips of theirs went. But none of that happened. The station and the planet stayed absolutely silent, and nothing happened at all.

  Somehow, that just made it seem even more menacing.

  Dash eyed the station on the heads-up. It was a spindly thing, a long cylinder with a small circular section at one end that seemed to be a habitat module. The actual, livable space inside it would be small, though. It slowly rotated, dark and silent against the backdrop of the barren world.

  “No power emanations, no emissions of any sort,” Leira said. “It looks dead.”

  “Yeah, it does,” Dash replied. “But how many times have seemingly dead things suddenly come to life?”

  “Good point.”

  Dash eased the Archetype forward, stopping a few tens of meters away from the station.

  Nothing.

  “Sentinel, can see you if there’s any way of getting inside? Without making an opening of our own?”

  “There is what appears to be an airlock on the opposite end of the station from the circular habitat portion.”

  “Feel like stretching your legs, Leira?”

  “You know, the thought of going inside there gives me the creeps. But if it means I can get out of this cradle and actually move around, what the hell, let’s go.”

  Dash tilted his head back as far as his vac-suit would allow, shining his helmet lamp up the length of the long spindle. It seemed to be a uniform five meters in diameter, as far as he could see. Beyond that, it vanished into darkness beyond the light’s reach. Low-light let him see a little further up the tube, but with diminished depth perception; thermal didn’t show anything at all, the entire spindle being a uniform temperature. He decided to use the lamp.

  If there were nasty surprises in here, at least they had some decent weapons to deal with them. No longer did they have to rely on their own, woefully inadequate slug guns or the powerful but indiscriminate fusion pistols they’d taken from Clan Shirna. Among the things they’d retrieved from the crashed Golden ship on Gulch were Golden weapons, pulse-guns that Custodian had been able to reverse-engineer and start manufacturing. It seemed a glaring oversight by the Unseen to not ensure they’d included a decent personal weapon somewhere amid their schematics, but nothing had shown up in any of the aliens’ databases so far. Still, the pulse-guns were a terrific alternative.

  “Looks clear ahead,” Dash said. “You ready?”

  “As I’ll ever be,” Leira replied.

  “You sound nervous.”

  “Well, duh. It’s one thing to have a huge alien mech strapped to my butt. Heading into some unknown alien station with nothing but a vac suit protecting my delicate flesh? Different story.” After a pause, Leira added, “Why, aren’t you nervous? Really?”

  Dash shrugged inside his suit. “Nervous as hell. Never said I wasn’t, just that you sounded it.”

  “Semantics. Fine. Let’s just get going.”

  Dash led the way, pulling himself along a ladder built into one side of the spindle’s interior. With no artificial gravity, and far too slow a spin to generate it through centripetal force, the going was easy. He used one hand on the ladder, while the other held the pulse-gun ready.

  About ten meters along the spindle, Dash tried a comm check with the waiting mechs. “Sentinel, are you and Tybalt still able to read us?”

  “Yes, your signal strength is strong.”

  That was good, at least. Sentinel hadn’t been sure what effect the alloy hull of the station might have on comms, so they’d jammed the airlock open and put a signal repeater just inside it, at the base of the spindle, just in case.

  Dash carried on, but stopped again after just a few meters.

  “Huh,” he said.

  Leira’s light shifted as she moved away from the ladder a bit to be able to see past Dash. “What? Did you find something?”

  “Yeah. There’s a bracket, or hardpoint or something just ahead. Three more, spaced around the inside of this tube we’re in. Looks like they're meant to mount something that’s not here.”

  “Something that was just never installed?”

  “Or was installed, but then taken away.” Dash moved a little closer. Four brackets, each protruding from the wall of the spindle, each with two holes about as big around as his thumb. He made his way past them, slowly and cautiously, in case they were actually more than just mounting hardware. But nothing happened or changed, so he carried on.

  They passed another half-dozen rows of the hardpoints. Either one thing, almost as long as the spindle, or several smaller things had once been mounted in here. About halfway along, what looked like a cable conduit started running up the wall opposite the ladder; ports opened along it every few meters, but all of them gaped empty, like the spindle itself.

  They reached the other end of the spindle. A blank wall truncated it, split by a hatchway about a meter across.

  “Maybe it’s not locked,” Leira said.

  “One way to find out.” Dash pushed on the hatch. It didn’t budge. “Why am I not surprised?” Nothing was ever easy, was it.

  The hatch slid open.

  “Whoa,” Dash snapped, raising the pulse-gun. Nothing emerged from the now-open hatch, though.

  “Does your exclamation mean that the hatch is now open?” Tybalt asked.

  “Uh, yeah, it just opened up. Did you have something to do with that?” Dash asked.

  “I did. Sentinel is maintaining watch with the Archetype. I have discovered an open data-port on the exterior of the habitat module, where something was removed. Through it, I have been able to gain access to some systems.”

  “Yeah, something was removed from inside this spindle, too,” Dash replied.

/>   “Tybalt,” Leira asked. “Are you saying there’s still power on this station?”

  “No. I am supplying power through a coupling adjacent to the open data-port. The station’s generator is completely offline.”

  “I’ll bet it was removed, too,” Dash said. “Sounds like this station was just abandoned.”

  “I wonder why,” Leira said.

  “Again, only one way to find out.”

  Dash pulled himself through the open hatch, into the habitat module.

  Dash hung onto a console and turned himself through a full circle, taking in the topmost level of the habitat. There was only one other, a lower level, long empty, that seemed to actually be a habitat, the living space for who or whatever had crewed the station. This level was obviously the working space, a control room or bridge.

  “It’s clear up here, too, Leira,” Dash said. “Still no gravity or atmosphere. Tybalt, I assume you’re powering these consoles that are lit up.”

  “I am. The station has no capacity for generating its own power.”

  Leira drifted up through the hatch. “So whatever this place was, the Golden—I assume it was the Golden, anyway—decommissioned it and took out whatever they considered valuable.”

  “So it appears.” Dash turned to the nearest console, rotating himself to face it right-side up. Thanks to his Melds with the crashed Golden ship on Gulch, he could more or less read the data displayed on the consoles. It didn’t have much to say, though, just variations on standby and offline messages. But one console caught his attention, the glowing symbols declaring it was awaiting input. He nudged himself over to it.

  “This one seems to still be working, at least in a way,” he said. “I’m going to try activating it. Leira, if I go quiet for more than a few seconds, pull me away from it.”

  “You shouldn’t Meld with it through your gloves, though, right?”

  “I shouldn’t, but who knows when it comes to this alien tech?”

  “Well, I’ve got your back.”

  “Okay, then. Here goes.”

  Dash tapped at the console. The display changed to a menu.

  “Well that was anticlimactic,” he said. “Tybalt, did you see me do that?”

  “I did. Despite what the menu is telling you, there are only two data pathways that don’t immediately terminate. One is for a system called auto-eject. It is currently offline.”

  “Not sure what it auto-ejects when it’s working,” Leira said. “But let’s stay away from that one, anyway.”

  “A hundred percent with you on that,” Dash replied. “The other one has something to do with a—” Dash frowned at the symbols. “A recording? An archive?”

  “A log,” Tybalt said. “It is essentially the only remaining data on the station, unless some is hidden from us. It is encrypted, but Sentinel and I have been able to decrypt it.”

  “So fast? That sounds a little too easy,” Dash said, narrowing his eyes at the console.

  “It would be more than sufficient encryption to stymie your best efforts,” Tybalt said.

  Dash gave a thin smile. The more time he spent with Tybalt, the gladder he was that it was Leira who had to deal with the stuck-up AI, and not him.

  “Anyway, let’s see what you’ve decrypted for us,” Dash said.

  Leira had maneuvered herself beside Dash. “I see a screen full of squiggles and dots and things.”

  “Me too. I didn’t Meld enough with that crashed Golden ship to really get the lingo.”

  “As I recall, we had other priorities, like not dying.”

  Dash studied the script. “It’s a log of some sort.” He stopped, frowning at an entry near the top.

  “What is it?” Leira asked.

  “This, right here. I’m sure it says Wind of Heaven.”

  “So what’s the rest of it? More ships?”

  “Yeah, it is.” Dash’s frown deepened. They’d found a hard connection between the Golden and the lost Wind of Heaven. But what did that connection mean? Was this a trophy list of some sort, the Golden listing the ships they’d destroyed so they could remember the destruction of each one fondly?

  Leira was apparently musing over the same thing. “Tybalt, do you have any idea what this station was for?”

  “Sentinel and I have been considering that very question. We believe, based on the listing of ships, and the location and trajectory information associated with each, that this station incorporated the ability to force vessels out of a super-luminal state and back into Real Space. The specific engineering is unclear in the absence of the technology actually used, but it would appear that it leveraged the extremely high gravitation of the parent star to do so.”

  “Well, crap,” Dash said. “That’s a Golden capability we haven’t run into, thankfully.”

  “One that we haven’t run into yet,” Leira said.

  “If you must be comforted, then you will be pleased to know that such technology is only likely to function in relatively close proximity to a massive body, such as this star,” Tybalt said. “Extrapolating that across the galactic arm, more than seventy percent of known space would be free from this effect.”

  “Means thirty percent isn’t,” Dash replied. “Let’s map that out and make a note to be careful when we’re flying through any dicey space.”

  “Well, it looks like the Golden decided to stop yanking ships out of unSpace,” Leira said. “Which, looking at this list, it seems they’ve been doing for a long time—assuming each line is an entry, of course, since it’s just gobbledygook to me.”

  “They were, yeah,” Dash said, swiping a gloved finger up the screen, scrolling the list. It went on and on. “Shit, that’s a lot of ships over at least a couple hundred years.”

  “Two hundred and sixty-two terrestrial years, to be exact,” Tybalt said.

  “You know, I’ll bet you if we dig into this, we’ll find a bunch of spooky stories and conspiracy theories about ships going missing in this stretch of space,” Leira said. “A sort of celestial triangle.”

  “Why a triangle?” Dash asked.

  “I actually don’t know. These things always seem to get called triangles, though.”

  “Well, triangle, square, pentagon, whatever, it might be worth finding out if there are more stories like that centered on any big stars in the arm. That might hint at any more of these sorts of stations out there.”

  “Huh. Good point.” Leira pointed at the display. “So they were yanking ships out of unSpace for two hundred years. Why? And why did they stop?”

  “Because they got what they wanted,” Dash said into the silence.

  “Which was?” Leira asked.

  Dash looked out through a nearby viewport into the black. The view faced away from the galactic plane into deep, interstellar space. He shivered, his lips set in a grim line. “People.”

  “Many people,” Sentinel said. “The likely total complement of the ships in that log potentially amounts to tens of thousands.”

  “So where are they?’ Leira asked.

  Dash pointed in the general direction of the next system the Wind of Heaven would have reached, had it not been torn out of unSpace and destroyed.

  “Let’s go find out.”

  7

  “Welcome to the Ring!” Al’Bijea said, smiling broadly. “We don’t often bring outsiders here, so you are enjoying a rare treat.”

  Benzel stepped out of the shuttle’s airlock, Wei-Ping at his side. He’d assumed that he’d been long since jaded past the point of being especially impressed by any celestial object, and figured this ring world would just be more of a huh kind of thing—interesting, but that’s about it.

  As he slammed to a halt and stared up, he discovered he was wrong. There still was a little capacity for wonder in his cranky old bones, it turned out.

  He gaped up at the vast sweep of the Ring. It stretched away in both directions in a shallow, arcing, upward incline, as though he stood at the bottom of a wide, low valley. But instead of reachi
ng a crestline or a horizon, the view just kept going, narrowing in both directions into perspective, but still climbing, until the landscape soared straight up, finally meeting somewhere directly overhead.

  They’d landed in what amounted to twilight, one of the artificial suns slowly moving off anti-spinward relative to the Ring. The other lit up part of the massive construct high and to one side, illuminating fields, villages, and a winding river. Lights sparkled across the darkened parts of the Ring, marking towns and houses and even roads in the gloom.

  “Okay,” Benzel said, his head tilted all the way back. “That is damned impressive.”

  “It sure is,” Wei-Ping put in, her hands on her hips. “It must have cost a fortune to build—and run.”

  “Comet mining is quite profitable,” Al’Bijea replied. “Which is a good thing, because it is expensive to maintain and operate, yes.”

  “How the hell did you get so much water to this thing?” Wei-Ping asked, pointing at the river then at a long, thin lake just beginning to shimmer under the touch of dawn, off to spinward. “Shipping water ain’t cheap or easy.”

  Al’Bijea gestured for them to follow him away from the shuttle, then pointed at the massive, gleaming snowball poised at the center of the Ring. “It all comes from comets—our initial supply, and then what we need to use to offset the small amounts that escape into space. We’ve never been able to stop a little leakage, probably because our gravity is less than standard here.”

  Benzel shrugged. He’d become so used to switching seamlessly from gravity to zero-g and back again that he barely noticed gravity anymore, unless it was especially high. “Considering that ice is bulkier than the same amount of water, I’m surprised you’ve managed to make one comet last so long, even one as big as that one up there.”

  “We haven’t,” Al’Bijea replied. “That’s actually the third comet we’ve used as our Hub. We extract water and other resources from it, and then, when it’s too depleted, we move another one in to replace it.”