The Messenger Box Set: Books 1-6

by J. N. Chaney

  “Dash,” Sentinel cut in. “The two leading Bright ships have accelerated.”

  “I see that,” Dash said, then the threat indicator changed. “I also see they’re launching missiles. I guess that means they really aren’t interested in talking to us.”

  Dash turned the Archetype toward the onrushing Bright and accelerated in turn. Leira fell in behind him, but off to one side to maintain a line of fire.

  “Those two lead ships seem to be screening that one following them,” Dash said. “Leira, I’m going to try to keep those first two assholes busy. You try to work around and threaten that third ship. That ought to give those lead ships something to think about.”

  “Roger that.” Leira immediately began angling away, heading into a wide-sweeping turn that would bring her in on the trailing ship’s flank. Dash concentrated on the leaders, opening with the dark-lance, snapping out shots that blasted away the barrage of missiles they’d launched. They just launched more to replace them, but Dash noticed they’d slowed again, apparently wary of Leira menacing whatever the ship was they were protecting.

  “Okay, here we go,” Dash muttered. He drove the Archetype hard and fast, diminishing the amount of time the Bright had to react. At the same time, he kept up a steady rhythm of shots from the dark-lance, destroying missiles and hitting the Bright ships with the occasional blast to keep them on their toes.

  “The Archetype will be struck by three missiles, given the rate at which you are destroying them,” Sentinel said.

  “Yup, I see that,” Dash replied. He could decelerate, giving himself more time to shoot, but he didn’t. He drove on even faster.

  “Messenger,” Sentinel said. “I would caution you—”

  “I know, yeah. But I want to keep the pressure on these guys. Come on, boys, me or Leira, who’s it going to be?”

  The two ships kept boring in. Now they opened up with rapid-fire pulse cannons, the shots flashing and flaring against the Archetype’s shield. Dash pushed the mech even harder and faster, closing the distance at an ever-increasing rate.

  “First missile impact in fifteen seconds,” Sentinel said.

  “Tell me when it’s ten.”

  “It is now ten sec—”

  Dash accelerated the Archetype as hard as he could in one direction, while firing the distortion cannon in the other. The mech shuddered as the sudden gravity well yanked at it, but the missiles had no warning and were deflected away, zipping harmlessly past the Archetype. One petulantly detonated anyway, bathing the mech in hot plasma and hard radiation, but the way ahead was clear.

  Dash opened fire again with the dark-lance, landing hits on both the approaching Bright ships. Something failed catastrophically on one, its bow suddenly blowing open, the ship slewing to one side but still tearing along its original trajectory. Dash fired up his power sword and struck out at the other as it flashed by. The blade slashed into it, opening a gash more than half the length of its hull. Then it struck something unyielding and the Archetype was flung sideways. It spun around so hard the inertial dampers failed to entirely offset the colossal acceleration. Dash was flung hard to one side of the cradle, and ruddy darkness washed across his consciousness as blood was slammed into his head.

  When it cleared, Sentinel had recovered the Archetype from the collision, but the sword was offline. When Dash checked its status, he saw why: he’d managed to snap the blade halfway along its length.

  “Wow.” He shook his head, clearing away the last of the crimson fuzz of his red-out. “Okay, remind me not to do that again,” he said, wincing as his head throbbed.

  “Had I known that was your intent, I would have cautioned against doing it in the first place.”

  Dash had to give a wry grin at Sentinel’s admonishing tone, but he looked at the threat indicator to see what had happened to the two Bright ships. The one with the blown open bow continued plowing along its original trajectory, but it had apparently lost pitch control and slowly tumbled end over end. The other had spun a one-eighty and accelerated hard, intent on coming back at Dash.

  Again, he opened fire with the dark-lance, scoring hit after hit on the Bright ship trying to re-engage. It returned fire with its pulse cannons, until those abruptly went dead; a few seconds later, a tremendous explosion blew apart its drive. Dash switched fire to the second ship, blasting chunks of debris out of it until nothing remained but glowing scrap.

  He turned to find Leira.

  She’d managed to engage the third Bright ship, which was larger than the other two, but also more ponderous. The Swift danced around it, spinning and somersaulting, dodging missiles and replying with missile and nova-gun shots of her own. Dash launched the Archetype to help her, but the Bright ship’s power suddenly went off-line, the ship going dark, its emissions fading toward background readings.

  “Leira, you good?” he asked.

  “Oh yeah, I’m fine. I’m going to close in and finish this bastard off.”

  “Just take it easy and remember how strong these mechs are. I’d like to keep this one more or less intact. Those other two ships seemed to be trying to protect it, and I’d like to know why.”

  The Swift zoomed up to the Bright ship, grappling it with one mechanical fist. Leira pulled back the other, apparently intent on punching into the drive section to disable it permanently, but the momentum of her swing caused her other hand, the one holding onto the hull, to pull, tearing a massive chunk out of the ship’s hull. A shimmering cloud of vapor erupted from the gaping rent, spilling around the Swift like wind-blown mist, spreading and dispersing. Objects driven along by the rush of escaping atmosphere came tumbling into space with it: broken structural members, fragments of hull plating, other debris and components.

  Bodies.

  Dash just stared at the horrific sight. Bodies, dozens of them, had come tumbling out into space through the torn hull of the Bright ship.

  “Dash—” Leira started, then stopped on what sounded like a choked gasp.

  Dash slowed the Archetype, but in a kind of absent way. The horror show unfolding on the heads-up still transfixed him.

  “Dash,” Sentinel said. “The neutrino emissions from the Bright ship’s drive had dropped to near zero. They are increasing again. It would appear that they have managed to stabilize their reactor and are now powering it up.”

  Dash watched a body—a woman, he thought, except she had no legs—somersaulting into the void. She had long hair, and it stood straight up from her scalp, held that way by the centripetal forces of her tumble.

  “Messenger, the Bright ship’s reactor—”

  “Is powering up, yeah,” Dash said, shaking his head, then shaking it again, as though he’d just walked into a spiderweb that now stubbornly clung to his face. He couldn’t look away from the woman’s body.

  “Dash, shit. What did I do?” Leira asked, her voice barely a whisper.

  “I—” he began, then stopped. He was surrounded by casual death, and it didn’t have to be that way.

  “Dash,” Sentinel said, putting a snap of authority into her voice. “In ten seconds, I will assume you have been incapacitated and will engage appropriate protocols.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” Dash snapped. Sudden anger infused his voice, though he wasn’t sure who it was directed at—the Bright, for being here and having all these people on board this ship; Leira, for her carelessness; himself, for not doing something, anything, that might have prevented this from happening. “I just need a second. I know it doesn’t bother you, but we mortals have a hard time seeing death so—shit, up close and personal like this.”

  “I wasn’t aware that you empathized so readily with other species.”

  “These are people, Sentinel. Look at them. They must have been prisoners of the Bright, maybe from the Wind of Heaven.”

  “They may have once been such, but they are no longer, and have not been for an indeterminate time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “All of the remai
ns that register any recognizable human bio-signatures have been significantly altered, both physically and chemically.”

  Dash had to shake his head again. “They’re people, but they’ve been, what, changed? The Bright have been changing them?”

  “That is correct.”

  Join us and be elevated.

  It struck Dash like a plasma blast that he was looking at the Bright’s elevation tumbling and drifting through space around him.

  Stunned shock had become unfocused anger; now, unfocused anger became a laser beam of rage, aimed straight at the Bright. Before he could even begin to react to his own swell of fury, though, Sentinel powered up the Archetype’s drive.

  “Wait, what the hell are you doing?” Dash snapped.

  “I have engaged emergency protocols in order to remove the Archetype to a safe distance from the Bright ship.”

  Dash frowned. Safe distance?

  The threat indicator flashed. The neutrino emissions from the Bright ship were nearly at the expected maximum for the largest fusion reactor it could possibly be carrying. For once, this wasn’t an assessment, or a guess; it was a certainty, derived from the physics of nuclear fusion.

  So the crew had gotten the reactor back up to power. Shit, that meant the Bright ship would be able to power up its drive and weapons then try to resume the fight.

  How many more people, elevated or not, were still on board?

  Except the Bright ship wasn’t powering up any of its systems. The reactor was burning at full power—and now, what was probably emergency overpower—but none of that energy was being used for anything.

  “Leira, maximum speed, any direction, now!”

  On impulse, Dash reached out and snatched a tumbling body with the Archetype’s fist, hoping he didn’t damage it too much in the process. Then he flung the mech away at the highest acceleration he could manage. Fortunately, Sentinel had powered up the drive, gaining him a second or two.

  He saw the Swift racing away as well. Both mechs tore through space, the gap between them and the Bright ship steadily widening.

  A voice came through the comm—flat, mechanical, devoid of emotion. “We know you,” it said. “We know how you have lived your pathetic lives, and we know how you die.”

  A terrific flash ended the transmission, and the Archetype was bathed in a momentary blowtorch of x- and gamma rays followed by a tsunami of stellar heat. Alarms sounded as some of the mech’s systems overloaded and rebooted, the colossal electromagnetic pulse momentarily overcoming even the formidable electronic defenses of the Unseen. Dash switched the view rearward, to see the Bright ship simply gone, replaced by an expanding, rapidly cooling globe of glowing plasma.

  “Leira, are you okay?” Dash asked.

  “I—yeah.” Her voice trembled. “Dash, back there—”

  “Sentinel says those people had been changed. They weren’t really human anymore.”

  “I know. Tybalt told me the same thing. But Dash, I killed them.”

  “No, Leira, you didn’t,” Dash replied, going limp in the harness, drained by the successive waves of emotion that had slammed through him. “The Bright did. You probably put them out of—” Dash paused, trying to imagine what being aboard that ship must have been like. He didn’t try to imagine it for long, though. “You probably did them the biggest favor anyone could.”

  “It sure doesn’t feel like it.”

  “No. It doesn’t. But it will.”

  The Swift angled back toward the Archetype. Dash considered sifting through what remained of the other two Bright ships. The one Leira had inadvertently torn open was simply gone, entirely vaporized by temperatures not far off from the interior of a star. Had they not fled, the mechs probably would have survived it, but they would also probably have been severely damaged, likely even disabled. And here, so far from the Forge and deep inside what was effectively enemy space, that could have been catastrophic. He suddenly had no desire to stay around this lonely, nameless star system any longer, and just wanted to go home.

  “Dash, you retrieved a body before we evacuated the vicinity of the Bright ship,” Sentinel said. “What do you wish to do with it? Unprotected exposure to the environment of space during the return trip to the Forge will likely destroy it.”

  Dash instinctively glanced at his right hand. That’s right, he’d used the Archetype’s massive hand to snatch up a body before powering away from the imminent blast. “Can we put it into one of the storage compartments in the legs, keep it protected for the trip back?”

  “Yes. I will attend to the necessary details.”

  As Sentinel stowed the body away, Dash took a moment to muster himself. Drained or not, they were still in enemy territory. He could relax when he finally dismounted from the cradle, safely aboard the Forge. Until then, the war would have to go on.

  Dash found Conover, Amy, and Kai waiting in the docking bay for them. He landed the Archetype and clambered out of it, grateful for a chance to be somewhere that wasn’t the mech’s cramped cockpit.

  The others immediately closed in on him, no doubt to bombard him with a deluge of reports and questions, but he waved them off and crossed to a solitary figure standing before the Swift.

  Leira turned as he approached, a desolate look on her face. She opened her mouth, but Dash just took her in his arms and hugged her.

  “Guys,” Amy asked, stopping a few meters away. “Cuz, are you okay?”

  Dash turned. Conover and Kai had joined Amy, deep concern tightening all their faces.

  “No,” he said. “But we will be. Just give us some time, okay?”

  Amy nodded and they backed away, whispering among themselves.

  Sentinel, however, either didn’t pick up the cue, or simply didn’t care. “Dash, about the body you retrieved—”

  “Not now, okay?”

  “This is important.”

  Leira pulled away. “I’ll be fine.” She forced a smile and shrugged. “I kind of have to be. We’re fighting a war, remember?”

  “Yeah, I do. Okay, Sentinel, what’s so important?”

  “Custodian has scanned the body you retrieved, and he, Tybalt, and I agree that it is not that of an altered human.”

  Dash frowned at Leira. “What is it, then?”

  “It is the body of one of the Bright. And there is something unusual about it.”

  “What?”

  “To properly answer that, the body must be taken to the medical level for further tests. We will then have an answer for you.”

  9

  Dash stood over the Bright corpse, which was laid out on a treatment table in the Forge’s medical level. A console over the table glowed with information, myriad details of physiology, chemistry, anatomy—all of which would no doubt mean something to someone with a medical background. Dash could bandage a stubbed toe and wrap a dressing around a wound, and that was about it.

  He looked at the others—all of the others, in fact, excluding Benzel, Wei-Ping, and the Gentle Friends with them at the Aquarian Ring, those crewing the Silent Fleet ships still on station near the Forge, and Ragsdale, who had returned to Port Hannah for a brief visit. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to see a Bright up close, and Dash couldn’t really blame them. So far, aside from Clan Shirna, they hadn’t really had a chance to look their enemies in the face.

  It wasn’t a pretty sight.

  The face on the table might as well have been a mannequin or a doll. Light gleamed off the smooth, pale flesh, which resembled wax, or even ceramic. The eyes, crystal bright, had no iris, just featureless whites and gaping pupils. The rest of the body had a similar artificial look to it, like something that had been cast or carved, not actually made of living matter.

  “The body’s in surprisingly good shape, considering it was blasted out of a ship into space then grabbed in the Archetype’s hand,” Conover said.

  “Yeah, it is,” Amy replied, nodding. “Makes me wonder if it somehow was healing itself on the way back here.” That earned her a few ne
rvous looks from the others. Harolyn, who was finalizing her preparations to join Benzel in investigating whatever they’d found in the remains of the comet on the Aquarian ring world, gave a nervous nod.

  “Yeah. Looks like it could come to life at any second,” she said, then looked around. “It can’t, can it?”

  Dash glanced around and saw hands on weapons. Kai and his monks, he noticed, edged themselves apart and away from one another, as though to give themselves room to fight. If the damned thing did come to life, he thought, they were more likely to start injuring one another in the cramped confines of this medical bay.

  “It really is dead, right, Custodian?” Dash asked. “I mean, it seems to be, but damn it, does it ever look like it could be alive.”

  “The body actually has undergone considerable self repair,” Custodian replied.

  Dash’s eyes widened, while everyone drew back from the body. “Wait, are you saying this thing actually is still alive?”

  “No. The self-repair functions are autonomous and only affect specific parts of the body. Overall, this organism is still very much dead.”

  “Okay. Good.” Dash stepped toward the body again. “So what can you tell us about it?”

  “Analysis of trace radioactive isotopes in its remaining biological material suggest that this being is approximately five hundred years old,” Custodian replied. “Its skin has been augmented with a complex, self-repairing polymer lattice, greatly increasing its strength and durability. It has no sweat glands, so it must regulate its temperature in some other way. Its eyes have been replaced by sensors that can discern electromagnetic energy ranging from short wavelength microwaves to far ultraviolet. Further conclusions await internal examination.”

  As Custodian spoke, a series of jointed arms unfolded from the console above the body, ending in a variety of wicked-looking implements, including scalpel blades, saws, and drills. They immediately began cutting into the body and peeling back skin, revealing what was inside it.

  Dash braced himself for gore—and there was some, but not what he expected. Clear and oddly colored fluids, sticky and viscous, oozed from the cuts, gleaming on metallic and crystalline components that seemed to take the place of internal organs. An acrid, caustic stink wafted up from the body as the medical system dissected it. It was gruesome, but Dash found himself staring in grim fascination, watching as more and more components of alloys, ceramic, and polymers were revealed.