by J. N. Chaney
“The technology has been proven. It is now possible to disrupt the translation of any ship we choose.”
Dash turned back to the Verity, satisfied at the sudden look of nervous uncertainty that flashed across his smooth, doll-like face.
“Yeah, I think we’ll start pulling Bright ships out of unSpace,” Dash said. “You’ve inspired us. We can harvest your ships for their resources, and as for the crews—” He glanced at the green fluid. “We can make as much of this stuff as we want.”
“You are nothing more than animals,” Kizdin spat.
“Animals who are holding you prisoner,” Dash said. He looked at the others. “I’m thinking we hold him, keep him alive. He might still be useful to us. Maybe even for a prisoner exchange, if that comes up. In any case, we can kind of put him on display, in a cage.”
“Like in a zoo!” Leira said.
“That’s right. Only it will be the animals doing the watching.”
Kizdin fell back onto the gurney. “I have answered most of your questions. Now, demonstrate to me that you are not entirely vicious beasts and get that substance of torture away from me,” he said, pointing to the IV.
Dash smiled, taking the line and removing it from the bag. He turned it up and took a sip, grimacing a bit. Kizdin gasped.
“It is a substance of torture,” Dash said. “At least, the morning after the night before. And the coloring really doesn’t do much for the taste. It’s still damned fine—and potent, I might add—plumato wine.” He grinned. “You Verity just can’t hold your liquor, can you?” Dash looked at Kai. “You were right, their bodies just aren’t equipped to deal with alcohol.”
Kai shrugged. “The members of our Order chose to abstain from liquor long before even the Verity left. It is not surprising that they neglected to consider it a threat.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We suspected that androids, or whatever the hell you are, just wouldn’t do well on booze and fear. Turns out I was right,” Dash said.
“Lightweights,” Leira snorted, making them all laugh.
“It was a good plan, Dash,” Harolyn said. “A damned good plan.”
“And that is what we unpredictable, random, biological animals are capable of,” Dash said, giving Kizdin a smile that didn’t touch his eyes. “This is what you’re going to be fighting.”
Kizdin grimaced, and for the first time, his smooth face held an emotion: fear.
14
Dash walked around the oblong object, taking it in from all sides. It didn’t take him long, being only about a meter-and-a-half tall and about three-quarters of that wide.
“I somehow expected it to be, I don’t know, bigger. More imposing, I guess.”
“It was manufactured in the most efficient way, in order to use the fewest resources possible,” Custodian replied. “It was not necessary to make it larger. That would have been wasteful.”
“That’s fine,” Dash said. “It wasn’t a criticism, just an observation.”
Dash stood with Viktor and Conover on the fabrication level, inspecting one of the new scrambler mines they’d developed. It did, indeed, seem rather unremarkable, a smooth hull unbroken by only a stubby spike, apparently an antenna, on one end, and a rounded indentation on the other. Custodian had already told them it carried three charges, each capable of knocking a translating ship out of unSpace, at least temporarily.
“Is it possible to mount this on a missile?” Viktor asked.
Conover nodded. “Yeah. A scrambler warhead would be really powerful, especially if the missile itself could translate into unSpace.”
“It would be possible to build such advanced versions of this weapon, given sufficient Dark Metal, as well as upgrades to the Forge’s available power. The necessary fabrications to make such a missile capable of translation are very energy intensive.”
“Sounds like a future upgrade,” Dash said. “For now, this is great. Being able to knock Bright or Golden ships out of unSpace would be really useful.”
“And three charges?” Viktor asked. “How can something this small be that capable, when the Bright station Dash and Leira found was so big?”
“That station could be used repeatedly, as long as it had available power. It also had a much longer range, being able to affect ships over a large radius. The range of this mine is limited to about one hundred million kilometers.”
Viktor nodded. “Still pretty good.”
“It’s another weapon,” Dash said. “And we can use every weapon we can get our hands on.”
“Dash,” Custodian said. “To that end, if I may ask, do you intend to engage in further boarding actions against enemy vessels?”
“Yeah, almost certainly. Why?”
“The Archetype is now at forty-one percent power, which means it is capable of receiving further upgrades. There are several that are possible, but there is one that I would recommend immediately, as it will be a quick and easy one to install, and will potentially be of great use if you board another enemy ship.”
“Sounds good. I’m going to head up to the War Room to meet with Benzel and Wei-Ping. You can explain it to me on the way.”
He made to leave, but Conover stopped him. “Dash, I was wondering. How did I do? You know, back in the medical bay, when you pushed me?”
Dash exchanged a grin with Viktor. “Why? You considering a career in acting?”
“No, I just wanted to know, you know, if I was helpful.” He shrugged. “I’ve never done much of that make believe sort of stuff before.”
“I suspect you were too busy reading, studying holo-docs, that sort of thing, weren’t you?” Viktor asked.
“Yeah, I guess.”
Dash put a hand on Conover’s shoulder. “You did fine. You actually have a knack for it. Remember when we first met the Governor of Port Hannah and pretended to be mercenaries? That’s when I knew you were good at being all deceptive.”
Conover looked inordinately pleased with himself after that. That made Dash smile, but also a little curious. Conover had nothing to prove to them; he’d been brave, skilled, and all-round invaluable to them, over and over again. Hell, he and Amy had, by themselves, probably saved the Forge in their early days aboard it from destruction by the Golden. So why did he think he had something to prove now?
Dash made a mental note to dig into this a little, but Benzel and Wei-Ping were waiting in the War Room, and Custodian had some new upgrades to the Archetype to explain along the way.
Dash looked around at the gathering, which was essentially everybody except the rest of the Gentle Friends; Ragsdale, who was still away at Port Hannah; and Freya, who was busy with her botanical work.
“Okay, everyone, I’ve asked Benzel to take the lead this time,” Dash said. “I want to spread things around some to balance out the workload.”
“And in case you become a casualty,” Viktor said.
There was a moment of silence. Dash wasn’t sure how to answer that. That had been part of it, yes, though he hadn’t advertised it that way. Leave it to Viktor to perceive it. Dash finally just nodded.
“Yes. In case any of us become casualties, we need others who can take their place. We can’t afford to have single points of failure.”
“Except you’re the Messenger, right?” Amy said. “You really can’t be replaced.”
“Actually, he can be,” Custodian put in. “The Creators understood the need for redundancy. If Dash becomes unable to carry out the role of the Messenger, another will be designated.”
Dash shrugged. “See? I’m expendable.”
“So who would the next Messenger be—” Amy started, but Dash raised a hand to cut her off.
“This is a good conversation to have, but not right now. First, we have more pressing business. Second, I don’t think it’s up to us, anyway.”
“There are criteria,” Custodian said.
Dash paused at that. There were criteria? Really? He had literally stumbled onto the Archetype in
deep space, which is how he became the Messenger. Leira had wondered if there might be more to it than just random chance. Was there?
Yes, a conversation he definitely had to have with the AIs sometime.
“Anyway, Benzel, what have you got for us?”
Benzel stepped forward, and a holo image of a star map once more appeared, floating in front of him. “Dash asked me to work with Custodian and the other AIs to figure out our next move. Me, I’m a pretty simple and straightforward guy, so I figured, let’s go find the ones behind all of this.”
“The Golden?” Viktor said. “You want to bypass the Bright and the Verity and just try to go straight for them?”
“Sort of,” Benzel replied. “The trouble is that we don’t know where the Golden are, exactly.”
“Do we even know if there are Golden, though?” Viktor went on. “The Bright might just be adapting Golden tech they’ve found for their own purposes.”
“Kind of like we do with the Dark Metal we retrieve,” Harolyn added.
“Which means we could spend a lot of time and effort trying to hunt the Golden, when the real enemy is the Bright.” Viktor crossed his arms. “I’m not saying there aren’t any Golden anywhere, that they’re all gone and we’re just facing the remnants of their tech. But we don’t know that the Golden are immediately behind this.”
“I don’t think so,” Dash replied. “I think the Bright are getting direct support from the Golden, or maybe from Golden constructs, like we are from the mechs, and the Forge, and the AIs. They’re not the Unseen, but the Unseen made them.”
“Wouldn’t that be something,” Leira said, shaking her head. “If it turns out both the Unseen and the Golden are long gone, and this war is now being fought by their leftover legacy tech.”
“I don’t think it makes much difference in the end,” Dash said. “Whether it’s living Golden or Golden-made machines doing it, extermination is extermination.”
“Can’t argue with that,” Viktor said.
“The point is that I’m convinced the Bright are getting help from the Golden in some direct way. We know that Clan Shirna was being bought off by the Golden somehow, so there’s something out there taking an active role in all this. We need to find it.”
Benzel nodded. “So, to that end, Wei-Ping and I did some thinking, and then we went back to Al’Bijea with the Aquarian Collective and asked him to send us all of the data they could about comets.”
Harolyn blinked. “Comets? Why?”
“Because the Golden had built some sort of fancy Dark Metal smelter inside a comet, which now sits on the Aquarian Ring.” He looked at Dash. “And you said you found the Archetype hidden away inside a comet, right? So these old races really seemed to like putting things into comets.”
“Makes sense,” Conover said. “There are lots of comets, they’re all pretty nondescript, and they sit way out on the margins of systems where no one pays much attention to them.”
“That’s right,” Benzel said. “No one pays much attention to them—except the Aquarians. They corral them and harvest their resources. Hell, it’s what they do. So, if there’s anyone who knows comets, it’s them.”
“Turns out that they’ve been surveying comets for a long time,” Wei-Ping said. “They’ve sent out hundreds of probes—translate a survey ship into a system, drop off a probe, translate away and leave it there collecting data about comets. Then they pick it back up on the return trip and download whatever it collected. One ship might do a hundred systems on one survey.”
“And now they’ve got a crazy huge database of comets,” Benzel said. “Hundreds of millions of them, and more all the time. There’s not a lot of data about any particular comet, just size, orbital data, and a simple spectral analysis. But they’ve cataloged a whole lot of them, that’s for sure.”
“So how does this help us?” Viktor asked. “Is there something we can use in all those data?”
Benzel grinned. “I’ve been getting to that. Custodian, can you put all of the comets from the Aquarian database on this display?”
The image immediately changed, and dramatically, as thousands of star systems were enclosed in glowing haloes—millions upon millions of comets, so many data points that at this scale, they were just glowing fuzz.
“And this is just comets more than a kilometer in size,” Benzel said. “Okay, Custodian, now just leave the comets showing in systems that are within twenty light-years of any zone of space where ships have gone missing, but only if the number of lost craft is greater than average.”
At least three quarters of the systems went dark.
“Well, that’s definitely progress,” Amy said.
“Now leave only systems showing containing comets that showed anomalous readings,” Benzel said. “Anything off the expected background spectral values.”
About two thirds of the remaining systems dimmed.
“So there are comets in these systems that have something about them that’s odd. They might be too warm, or are giving off a little too much radiation, something like that.”
“That still must be dozens of systems,” Leira said.
“One hundred and fourteen,” Custodian replied.
“Yeah. Like I said, dozens. Can we narrow this down more?”
Benzel smiled. “We sure can. Custodian, overlay your Dark Metal scans on this.”
Suddenly, only a half-dozen systems remained.
“Custodian has been using that fancy Dark Metal interferometer thingy Conover came up with to keep scanning deep space for Dark Metal,” Wei-Ping said. “These are all the systems that gave back readings for the stuff superimposed on unusual comets.”
Dash walked up to the display, looking at each system in turn. He finally pointed to one, which of course had a catalog number, but also showed the name Siren.
“Siren?” he said. “It’s called Siren?” He narrowed his eyes. “I don’t see any sort of settlement here.” It wasn’t unheard of for unsettled systems to be named; many still carried names given to them long ago when they’d only been seen through telescopes by Dash’s planet-bound ancestors, before the days of interstellar flight. But this one stood out. It was the only system named among dozens, in a more remote, much-less traveled part of the galactic arm.
“There isn’t any settlement there. Not a colony, not a research station, not a mining outpost, nothing. As near as Al’Bijea’s people can tell, it was given that name because more than the expected number of ships have gone missing near it.”
Dash nodded. “And that’s definitely a Dark Metal signature.”
“It sure is,” Benzel replied. “So, strange comets, at least one of them giving off a strong Dark Metal return, missing ships…” He ended on a shrug.
Dash turned to the others. “Okay, I’m convinced. Any objections?”
Heads shook. Viktor simply said, “That was damned good work.”
Dash turned back to Viktor, looking at him through the glow of the star chart. “So what do we do about it?”
“We could send a probe to do some reconnaissance before we commit to doing anything.”
“Is that what you’re proposing?”
Benzel laughed. “Nah. We should go there in force, ready to fight. Strike hard and fast.”
“If there’s nothing there after all, then we burn some fuel,” Wei-Ping said.
“More importantly, we use up precious time,” Harolyn added. “ You always were an impetuous one, Benzel. You sure about going all in on this?”
“Damned right I am. Every boarding action I’ve done has basically been running headlong into something mostly unknown. We never knew if we were going to find all sorts of valuable cargo, or squads of mercenaries hired to ambush us.” He shrugged. “Sometimes you have to say what the hell, accept the risk, and get on with it.”
Silence fell as they waited for Dash to speak. He stared at the system called Siren. It was nothing special, out in the middle of pretty much nowhere, their suspicion about it based
on micron-thin evidence, all of it circumstantial.
But it felt right.
“Yeah. I agree,” he finally said. “We’ve been looking for a chance to bring the war to the bad guys, and do it in a big way, one that’s going to hurt them. This might be our chance. It’s not like they were shining a beacon trying to lure us here, either. I think they’re trying to hide something in that system.”
“And they would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for the Aquarians,” Wei-Ping said.
Dash nodded at that. “Yeah. The power of alliances.” He looked back at Benzel. “Have you got a plan worked out for how to do this?”
Benzel’s grin widened. “I thought you’d never ask.”
Dash watched as the new mines were tractored out to the Snow Leopard, which hung just outside one of the big docking bays near the fabrication level of the Forge.
“Still not entirely sure how we’re going to use those,” he said.
“It will be situational for sure,” Conover replied. “Still, better to have them and not need them—”
“—than to need them and not have them,” Dash finished. “That’s very true.”
The Snow Leopard would be part of the second wave of their assault on Siren. In fact, everything except the Archetype and the Swift would be part of the second wave. The two mechs would lead the attack, with the Gentle Friends and the ships of the Silent Fleet leading the second wave. Everything else, including the Snow Leopard, the Slipwing, and a flotilla of drones mounted with various weapon systems, would follow, ready to engage once the Bright—or, more to the point, the Golden, hopefully—were located.
And that was the plan. Simple, flexible, without a lot of moving parts, just the way Dash liked it.
It made Dash think of something else, though. He turned to Amy, who stood nearby, chatting with Wei-Ping about something. “Have the upgrades on our ships been completed? I know they were underway, and the Slipwing was further ahead.”
“Not quite,” Amy said. “The Snow Leopard and the Slipwing could both use a few more days. But they’re in pretty good shape. The Rockhound isn’t as high a priority. She’s just not up to taking many upgrades.” She shrugged. “She’s basically an old tramp freighter, though. Never meant for fighting.”