The Messenger Box Set: Books 1-6

by J. N. Chaney

  “That’s right. I can’t even start to pick out how many episodes of impacts have happened,” Taggart admitted.

  Benzel curled his lip. He didn’t like where this was heading. “So, guys, what are you telling me here?”

  “I’ve done some scans with the Rockhound’s systems. She might not be much in a fight, but she’s good at what she does with rocks. The Ponderous has been struck over a thousand times by them—pebble-sized and smaller. The most recent impacts aren’t very old, meaning they probably happened shortly before we arrived here.”

  Benzel definitely didn’t like where this was heading now. “A thousand times? So these rocks are in orbit around this moon and keep slamming into her. That’s what you’re telling me, right?”

  “It is,” Taggart said.

  “Okay, and it’s all one swarm? Where is it now?”

  “It is one swarm, and we don’t know. Our best detectors have a sensitivity floor, meaning they won’t see enough of a signal from objects below a certain size to even register them.”

  “So this swarm of rocks is invisible?” Benzel asked.

  “Pretty much,” Taggart said.

  Benzel wanted to rub his eyes. Nothing could ever be easy, could it.

  He looked back toward the stern, and then beyond it, past the limb of the moon. Somewhere out there was a swarm of rocks moving at a high orbital velocity, fast enough relative to the Ponderous to hammer her like machine-gun bullets. It had to be a rather eccentric orbit, though, or with that much extra speed, they’d have just been flung into space. Instead, they swung away from the moon then fell back, picking up speed as they raced through their apogee, their closest point of approach to the moon. Along the way, they battered the Ponderous, hundreds of them likely thrown into new orbits, or simply away into the void.

  And they were all too small to detect. That meant, with no hard orbital data, they had no way of calculating the period of their orbit. They might be back in a few days—or a few minutes.

  Benzel suddenly felt very…squishy. A pebble that would only pock the composite alloy of the big hulk’s hull would pass clean through him and his vac suit, barely slowing as it did.

  Nope, nothing could ever be easy.

  Benzel watched as the Snow Leopard, the Ardent, and their lumbering chunk of the Ponderous in tow translated into unSpace. Their synced translation drives pulsed out a telltale burst of neutrinos as the quantum fabric of space-time rebounded from the shock, and then they were gone. That left the Rockhound and the Fearsome, which would take the midships block into tow as soon as it was finally cut free of the drive section. They still hadn’t decided quite what to do with the latter, whose awkward and largely inaccessible cargo of antimatter still gave Benzel the shivers.

  He puffed his suit thrusters, pulling away from the sleek bulk of the Fearsome, which the Gentle Friends were already rigging up for towing. The Rockhound would join her as soon as the last few cuts were made by her laser. Benzel found himself constantly looking back along the length of what remained of the Ponderous, at the starfield beyond her stern. He’d never be able to see the orbiting cloud of pebbles and gravel coming, of course, any more than he could see a slug-gun round in flight.

  But they were out there, racing closer by the second.

  “Harolyn, how much longer until you can do these last two cuts?” Benzel asked.

  “We figure another five minutes for the laser to regenerate, and then another ten minutes after that.”

  “Got it, thanks.”

  So fifteen minutes, and then another hour to get the Rockhound hooked up. So, as long as those damned rocks didn’t show up for another hour and a half, they’d be good.

  He pulsed the thrusters, pushing himself back toward the Fearsome. A quartet of Gentle Friends hung in two pairs, upside down relative to one another, working on the fasteners attaching one of the tow cables to the Ponderous. He stopped a few meters away.

  “Dana, how’s it going?”

  One of the suited figures rotated to face him. “Good. This is the last cable for the Fearsome.” She grabbed it so she could gesture back at another skein of cables that were already hooked up to the hulk, the other ends drifting free. “We decided to get them ready for the Rockhound too, to save some time.” She chuckled. “Any chance we could keep these ones, you know, after this is all done? Compared to how we used to do things, this is amazing.”

  Benzel chuckled back. He knew what she meant. Conventional towing required large and complicated contraptions called harnesses that would basically lock something being towed, and the ships towing it, into a single, freakish whole. The harnesses pretty much had to be purpose-built for the ships involved. There were supposedly military versions available, permanently fastened to translation tugs, that could automatically accommodate any ship, but Benzel had never seen one and suspected they didn’t work as well as the rumors claimed.

  “Sorry, but Custodian made these cables just for us,” Benzel said. “They’ve got Dark Metal infused in them, so they’re able to let us pull something this big”—he jerked a thumb toward the hulk looming above them— “through a translation. He wants to recycle them as soon as we get back.”

  “Damn,” Dana said.

  And that was all. She probably would have said more, but her head exploded.

  One instant, Benzel looked at the woman’s face through her helmet’s faceplate. The next, helmet, faceplate, and face were gone, replaced by whirling dollops of blood. A fragment of something zipped past Benzel, heading for deep space.

  Benzel drew in a breath to shout his warning, but he knew it was too late.

  Another of the Gentle Friends suddenly spun in place, crying out. Blood trailed in a gooey spray of droplets from her leg, where sealing foam bubbled out through a rent in her thigh. Benzel’s thoughts abruptly shifted.

  The swarm of rocks was here.

  “Puncture-puncture-puncture!” someone shouted, a warning against something that risked tearing open suits. The Gentle Friends immediately thrusted toward the Fearsome, but it was at least two hundred meters away.

  “Stop!” he yelled, at the same time punching at the control-pad on his left forearm. His shuttle, which belonged to the Snow Leopard, but that he’d kept to use as an emergency boat while they did their work, came to life, thrusting toward them. It hung nearby, only ten meters away, so it was a much better bet than trying to reach the far-off safety of the Fearsome.

  “Everyone get behind the shuttle,” he snapped. “We’ll use it for cover!”

  He brought the shuttle to a halt and moved in beside it. The Gentle Friends reversed course to join him. Benzel could only grit his teeth and desperately hope no more of them were hit by the rocks as they closed.

  One by one, they crowded in beside Benzel. A few seconds later, something struck sparks off the tow cable, then more impacts erupted all across the stern of the Fearsome, recorded by flashes of heat as speeding pebbles gave up their formidable kinetic energy in an instant. Now a blizzard of projectiles raced past, invisible, but very much there and deadly, based on the scintillating ripples of flashes across the Fearsome’s hull. All Benzel and the three surviving Gentle Friends could do was huddle in the lee of the shuttle and hope nothing big enough to slam right through it was on the way.

  Eventually, the strikes on the Fearsome slowed, became sporadic hits, then stopped altogether.

  “Benzel! Dammit Benzel, answer me!”

  It was Wei-Ping. It struck him that she’d been shouting at him for a while now, but he’d been too fixated on surviving to answer.

  “Wei-Ping, I’m here. I’m fine.”

  “Shit, I saw someone get hit.”

  “That was Dana,” Benzel said with reluctance.

  “Dana. Dammit.”

  He looked at the other Gentle Friends. Two were unhurt, but the third, a young man named Riley, was unconscious—shock, probably, from the hit on his thigh. Between the sealing foam and his suit’s emergency first-aid system, he was still
alive, but he needed help fast. He spent the next few minutes snapping out instructions, even while getting Riley loaded into the shuttle. As he did, he saw just what the shuttle had protected them from.

  Its opposite side was pocked with scarred divots; a few rocks had gone through, leaving holes, the edges of which still glowed slightly with impact heat. One of those had punched a deep gouge into the opposite interior wall, just a few centimeters away from him and the others huddling on the opposite side.

  He looked back toward Dana. She’d been hit again. Repeatedly, in fact.

  Benzel turned away from what was left of her and started assessing the damage.

  “We all set?” Benzel asked.

  Aboard the Fearsome, Wei-Ping replied, “We’re ready. We’ve got the worst of the damage to the aft end taken care of.”

  He looked at Harolyn, standing beside him in the cramped confines of the Rockhound’s tiny bridge. “We ready?”

  She nodded. “Any time.”

  “The drives are synced up,” the Rockhound’s pilot said over his shoulder. “Fearsome has control.”

  “We have control,” Wei-Ping confirmed.

  Now they just waited for Benzel’s command. One word, go, and the two ships would yank the midships chunk of the Ponderous into unSpace and power back to the Forge.

  But there was something he had to do first.

  “Wei-Ping, you may fire at will.”

  “Roger.”

  A single pulse cannon opened up from the Fearsome, its bluish bolts streaking off into the void. Somewhere along their path, Dana’s remains would now be a tenuous, expanding cloud of vapor.

  Goodbye, Dana, he thought.

  “Okay, let’s get the hell out of here,” Benzel said.

  On their way back to the Forge, Benzel took the time to speak to the Gentle Friends aboard the Rockhound. He’d do the same with all the rest of them. He wanted to get to know them better because, much as it pained him to admit it, he’d known Dana for at least three years now.

  But he never had learned her last name.

  Nope, nothing was ever simple. Especially in space.

  20

  “So there’s Dark Metal down there, huh?” Dash asked.

  “The signal return is clear,” Sentinel replied. “There are at least four hundred kilograms of Dark Metal, all of it in one location on the comet’s surface.”

  Dash narrowed his eyes at the heads-up. Sentinel made it sound straightforward. There was Dark Metal here, and it was all in one spot, so it should be easy to grab and take back home.

  Trouble was, the comet had other ideas. The size of a small mountain, the mass of ice and rock tumbled amid a halo of debris. Some impact had given it the spin, and nothing had dampened it since.

  And that impact had probably been by what was now just rotating into view.

  “That’s definitely a Golden ship,” Leira said. “It has their lines, if you know what I mean.”

  “I do. And Sentinel confirms it. It’s not like any type we’ve ever seen before, though.”

  Dash zoomed in the image on the heads-up, magnifying a sleek, tapered craft mostly buried in the ice. The pattern of cracks radiating away from it showed that it had hit hard. Dash wondered at the streamlined design; it spoke of a ship meant to spend more time flying in an atmosphere than outside of one.

  “Sentinel, give that thing a good scan,” Dash said. “I have a few ideas I’d like to follow up on, and this ship just might give me some inspiration.”

  “Interference from the debris cloud of the coma is preventing effective scanning. In particular, there is a great deal of dust, which has developed a strong static-electric charge.”

  “Well, we need to retrieve the Dark Metal anyway,” Dash said, and began gingerly easing the Archetype into the coma. “See if the scans get better as we get closer—avert!”

  A chunk of ice the size of a cargo pod slammed into the mech. It wrenched Dash sideways, threatening to make the Archetype cartwheel. He stabilized it and checked for damage. Superficial at worst. Still, he backed off and returned to clear space.

  “Okay, we need to figure out how to get at this thing. I’m thinking shooting these will just make smaller chunks.”

  “True,” Leira said. “But eventually, they’ll be small enough that they won’t matter anymore.”

  “I would point out that the reason this comet is surrounded by so much debris in its coma is that it is losing structural integrity as it moves closer to this system’s sun,” Tybalt said. “It has already begun outgassing as it warms up.”

  “So this is a comet on its death ride?” Leira asked.

  Tybalt hesitated. “Death ride? How does such a term apply to the structural collapse of an inanimate?”

  “Tybalt doesn’t quite have human idioms down,” Leira said. “I’ll explain it to him.”

  “In any case, Dash, discharging weapons in close proximity to it could have unintended consequences,” Sentinel went on. “If you blow apart a fragment, debris from it could easily act as shrapnel, striking and further destabilizing the body of the comet itself. That could then break apart, effectively destroying the Golden ship in the process.”

  “We’d still be able to retrieve the Dark Metal, though.”

  “Yes.”

  Dash narrowed his eyes at the Golden ship. As he’d said more and more often lately, Dark Metal was their second-most precious commodity. Their first was time. So he didn’t want to dawdle around with this any more than necessary; there were other Dark Metal signals to be investigated and scavenged.

  Still, the nearly disastrous encounter with the new Verity ships had rattled him in ways he’d only just started to appreciate. Before that, he’d essentially assumed the Archetype, Swift, and other Unseen tech would always carry them through. Sure, there’d be hard fights, and yes, people would get hurt and even killed, but in the end, they’d carry the day. The idea of actually losing a battle—or the war—had been a pretty abstract one.

  Now, he wasn’t so sure. The creeping despair he’d felt welling up as the Verity ships so handily outmaneuvered, outgunned, and outfought them had been deeper and more intense than even the awful time he’d thought Leira was going to die aboard the Slipwing when it plunged into the Forge’s star. The hell of it was that, had he lost Leira and the Slipwing that day, it would have been tragic, and sad beyond belief, but it wouldn’t really have changed anything. Someone else, maybe Conover or Amy, would be piloting the Swift, but the war would go on.

  But if they’d lost the two mechs to the Verity, that could have ended the whole damned war right there. And the implications of that were just too horrible to even begin contemplating.

  Dash set his mouth into a hard line. “We need Dark Metal. But we also need to understand our enemy’s tech. Take advantage of it if we can. We need every edge we can get.” He gave himself a grim nod. “I want that ship intact, at least until we can get a detailed scan of it.”

  “Dash, it looks like an atmospheric fighter,” Leira said, echoing Dash’s earlier musings. “You think we’re going to be fighting in atmo?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure we will,” Dash replied as the Archetype’s hand closed on a section of debris, sending spalls of glittering ice into a swirling cloud. “And probably sooner rather than later. If the Golden are using human and other allies, then they won’t all be in space.”

  Dash scowled at the comet. Somehow, comets had come to figure way more prominently in his life than he’d ever imagined possible. He’d crashed into and almost died on a comet, found the Archetype buried in that same one, found its first power core in another, and now had hooked up with Al’Bijea and the Aquarians because of comets—and they had the remains of one that contained an ancient Golden Dark Metal foundry.

  Comets. Hunks of ice and rock and other crap. Until that fateful crash on the Archetype’s comet, Dash had never thought of them as anything but a possible nav hazard. Now, the damned things seemed to define his life.

  “Okay,�
�� Dash said. “We can’t just blast away this debris. I’m assuming using the distortion cannon to try pulling debris away won’t work any better.”

  “That would be more likely to make the situation even worse, actually,” Sentinel said. As if to underscore her words, the comet picked that moment to vent a spectacular geyser of dust and gas. The gas arced into a graceful curve under the minute pressure of the stellar wind from the approaching star, while the dust remained following the comet’s orbital trajectory, each respectively feeding the two tails that trailed along behind it for almost a million klicks.

  “I think we’re just going to have to bull our way through this,” Dash said. The Archetype might get beaten up, but it was meant to take a pummeling from things like missiles and pulse-cannons.

  “Dash, Tybalt has an idea,” Leira said. “A clever one, actually.”

  “Hey, I’m all ears for clever ideas. Go ahead.”

  “Messenger, since the problem is the debris in the coma, which is behaving unpredictably as it heats up, why not simply remove the problem?” Tybalt said.

  “Tybalt might not quite get human idioms yet, but I see he’s picked up a really human flair for the vaguely dramatic,” Dash replied. “What the hell are you talking about? We’ve already concluded that we can’t just blow the debris away.”

  “Correct. So, instead, remove the object of your interest from the problem.”

  “Tybalt, I swear—”

  “What he’s suggesting is yanking the comet into unSpace and scavenging it there,” Leira said. “I’m not sure why he’s being so damned elusive about it.”

  “The Messenger got it right,” Tybalt replied. “I am exploring the concept of being dramatic. It intrigues me.”

  “Oh for—that’s all I need,” Leira muttered.

  Dash had to chuckle. Yup, sometimes they really did sound like an old married couple. “Okay, so how do we do that, Tybalt?”

  “In a manner similar to the recovery of the Verity missile platform. Anchor the Swift and the Archetype as firmly as possible to the piece constituting the head of the comet, then do a synchronized translation. I calculate that one of the mechs is sufficient to maintain it in that state, while the other performs the recovery operation.”