The Messenger Box Set: Books 1-6

by J. N. Chaney

  Dash watched as the drones configured themselves to plug the gaps their missiles had blown in their screen. They were fast, nimble, and adaptable. Each sported a pulse cannon—albeit, not an especially powerful one, since the drones were only about five meters long—and they worked together to concentrate their fire. The Archetype shuddered as pulse-cannon shots slammed into its shields like hail from a storm, but he ignored it and lined up dark-lance shots, taking out one drone and then another. A moment later, as they flashed past the Shroud, he fired a quartet of missiles at point-blank range. A drone exploded with a tremendous flash, not hit by a missile, though; it seemed to destroy itself to knock his missiles off their trajectory.

  “They’re pretty happy to suicide these things,” Leira snapped. “I’ve had two blow up in my face.”

  “Let’s just stick with the plan,” Dash called back. “Okay, translation point coming up, and—now.”

  Both mechs flung themselves back into unSpace. Dash waited to see if any of the drones chased them into the darkness that was both infinite and dimensionless, but none did.

  “Well, at least that hunch paid off,” he muttered. “Okay, let’s attack next from…” He decided on a trajectory and passed it through Sentinel, to Leira and Tybalt. They confirmed it, and the mechs maneuvered themselves to their new translation point.

  On Dash’s command, they dropped back into real space. This brought a glaring deficiency in the Golden’s choice of this stellar nursery as a hiding place for the Shroud. Ordinarily, the deepest into a system a safe translation point would be was defined by its star’s gravity well. But the nearest star to the Shroud was a small one, a youngster still accreting new matter from the surrounding dust and gas. Its gravitational influence was almost negligible, meaning they could translate in almost as close to the Shroud as they wished. In fact, the only real limit was how close to it they wanted to pop back into normal space, while still having enough time to engage in battle.

  Ahead of them, Dash saw the drones flinging themselves through myriad, gyrating accelerations, trying to accommodate their new approach vector. Again, the Archetype and the Swift fired salvos of missiles, then bore in hard behind them. Then the drones opened fire.

  They raced past the Shroud, firing missiles at nearly point-blank range. One detonated close to the facility but failed to take out the array, which Sentinel confirmed was a comm system. Dash cursed as they swept into their outbound run and prepared to translate. Repeated, massed pulse-cannon fire from the Golden drones was taking its toll on both mechs. Their shields were down, and both had minor damage to various systems.

  Both were also still combat-capable, but as usual, time stood as fierce an enemy as the Golden themselves; if the Shroud had managed to send a distress signal, they might soon face much more powerful reinforcements. As they translated and maneuvered to attack from another vector, Dash decided that if other enemy forces did show up in strength, they’d just run. As much as he wanted this shroud—or to put it out of action—he would not risk losing their mechs over it.

  As they snapped back into real space and began to accelerate, Dash called up Leira. “If we don’t do something decisive to shut down these defenses and set it up for capture on this run, then we’re just going to destroy this Shroud thing.”

  “Got it,” came Leira’s terse reply as they zoomed back into the maelstrom of drone fire.

  The Shroud grew in the heads-up; firing solutions resolved and the missiles armed, ready to launch. On instinct alone, Dash decided to configure the missiles to use a more scattered approach, forcing the drones playing close-in defense on the Shroud, and its own point-defense systems, to take a tiny bit longer to acquire targets and shift fire among them. At the same time, two of the missiles would hang back and approach in a spiraling corkscrew, making them a little harder to acquire in the first place. As he launched the missiles, Dash knew it was a trade-off, giving their enemies more time to engage, but making it harder for them to do so. He could only hope the latter overrode the former, even just a tiny bit.

  But it was a gamble that paid off. One of the spiraling missiles flashed past the defending drones, somehow dodged a last-ditch storm of point-defense fire, and slammed into the comms array. The explosion blew the array to pieces, the blast and resulting shrapnel ripping into the Shroud’s hull.

  As they once more started their outbound leg, Dash saw that the drones seemed to suddenly lose their smooth coordination, the maneuvers becoming erratic, their fire more sporadic. Sentinel confirmed it.

  “The drones are now operating at a much lower level of efficiency. It would appear that whatever control system directed them from the Shroud has gone offline.”

  Dash made a snap decision. “Leira, reverse course! Let’s attack right now, before they get a chance to do any repairs!”

  The Archetype and Swift both jackknifed through course reversals, then accelerated at full combat power, slowing, stopping, then driving back along a back trajectory. Dash began pumping out dark-lance shots, while Leira opened up with the Swift’s nova cannon. Soon, fragments of wrecked drones spun and tumbled around the Shroud; by the time they’d zipped past it, only a few remained operational. While Leira finished them off, Dash put his attention on the Shroud itself. It still poured out point-defense fire; it wasn’t much of a threat to the Archetype, but it needed to be silenced if they were going to recover this thing.

  “Sentinel, can we dark-lance those point-defense batteries without wrecking the Shroud?”

  “Inadvisable. The energy release from the dark-lance impacts will likely do considerable damage to the facility, perhaps even destroying it.”

  “So it’s a club, and I need a scalpel.” His mind raced. “How about our own point-defense systems? Can we use those?”

  “We would have to close the range considerably. However, they would do much less collateral damage, yes.”

  Dash flung the Archetype directly at the Shroud, switching the mech’s point-defense batteries from autonomous, reactive mode to a reactive, command-input mode. The instant they entered range, he opened up.

  For the next few moments, Dash found himself embroiled in one of the strangest battles of this entire war. The Shroud and the Archetype traded barrages of point-defense fire, shots meant to be a last-resort defense against incoming ordnance. The result was spectacular torrents of fire exchanged between the mech and the Shroud, but it didn’t actually do very much to either one, at least not quickly.

  Despite the tension of the situation, Dash had to grin. “I think I could spit on the Shroud and do about as much damage,” he said, watching as the dazzling display of shooting played out. It was like two guys locked in an awkward slap-fight, one unable to throw any punches, the other unwilling to.

  “Need a hand?” Leira said.

  “Yeah, it’d be helpful,” Dash replied. “This is going to take forever.”

  Tybalt coordinated the Swift’s fire with the Archetype’s, timing the shots from the two mechs so they’d impact simultaneously, on common targeting points. With the added weight of Leira’s fire, the Shroud’s defenses were finally silenced, one by one.

  The threat indicator had gone dark. Dash warily moved the Archetype in closer to the Shroud, ready for it to light up again.

  It didn’t.

  He let himself relax a notch. “Okay, looks like we’ve got this. Now, to get it out of here before more bad guys show up.”

  “Dash, I don’t see any way of actually boarding this thing,” Leira said.

  Dash scanned the oblong bulk of the Shroud for anything that resembled an airlock. He saw lots of relatively minor battle damage, albeit still enough to seemingly knock the facility completely offline. But he saw no way in.

  “That is because it is an entirely automated facility,” Sentinel said, answering the question Dash was just about to ask. “It is meant to operate autonomously. There is a small maintenance facility, but it is isolated from the interior of the Shroud, where the fabrication functi
ons are performed.”

  “I would speculate that the fabrication processes for power cores are not compatible with the existence of organic life,” Tybalt added.

  “Makes me a little nervous having one of these things operating aboard the Forge,” Leira said. “Of course, I get nervous whenever I hear that something is incompatible with organic life—you know, being organic life and all myself.”

  “We might have to operate it like a standalone thing,” Dash said. “But that’s a problem for later. Right now—Amy, you there?”

  “Roger that. Standing by.”

  “Okay, come on in and get this thing hooked up so we can get the hell out of here.”

  “Be there in a flash.”

  A few seconds after she’d spoken, the Slipwing and the Rockhound both dropped out of unSpace, each with a tug drone in company. While they moved in, the Gentle Friends aboard the Rockhound proceeded to get things in place and hooked up with their usual, brusque efficiency. Dash and Leira took up stations a few tens of thousands of klicks on opposite sides of the Shroud and maintained a careful watch for any new, incoming threats.

  It seemed to take the Gentle Friends forever to get the Shroud rigged for towing. Dash knew it didn’t really, but he couldn’t forget that comms array, pointed into what seemed like empty blackness. It made him wonder, and wondering made him start using his imagination, and none of the things he imagined were good.

  Had the threat indicator flickered? “Sentinel, did I see a brief contact there?”

  “I have detected nothing, and the Archetype’s sensors are showing as fully—”

  “That’s fine,” he said. “Guess I’m just jumpy.”

  Dash tried to make himself relax and stop seeing more flickers from the threat indicator, or more things suddenly moving against the starfield, then vanishing as soon as he looked at them.

  I need a vacation, he thought.

  “Okay, Dash,” Amy said. “The Gentle Friends are ready.”

  “Excellent, let’s get out of here.”

  “In a hurry?”

  Dash frowned at his own anxious tone. Yup, definitely a vacation, sometime soon.

  “I’m always in a hurry, Amy,” he finally replied, making his tone as light as he could, this time.

  Still, he was profoundly glad when they finally entered unSpace, heading back for the Forge and leaving the spectacular menace of the stellar nursery behind.

  11

  Dash strode along a corridor, reading a datapad as he went. Custodian had given him one of his typically too-complete status updates; it recounted all sorts of specific parameters about things that Dash either didn’t really understand, or frankly just didn’t really care about. He was used to it, though, and was able to quickly sift out the things that were important—at least, to him.

  The Forge continued its stately progress toward Verity space and would cross what seemed to be the boundary in about five or six days.

  Power levels for the Forge and the two mechs had stabilized; the latter had also now been fully repaired and were ready for battle.

  Benzel had finalized the configuration of the fleet, and Wei-Ping had started a series of exercises and war games to hone their skills and tactics, and to get them used to working together in their new squadrons.

  The smelting and fabricating systems were running flat-out, producing new ship components, missiles to restock and expand their inventory, even more mines.

  Dash slammed to a stop and reread the section he’d just finished.

  “Custodian?”

  “Messenger.”

  “What’s this about new mechs?”

  “Sentinel was correct.”

  “Uh—what?”

  “She suggested that if I simply included that as an unremarkable line item in a routine status report, it would evoke this very reaction from you.”

  “She—wait. You mean Sentinel put you up to something?”

  “Put you up to something is an idiom with which I am unfamiliar.”

  “It means that she encouraged you to do something meant to…well, affect me in some way. Usually, it’s some sort of trick or joke.”

  “This is neither. The Forge really is now capable of constructing new mechs.”

  “Yeah, I get that, but—” Dash broke off, smiling and shaking his head. He knew these AIs communicated with one another all the time, but he’d always just assumed it was about AI things, swapping data, that sort of thing. But they were also conspiring to screw around with him?

  He needed to talk to Leira and the others about this. The AIs were clearly starting to show human quirks and characteristics, and while that was both amusing and fascinating, was it also going to start affecting their ability to do the things they’d come to count on them doing?

  For now, though, he just put that aside. “So tell me about these new mechs. Where did the schematics for them come from?”

  “From the data stores in the tandem power core retrieved from Burrow and installed in the Forge. I have been evaluating them, and have concluded that, with some modifications, the Forge would be capable of constructing both types of new mech.”

  “Okay, so what are they like? What abilities do they have? How many?”

  “If you come to the fabrication plant, I can better explain.”

  Dash glanced at the time on the datapad. “I have a meeting with Freya in fifteen minutes. I’ll be there, say, in an hour.”

  “I shall be ready.”

  Dash resumed his way along the corridor. Freya had been coy, too, about what she wanted to talk to him about. It seemed that this was a day for surprises.

  That some of them were coming from the AIs just made him shake his head again.

  Dash carried on, following the directions given to him by Freya. They were leading him into a part of the Forge that had been open and powered up for some time now, but that they hadn’t put into use. It was, as far as Dash knew, all hab and storage—good to have available, but not immediately required for anything. He wondered just what the hell Freya had been up to in here.

  He rounded a corner and saw Freya just ahead, standing in front of a big blast door. It opened, as far as Dash could recall, into a series of cargo bays. She smiled and nodded as he approached.

  “Hello, Dash. Glad you could make it.”

  “Well, you made it sound important. Also, you’re my supplier for plumato wine, pomegranate whisky, and whatever the hell that turquoise stuff is. You know, the one that glows a bit.”

  “Oh, right. I haven’t named that yet. It’s got a base of potato vodka, and then it has extracts from a couple of types of hybrid berries from that crashed Golden ship near Port Hannah.”

  “You sure that stuff is really safe to drink?”

  “Very. In fact, there are compounds in the berries that actually offset the toxic metabolic effects of the alcohol, so you get the drunk part without the hangover part.”

  “Sold!” Dash said, grinning. “I now have a new favorite drink, named or not.” His grin became thoughtful. “Now that’s something we could look at selling sometime. Holy crap, never mind blowing up stars or things made out of Dark Metal, drunk without a hangover would be worth a fortune.” He looked at Freya. “You’re officially my new hero. But I assume you didn’t want to bring me here to talk about booze.”

  “I did not. I want to show you something I’ve been working on. I’ve had Custodian helping me, mainly by keeping what I’ve been doing here secret.”

  Okay, now Dash had to resist a frown. They’d first met Freya in Port Hannah, on Gulch, where she’d been secretly slipping inside the crashed Golden battlecruiser buried nearby. Although Dash knew she hadn’t intended it, she could very well have roused the multitude of bots left dormant inside the Golden ship and provoked them into attacking Port Hannah. In other words, the woman had a history of questionably secretive judgment.

  Although if Custodian had at least been aware…

  “Okay, well, show me what you’ve got,” Dash
said.

  She nodded, turned, and touched a panel, opening the blast door.

  Light spilled out. With it came a waft of warm, humid air, and a smell Dash could only describe as green.

  He followed Freya through the open blast door then stopped and gaped.

  He stood in a park.

  Grass underfoot. A riot of color from flowering shrubs. Trees, some twice Dash’s height, with a lot of room yet to grow under the compartment’s ceiling. A path wound away from the blast door, vanishing among a stand of what Dash thought might be some sort of hybrid maples, but he was no plant expert and just guessed at it, from the flame-toned foliage.

  Freya’s grin went from ear-to-ear. “What do you think?”

  “Uh—”

  Dash found himself literally speechless. Freya just waited for him to find his voice again.

  “Okay, holy shit,” is what he finally said.

  “Holy shit is a good reaction,” she said. “Pretty much what I was going for, in fact.”

  “Freya—I mean, holy shit. How did you do this?”

  “Well, the Forge has stocks of a growth medium that I was able to use for soil. It can also make the stuff from almost any organic feedstock.”

  Dash narrowed his eyes at that. “Such as?”

  Freya smiled back. “Do you really want to know?”

  Dash looked at the grass, the soil beneath it. It looked like regular dirt. He decided to keep it looking that way and shook his head. “Not really.”

  “Anyway, once that was ready, I was able to start seeding the place.” She gestured around. “And here we are.”

  “Most of these plants look like they’ve been around for, well, more than just a few—” He paused. “How long have you been working on this, anyway?”

  “A couple of months.”

  “A couple of—” Dash shook his head. “You’ve been doing this for a couple of months? How the hell did you keep it a secret?” He shook his head again. He’d been worrying about security issues on the Forge before this, but the fact Freya could get away with something this elaborate—