The Messenger Box Set: Books 1-6

by J. N. Chaney

  “Can you deliberately overshoot?”

  “You are up to something again.”

  “Indeed I am. Can you deliberately overshoot the time we came from, go back to a point before it?”

  “I could achieve a margin of days, but nothing less than that. However, we would again be unable to return to real space because of the mass-balance problem.”

  “Yeah, the Archetype and Slipwing and Amy and Dash are still there, a few days ago, I get it. What if we go back and just sit in the Dark Between waiting until we started this whole mess to begin with? Once the other Dash and Amy I guess, enter unSpace.”

  “Then we would leave it,” Sentinel replied. “Yes, the reasoning is sound. However, that also does stand to create an infinite time loop, in which this incident will continue to happen, theoretically forever.”

  “Maybe it already has,” Amy said. “And we’ve been through this a bazillion times now.”

  Dash sighed. Now there was a terrifying thought. And yet, it might actually be true. How would they ever know?

  “Okay, so one last question, Sentinel,” he asked. “Once we’re out of this, will we just join the regular flow of time and carry on?”

  “To the extent I can answer that question, I would say yes.”

  “But you don’t know for sure.”

  “I do not.”

  “What do you think, Amy?” Dash asked.

  “This future sucks. Let’s go back and see if we can make a better one.”

  “Works for me. Sentinel, do what you have to do, and then let’s go back to where we belong.”

  The downside of their foray through not just space, but time—aside from the obviously cataclysmic possibilities it raised—was that they ended up five days ago, relative to when they’d first translated to start all of this. So Dash and Amy were still aboard the Forge, not yet having spoken to Al’Bijea, who himself wasn’t even yet aware that a Verity force was on its way to attack the Ring. It forced Dash and Amy to wait, hanging in the featureless void of the Darkness Between, passing the time as best they could.

  It turned out Dash was better than Amy at poker, but she was by far the better chess player.

  Now, they’d almost caught up in time. They’d seen the Verity force arrive and lay its trap; now, they prepared themselves to finally return to real space in their right time—more or less, although according to Sentinel it didn’t really matter, as long as they finished their long-delayed translation once the other Dash and Amy had entered unSpace.

  And, based on the chrono, they just had.

  “Sentinel, if we were to drop back into real space now, we’d have the drop on the Verity, right?”

  “Given that there is no way, in the normal course of things, for the Slipwing and Archetype to be here now, then it is likely that they would be taken completely by surprise, yes.”

  “Amy, you ready to do this?’

  “If it means I don’t have to play another hand of poker with you, yes, a thousand times yes. I swear you cheat.”

  “I never cheat friends,” Dash said. “Okay, then, let’s do this. Sentinel, let’s get the hell out of the Dark Between.”

  Side-by-side, the Archetype and the Slipwing finally popped back into the real universe.

  Ahead of them, a Verity flotilla was marshalled around two massive ships—a Verity battlecruiser and, to Dash’s grim surprise, a ship that clearly belonged to Clan Shirna. It was the twin of one that he’d destroyed with the Unseen device called a Lens, right after he’d killed the Shirna leader called Nathis.

  All of them were blissfully unaware of the Archetype and the Slipwing, which Sentinel had managed to bring back into real space only a few thousand klicks away. The wash of EM noise and radiation from the multitude of stars flaring around them gave them a brief window of time to act.

  “Amy, rake that big ship on the right, the one that’s probably Clan Shirna. I’ll take the one on the left. Go!”

  Together, the Archetype and the Slipwing leapt forward, accelerating hard.

  The enemy ships grew in the heads-up. The firing solutions were dead simple, practically shoot that way and watch for the boom.

  So Dash did.

  Dark-lance shots and missiles erupted from the Archetype, tearing into the hull of the big Verity battlecruiser. Dash fired the distortion cannon, too, yanking a chunk out of its hull and sending two smaller ships, a corvette and a fighter, careening into the debris and one another. He glanced at Amy and saw her pumping pulse-cannon shots and missiles into the Clan Shirna ship. She peeled off as return fire started up, point-defense systems first, as they came to automated life; bigger weapons followed, sporadic, but quickly growing in intensity as the enemy fleet realized it was being hammered by an attack that shouldn’t even be happening.

  Shots began to slam into the Archetype’s shield. Dash kept pulsing out shots from the dark-lance, punching into the battlecruiser’s hull, leaving clouds of venting atmosphere and spinning debris in his wake. He brought the Archetype to within a few meters of the big ship, deployed the power sword, and slashed at weapons clusters, sensor arrays, and anything else he could reach. And then he was clear, the big ship receding behind him.

  He stowed the power-sword and flicked the heads-up to a rearward view. Chaos gripped the Verity fleet. Ships that had prepared themselves for a common attack vector against the rest of the Cygnus fleet now struggled to break formation and reorganize themselves against this new, unexpected attack.

  But reorganizing themselves they were. Dash knew they’d kicked a nest of fangrats, riling them up to a frenzy. The question was, did they go back in, or just break and run until Benzel and the rest of the fleet—

  “Look out, assholes, here it comes again!”

  Dash saw that Amy had reversed course and now burned hard, driving the Slipwing right back into battle.

  “Oh. Amy,” Dash muttered.

  There was brave, and there was stupid, and there was stupidly brave—and then there was Amy.

  Dash somersaulted and drove the Archetype through a hard turn, then he opened up again with missiles and the dark-lance. The weight of return fire was building up to terrifying levels, though. He saw the Slipwing dodging and weaving through a storm of fire, taking a few hits, but mostly throwing off the Verity firing solutions—at least, for the moment. But the Slipwing had only a single, weak shield, all that even her upgraded reactor could power. Dash straightened out his course, trying to make himself an easier target, hoping to draw the Verity fire.

  Which he did. It seemed like most of the fleet had decided to concentrate their fire on him, and now he was the one desperately evading, trying to preserve the Archetype’s shields for as long as he could.

  The Slipwing slashed through the Verity formation, a streak of incandescent fusion exhaust. Amy landed solid hits on a Verity cruiser, but another had raised a shield of its own and just ignored her incoming fire, targeting her, and catching the Slipwing in a tsunami of pulse-cannon shots. The Slipwing staggered and her fusion exhaust died, leaving her coasting helplessly in a straight line.

  “Dammit!”

  Dash flung himself at his ship. Since she was no longer accelerating, he caught up fast.

  “Sentinel, priority on that shield! Give it everything you can!”

  “Understood.”

  Dash was able to launch a final salvo of missiles, then the Archetype’s weapons dropped offline. He caught the Slipwing and grabbed her hull, the mech’s mighty hands gripping her point defense battery. He couldn’t apply much force—he’d just rip the battery off its mounts—but he wasn’t trying to. He just wanted to protect the Slipwing as best he could and hope that either the rest of the fleet showed up, or they could lose themselves against the background clutter of the globular cluster. But without being able accelerate—

  “Amy, you okay?”

  “I’m fine. Your ship’s a little broken, though. I’m working on the drive now.”

  Shots slammed into the Archetype’s
shield, the volume of fire mounting by the second. Dash gritted his teeth against the growing storm, wincing as the Meld began communicating the damage. The shield faltered; shots starting smashing into the Archetype’s armor. But he could do nothing except coast along.

  “Amy, get that drive lit!”

  “Working on it!”

  Dash winced again. He let go of the point-defense array and moved the Archetype back, planting his hands on the Slipwing’s stern. The heads-up was filled by the gaping blackness of his ship’s fusion exhaust ports.

  “Change of plans, Amy. Don’t light the drive. I’m going to try to push—”

  Missiles raced in, a whole salvo of them. The Slipwing’s point defense opened up, taking down some, but the rest struck home, immersing the Archetype and her charge in searing blasts of raw plasma.

  The Archetype’s shield flared briefly with scintillating energy, then died. Every incoming shot would now strike armor, which wouldn’t last long.

  Dash found himself facing another of those awful choices. He could try to restore the shield, but that would preclude him powering up the Archetype’s drive. Or he could accelerate but forego the shield.

  Or he could leave the Slipwing to her fate and just break off to save the Archetype.

  Pulse-cannon shots began boiling away the Archetype’s armor. More struck the Slipwing, tearing glowing chunks out of her own armor. He heard Amy cry out as one bolt hit a soft spot, the base of the Slipwing’s lower sensor array, where its conduits entered the hull.

  Dash groaned as the Archetype staggered under the repeated hits. He was going to lose the mech—and they couldn’t lose the mech.

  Then he had a thought. He’d assumed that his inadvertent vision of the future, the wrecked Swift, had been something they could simply prevent by doing what they did, effectively rewinding time and trying again. But what if the future was fixed? What if this was inevitable? And if it really was an infinitely repeating loop, was there some way they could warn their past selves?

  The Archetype went abruptly dark and silent.

  “Sentinel!”

  Nothing.

  “Shit, Sentinel—”

  The heads-up flared back to life. “Emergency power only,” Sentinel said. “All major systems offline.”

  “Is there anything we”—Dash grunted, as yet more shots hit home—“we can do?”

  “I have no suggestions.”

  It was probably the bleakest thing Dash had ever heard from the AI.

  “You guys need a hand?”

  The massive bulk of the Herald slid into view, interposing her bulk between Dash and Amy, and the Verity fleet. The sound of Benzel’s voice let Dash just hang in the Archetype’s cradle for a moment.

  “You would not believe how good it is to see you guys,” he said.

  “Looked for a while there like you and Amy were going to take out this fleet all by yourselves, leave nothing for us.”

  “Yeah, it started out good, but kind of went sideways after that.”

  “Sorry, just a sec—” Benzel stayed silent for a moment, then said, “Sorry about that. Had a salvo of incoming missiles to deal with. Can you two extract yourselves from this mess on your own? All these stars are making this battle crazy complicated, there’s gravity everywhere, pulling in every direction.”

  “Amy, how’s that drive?”

  “If you’d get your face out of my rear end, I could fire it up right now!”

  Benzel chuckled. “Well, I’ll leave you two alone, then—”

  “Very funny,” Dash said, backing the Archetype away on thrusters and moving it out of the Slipwing’s exhaust plume. “Benzel, in all seriousness, have you got this battle under control? Because the Archetype’s in pretty rough shape.”

  It was Leira who answered. “We’ve got this, Dash. You and Amy made it a lot easier, those two big ships are pretty much out of commission.”

  Dash let out a long, slow breath. “Leira, is it ever good to hear your voice.”

  “Miss me?”

  The Slipwing’s fusion drive lit, and Amy powered away from the battle. Dash followed.

  “Yeah, Leira—actually, I did.”

  “Oh. Um, okay.” He could tell she wanted to ask more, but there was a battle to finish winning. “We’ll talk later.”

  “You bet,” Dash replied, glad to his core that they’d have the chance, because the future didn’t seem to be fixed after all.

  “I think that’s one of the worst beating the Archetype ever took,” Dash said, looking out from the docking bay and into space. The mech hung out there, motionless, a half dozen of the Forge’s maintenance drones swirling around it, removing wrecked armor and components and installing new ones. Heavy repairs like this were just easier to do in space; even so, Sentinel would still have to bring the mech into a docking bay near the fabrication plant for its final fixes.

  “Yeah, I guess that’s kind of my fault,” Amy said.

  Dash looked at her. “Yeah, it was.”

  She turned to him, surprised and little shocked. Leira mirrored her expression.

  “I’m sorry, Dash,” Amy said.

  He turned on her. Sheer relief at how things worked out wasn’t enough to offset the fact he was pissed. “You should be. Benzel and Wei-Ping think I’m aggressive, but you’re sometimes over the top, Amy. You’ve got to rein that in, especially if you’re going to be flying a mech, but there’s another issue here, too.”

  “Um…what?” Amy said, her voice small.

  He gripped her shoulder, his voice taking on a softer note. “You’re not bulletproof. None of us are.”

  She gave a chastened nod. “You’re right. I just get carried away.”

  “Custodian,” Dash said. “Whatever AI you set up for Amy in the Talon, it’s got to be one that helps her stay a little more…I don’t know, careful, judicious, something like that, anyway.”

  “Understood.”

  Dash wanted to stay mad at Amy; she looked like a puppy he’d just kicked. He finally sighed and said, “I don’t want to lose you,” he finally said.

  She gave him a weak smile. “Me, or your ship?”

  “Eh, maybe a little of both.”

  “Dash!”

  He turned to see Benzel, who was approaching with Wei-Ping.

  “We’ve got the final casualty count,” Benzel said. “We lost sixteen, and two ships. One was one of our new Silent Fleet additions, the Terror. She was just too badly damaged to bring home in one piece, so we’re retrieving her as scrap. The other was a mine layer, the Persistence.”

  “She took a missile that breached her reactor containment,” Wei-Ping said. “At least the people aboard her wouldn’t have felt a thing.”

  Dash crossed his arms. “That’s not really comforting.”

  “Don’t expect it to be,” Wei-Ping said. “It’s just that if there’s anything not truly shitty out of it, that would be it.”

  Dash stared at her for a moment, then nodded. She had a point. But so did he.

  “Custodian, we’ve been putting a lot of emphasis on making more weapons. But how about better ones? Do we have design upgrades we can make to these ships? Better shields and armor especially, to protect our people? We’re leaving too many souls out in the black, and I won’t have it.”

  “The amount of scrap being retrieved from the most recent battle—particularly Dark Metal—would allow for a number of upgrades,” Custodian replied. “However, it would mean curtailing production in some areas.”

  Dash nodded in thought. They had managed to salvage a lot of scrap from the battle in the globular cluster—including a Golden observation post of some sort, that had been well-hidden from outside the cluster but pretty evident from inside. They’d towed it back to the Forge along with everything else; after a brief examination, Custodian had suggested that it had enough Dark Metal incorporated into it to actually expand production of some weapons, particularly mines.

  But if that same Dark Metal could be used for better p
rotective systems—

  “Okay, Custodian, let’s you and I meet with Viktor and Conover in, say, an hour to talk about our production priorities. I really want to upgrade our ships’ systems and try to keep our people safe—or at least safer than they are now.”

  “Understood.”

  He asked Benzel and Wei-Ping to join in the meeting, then wandered off to spend a few precious minutes alone.

  Leira, though, apparently had other ideas. He turned when he felt someone following him across the docking bay and found her just a few paces away.

  “Am I intruding?” she asked.

  He nodded. “Yup. But if anyone has a standing invitation to intrude, it would be you.”

  She smiled. “So Amy mentioned that you guys did a little time traveling.”

  “Not by choice, but, yeah.”

  “What was that like?”

  “I don’t recommend it. Too much maybe-screwing-up-the-whole-universe to make it really worth it.”

  “I get that. Conover and the AIs seem to be really intrigued, but I agree that time is one thing we should probably leave alone.”

  Dash nodded.

  “So what did you see?”

  He looked at her. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, Amy wouldn’t tell me anything. She said I should talk to you. I’m just wondering what you saw.”

  Dash looked out at the Archetype and the maintenance drones darting about it. For a moment, with damaged armor being removed to be taken back to the smelters, she looked derelict, just as the Swift had looked during his brief but horrifying glimpse back into the real space of the future from the Darkness Between.

  He shrugged. “I didn’t see much, really,” Dash said. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter now because none of it will ever happen.”

  Leira said nothing. Dash turned to her and saw she was giving him a searching look. Finally, she spoke.

  “Makes me wonder what happened to the people in that future. Did they just cease to exist?”

  Dash looked into Leira’s eyes and smiled. “Actually, I think they’re just fine.”