The Messenger Box Set: Books 1-6

by J. N. Chaney

  “Any updates?” Dash asked, climbing into the Archetype’s cradle.

  “Yes,” Custodian said. “The incoming ships are Golden, Harbinger-class mechs, but smaller, lighter, and faster than the versions we have encountered previously. They are operating with the profile of a scouting mission in-force. They are approaching at high velocity and show no signs of decelerating,” Custodian said.

  “Meaning they plan on a strafing run—or colliding with something. Leira, you online yet?”

  “Just got comfy in the Swift’s cradle,” she replied. “Launching in about twenty seconds.”

  “Good. As soon as you’re clear of the Forge, fire a salvo of missiles at our visitors.”

  “That’s an awfully long-ranged attack, Dash, with lots of time for countermeasures and evasion. Won’t they just miss?”

  Dash spun the Archetype around and flung it into space. “Probably. But evasion is good. I want them to alter course, maneuver ,and bleed off some speed, see if we can get them playing defense. Benzel?”

  “Boss?” Benzel answered instantly.

  “Get your people in motion. I want flash mines deployed. Pushed out of the bays by hand if necessary. Any velocity is better than none. I’ll upload a scheme to the general channel in just a second. Conform as closely to it as you can.”

  “Will do,” Benzel said.

  Dash saw Leira’s missiles launch as Sentinel began tracking them. He fired his own salvo then conversed quickly with Sentinel, outlining the plan he’d roughed out in his mind while running to board the Archetype. It was still all about new weapons, and the fact that these were Harbingers only solidified it for him.

  “You wish to take these enemy vessels intact?” Sentinel asked.

  “Damned right I do. I’d like to see if we can retrofit them with pilots, or at least replace their AI with our own. Either way, I want to make them into our mechs.”

  “There is considerable uncertainty regarding whether that is even possible.”

  “Yeah, well, you don’t try, you don’t get. I mean, worse comes to worst and we just use them as scrap anyway. But if we could pull this off—” He gave the threat indicator a feral grin. “Yeah. I’m inspired by the Shroud. We took it from the Golden for ourselves. That’s like having two Shrouds, right? The one the Golden don’t have anymore, and the one we do. I’d love to keep doing that, and these Harbingers are a great place to start.”

  “Understood. The mine layer Void Stalker has several flash and scrambler mines already onboard and was on station with A Squadron of the fleet. Benzel is deploying her now, escorted by the Herald.”

  Dash nodded. “Perfect.”

  “Two of the approaching enemy craft have begun decelerating,” Sentinel said a moment later. “The other three are continuing to approach at high speed.”

  Dash narrowed his eyes at the heads-up. “Wonder what that’s about. Keep an eye on them, Sentinel, and let me know what they’re doing. Meantime, our missiles should be just about on target.”

  Sure enough, the three approaching Harbingers accelerated laterally, veering to one side then abruptly shifting thrust and veering again. At the same time, they opened up with insanely rapid-fire pulse-cannons. Each shot was weaker than those from the standard pulse weapons aboard, say, the Herald; Dash knew the strength of their shots was somehow a function of the length of the weapon’s reaction chamber, so these ones must just be smaller. But they made up for it with an incredible rate of fire. In a few seconds, they’d avoided or destroyed all of the missiles except one, which managed to land a lucky hit on one of the Harbingers. The enemy mech’s shield held, but it did slow some, falling behind its comrades.

  For the next few minutes, Dash just intently watched the tactical display. Sometimes space battles were like this: periods of doing nothing but flying, sometimes long ones, closing with the enemy. But at their combined closing rate, the Harbingers on the one side and the Archetype and Swift on the other, this doing nothing but flying part wouldn’t last long at all.

  Dash shifted his attention a fraction and saw the Herald and the Void Stalker closing up behind them. “Benzel, you’d better get those mines deployed. Those Harbingers are coming in hot.”

  “The Void Stalker’s already started laying them. We figure she’ll get twelve to fifteen of them deployed, and then she’s going to get the hell out of the way.”

  “Sounds good.” Benzel’s caution for the mine layer was commendable; she might be armed, but she was no match even for a light version of a Harbinger. Speaking of which—

  Sentinel spoke up, answering the question he was about to ask. “The two Harbingers that decelerated are now on an outbound trajectory. If they intend to translate, they will be able to do so in approximately five minutes.”

  “They’re getaways.”

  “I don’t understand the reference.”

  Dash allowed himself a smile. “When you’re doing a job, something that might get you into trouble, say, you’re breaking into a secure compound to steal a shipment of power couplings then you leave a getaway or two.”

  “That is an unusually specific example.”

  “Just plucked it out of thin air, honestly. Anyway, you leave one or two people back, watching over the job as it happens. That way, if anything goes wrong, they can break off and report back to the gangster—er, whoever set the job up in the first place. That way, they know what happened and can plan what to do next.”

  “You believe these two Harbingers intend to observe what happens then withdraw with that information.”

  Dash nodded. “Yeah. It’s a way of testing our capabilities. We might have spooked them when the Archetype and the Slipwing were able to suddenly appear right on top of them, without them detecting us until it was too late. They didn’t know it happened accidentally after some unplanned time travel.”

  “A good point. The Golden may now believe we have capabilities of which they were unaware and now they want to understand.”

  “Exactly. I mean, I don’t know that’s the case, but it would make sense.”

  “We will be in dark-lance range in fifteen seconds.”

  “Leira,” Dash said. “I don’t want to stop these guys. I want them to keep heading for the Forge and hopefully run into those flash mines. So let’s just keep accelerating past them, a high-speed pass, and snap out a few shots that mostly miss.”

  “In other words, not fight very well or smart?” Leira replied. “Yeah, I can definitely do that.”

  Dash chuckled and watched the range close. He fired the dark-lance a few times, landing a couple of hits that splashed off shields and Dark Metal armor, but mostly missing. Leira did the same with the nova-cannon, deliberately not targeting it to bypass the Harbingers’ shields. The enemy mechs returned fire as soon they were close enough to employ their shorter-ranged, rapid-fire pulse-cannons, then launching missiles. They weren’t, of course, trying to miss, and both the Archetype and Swift took hits.

  The extreme rate of fire of the pulse cannons was actually worrisome; they quickly saturated the Archetype’s shield with energy, pumping it in faster than it could radiated away. As they flashed past, the shield failed, and pulse-shots actually slammed into the mech’s armor.

  Dash decelerated hard. Leira did the same. The Harbingers made no attempt to maneuver after them, instead just boring straight in at the Forge.

  “Custodian,” Dash said as he flipped the Archetype around. “Just in case those mines don’t stop them, you’re going to be dealing with three of them coming in really, really fast.”

  “Understood. I am conferring with Benzel regarding the disposition of the fleet. However, the Forge is more than capable of taking care of itself.”

  “I’m sure it is. Just don’t get cocky about it, okay?”

  “Cocky?”

  “Yeah, you know, full of yourself, thinking you can do anything without help, that you’ll always get away with it, that sort of thing.”

  “So like you, you mean.”

>   Dash heard Leira’s laugh.

  He meant to shoot back a scathing retort of some sort, but instead he just shrugged. “Yeah, I guess I did just kind of describe myself, didn’t I?”

  Sentinel cut in. “Almost perfectly.”

  “Yeah, well, you all can just get down and—”

  “The Harbingers are about to enter the blast radius of the mines,” Custodian said.

  Dash focused his attention on the tactical display on the heads-up. He expected the Harbingers to destroy the mines before they could detonate; catching even one of them and disabling it was a faint hope, at best.

  “Wait. Benzel, what’s the Void Stalker doing? Get her the hell out of there!”

  “Stand by, Dash,” Benzel replied.

  Dash leaned hard into the acceleration, trying to drive the Archetype back along the Harbingers’ trajectory even faster, but it wouldn’t matter; he and Leira were both far too distant to influence the next few moments of the battle in any meaningful way.

  Which meant it was far too late for the Void Stalker. The Harbingers raced in, pouring out streams of pulse-cannon shots that destroyed mines and also pummeled the Herald. The latter’s shields held, but she limited her return fire per Dash’s orders, to try to avoid destroying any of the enemy mechs.

  Dash opened his mouth, but any sound died in the futility of the moment. The Void Stalker remained far too close to the live battlespace, somehow having been disabled. As the Harbingers raced on, destroying the last of the mines that threatened them, one of them switched briefly, almost contemptuously, to target the mine layer. A stream of pulse-cannon shots ripped into her hull; an instant later, a rippling chain of explosions tore the Void Stalker apart.

  Dash slowly blinked as the bleak reality of loss swept over him. He tried to remember which of the Gentle Friends he’d just seen die. He failed, and the moment stretched, punishing in its silence.

  Two of the Harbingers abruptly stopped accelerating, their power curves going flat. They were completely offline, dead.

  “Okay, we’ve got two of them, Dash,” Benzel said. “We’re going to seize them now so Custodian can hack them before they reboot and come back to life.”

  “Benzel—” Dash started, then shook his head. The man sounded not just completely unfazed, but actually kind of smug. “I mean, damn, how many people did you just lose?”

  “None.”

  “You—what? None?”

  Benzel laughed. “That’s right. Zero. Nada. The crew of the Void Stalker only sowed about half their mines. They set the rest to explode when the Harbingers made their closest pass. And then they jumped in the escape pod and ran. I’m afraid we lost our mine layer, but we can rebuild her easily enough. Hell, you can take her out of my pay. And we did get two of those damned mechs intact. That’s what you wanted, right?

  “Well, yeah. That was—” Dash smiled. “That was brilliant!” His smile became a wry grin. “But I can’t very well take the Void Stalker out of your pay, because I don’t pay you anything.”

  “Not yet you don’t.” Dash could hear the corresponding grin in Benzel’s voice.

  There was still one Harbinger inbound to the Forge, though, and the fleet was still avoiding engagement. Dash turned his attention to it—his full attention.

  “If we’ve got two of the bastards, we don’t really need a third. Not in operating condition, anyway. All units, feel free to take out that last Harbinger.”

  The fleet didn’t need to be told twice. A firestorm engulfed the remaining Harbinger as the Cygnus ships poured fire at it. It flew on, enveloped in a halo of energy discharge, doggedly determined to strike at the Forge.

  Dash began to think it might actually make it. The Harbinger’s shield seemed to be holding, at least long enough to let it do a single, probably suicidal attack run on the Forge. That was, until the Forge itself joined in the battle, seeming to open fire with every point-defense battery with a line-of-fire all at once.

  The Forge seemed to vanish behind a rippling wall of blue-white.

  The Harbinger likewise vanished in a hurricane of fire. It only lasted a second or two, then ceased as abruptly as it started. What emerged from the focal point of all that violence was just wreckage, barely recognizable as the mech it had been an instant ago.

  The whole fleet had stopped firing. Dash just stared, blinking at the after image left on his retinas by the orgy of fire that had spewed from the Forge.

  “Dash,” Leira said. “That was just the point-defense stuff. Custodian didn’t even warm up the main batteries or the missiles. Tell me why we’re not fighting this war drinking plumato wine in a hot tub aboard the Forge?"

  Dash rotated the Archetype so it was facing the Swift and made the mech shrug.

  “That’s a damned good question.”

  Dash stood with his hands on his hips, which kept one of them close to his pulse-pistol. Of course, the weapon would be of absolutely no use if things went bad here.

  “That is one scary looking piece of machinery,” Leira said.

  Dash nodded. “Yup, it is.”

  Even in this smaller, lighter version, the Harbinger still towered over Dash and his companions. Custodian had brought both of the captured mechs aboard the Forge, but in widely separated docking bays. He maintained that the risk was low; he had thoroughly insinuated carefully crafted strands of control into their systems, and now commanded all functions for both mechs.

  There were, nonetheless, logical parts of them still walled off by strong encryption and other countermeasures, so he’d taken the extra precaution of installing explosive charges inside them that could be triggered both remotely and by redundant, physical cables that kept them hardwired into the Forge’s systems. At the first hint of uncontrollable rebellion, the mech would be destroyed. It would damage the Forge, yes, but in nowhere near as profound a way as an unrestrained Harbinger could.

  Of course, if that happened in, say, the next few seconds, Dash would die with the satisfied knowledge that the Forge would probably still be fine.

  “Are you really sure it was wise to bring them aboard in the first place?” Viktor asked. “We had a Golden drone aboard once, and it managed to cripple a huge chunk of the Forge.”

  “These things are a lot bigger and meaner,” Ragsdale added, his arms crossed, a frown creasing his face.

  “They are, and I know that,” Dash said. “But the risk is worth it. Imagine if we can get these things running on our side—especially if we can figure out how to make them piloted. Two new, powerful mechs, for nothing.”

  “Plus that’s two mechs the Golden have lost,” Leira said, echoing Dash’s thoughts about how much greater the “force swing” was when they took things from their enemies and repurposed them for their own use.

  “All of this said, I would caution against counting on these Harbingers being available for use any time soon,” Custodian cut in. “Until we can be sure that any dormant Golden countermeasures that may still be contained with them are neutralized, they are unsafe to even study in any detail. I am planning to both physically and electronically isolate the bays in which they are located from the rest of the Forge before attempting any further, deeper intrusions into their systems.”

  “Do what you’ve got to do, Custodian,” Dash said, staring at the Harbingers. “But whether we end up using these things or scrapping them for feedstock, all I know is that we’ve screwed over the Golden a little bit more. And that makes me happy because I know that they don’t have unlimited resources.”

  Even Ragsdale nodded at that.

  17

  Dash pulled off his boots and stretched out his legs. He had probably walked twenty kilometers today, from one part of the Forge to another, checking out what was going on.

  He sighed and stared at the wall of his quarters for a few minutes. A few days ago, he’d asked Custodian to fire up a holo-image of a starfield to cover up a blank wall. Yes, he could just turn around and look out the viewports, but the starfield out there was b
oring—mostly featureless blackness, shot through with a smattering of brighter stars. If he killed the lights, he could see many more stars but, still, stars weren’t very interesting by themselves.

  The holo-image, though, switched through scenes of nebulae, miscellaneous clouds of starlit dust and gas, globular clusters, the glory of the galactic core, and even a glowing accretion ring around a distant black hole. The stately progress of the images was calming, soothing even, probably because they removed the creeping sense of dread and danger he’d come to associate with space and rendered it all down to beautiful pictures.

  Dash let his eyes drift close, then he cast his thoughts back through the day, sifting memories for anything he might have missed that could be useful. In a war of extinction, every advantage mattered.

  No matter how small.

  Dash had never seen the fabrication plant so busy. Every system, smelter, and machine was running flat out, components being cast, moved, assembled, ingots being shunted around and melted, glowing metal being poured, machine tools grinding away, cutting and drilling.

  “We’ve reached capacity, at least for now,” Viktor had said, standing by his side at the railing of one of the galleries overlooking the fabrication plan. “Custodian tells me that once the Shroud is producing new power cores, and they’re installed in the Forge, we’ll be able to ramp up production even more.”

  Dash nodded. “More is good. Overwhelming would be better.”

  “I agree. And as we gain power and materials, our ability will grow exponentially,” Viktor said.

  “If there’s an empty storage closet, I want it fitted with a smelter the size of a console. I want—I want us to be relentless. Like they are,” Dash said.

  “We will be. There’s apparently even a dormant fabrication plant not much smaller than this one, in that section of Forge near the docking bay we use for the Swift—you know, that whole area that’s still powered down.”