Dark Origins (The Messenger Book 14)

by J. N. Chaney

  He made a high pass over the base, then reversed course and did a lower one. Both revealed much the same thing. There was a small cluster of domed structures on the surface, surrounded by the wrecked missile launchers, and that was it.

  “Okay, I’m going down. Leira, stay up here and cover.”

  “Roger that. Oh, and insert the usual ‘be careful’ here.”

  “And I’ll give you my customary ‘I always am’ response.”

  “Yeah, except you’re not.”

  Dash sniffed, then grinned and fell out of the sky in a gentle path, decelerating the Archetype until it fell toward the surface of the rock at little more than a walking pace.

  “Sentinel, anything changing that you can see?”

  “No. However, now that we’re through the scattering field, I can discern a small complex of tunnels and compartments excavated into the rock below the domes.”

  “Shit.”

  “Shit?”

  “Yeah. It means we need to access them, and we can’t just use the mechs to do it because we don’t want to ruin anything that might be valuable.”

  “Understood.”

  The Archetype gently grounded about two hundred meters from the nearest dome, adjacent to the still-glowing debris of one of the missile launchers.

  Nothing.

  Dash sighed. “Hey, Wei-Ping?”

  “What’s up?”

  “Better get your marine contingent suited up. Need a few door kickers.”

  “They’ll be thrilled to hear that,” Wei-Ping said. “Three minutes to knock knock.”

  “Excellent. Tell them not to worry about scratching the paint.”

  “Copy that. Hear that, kids? We’re not just landing. We’re remodeling,” Wei-Ping said, and Dash could hear a cheer over the channel.

  “They sure do seem… enthusiastic,” Leira said, landing next to the Archetype.

  “They’re Marines,” Sentinel said, and that was all the explanation needed.

  Dash watched as the vac-armored marines picked their cautious way across the rocky terrain, moving from cover to cover. The low gravity, barely a tenth of a g, meant that they had to move in a sort of half-shuffling, half-bouncing way. But they trained for it, and did it with a smooth, relentless purpose.

  Dash, not so much. He moved less with purpose and more with exaggerated, comedic caution. He was used to “walking” around low-g bodies in the Archetype, which was just, well, walking. Sentinel and the rest of the automation took care of keeping it a natural motion. So he waited for the Marines to establish themselves and tried not to move around too much behind his covering chunk of rock.

  “Okay, sir, we’ve secured a perimeter, and we’re clearing through these domes now,” the platoon commander said over the comm.

  “Roger that. I’m coming forward,” Dash replied. He glanced at his own fire-team partner, a young marine named Scott. He offered Scott a thumbs-up, which was returned, then the marine bounded off and moved about twenty-five meters forward. Dash peered intently over the sight of his mag-rifle. Once Scott had halted, Dash prepared himself to move. As he did, he glanced back at the towering shape of the Archetype. The pale, greyish glow of the dwarf star barely lit the mech, rendering it into a mix of monochrome highlights and deep shadow. It was, he thought, the most ominous, almost sinister view of the mech he’d ever had—

  “Problem, sir?”

  Dash glanced back at Scott’s voice. “No. Sorry. Be right there.” Dash broke cover and moved, doing his best to not fumble and bounce high above the surface, or spin off against some rocks. As he did, he found himself glancing quickly from side to side. He felt so exposed. There was nothing to suggest the Deepers had set up any sort of ambush or hidden defenses, but it didn’t mean they hadn’t. And Dash had enough experience with apparently empty places suddenly erupting into desperate violence, as automated systems and bots suddenly exploded to life.

  But they reached the nearest of the domed buildings without incident—unless, of course, you counted Dash losing his footing once, spinning through most of a cartwheel, and clunking into a boulder. Scott laughed.

  “Sorry, sir, but you should have seen that. It was just pretty damned funny.”

  “Yeah, well, let’s pretend it never happened. I’m just glad no one recorded it.”

  “Are you sure about that?” Sentinel purred.

  Dash glanced back at the Archetype again. Sentinel would have had a ringside seat to his awkward antics.

  “Whatever you managed to capture, Sentinel, just delete it, okay?”

  In answer, a window popped open on the heads-up on Dash’s helmet. It showed him losing his foot, rotating through that almost-cartwheel, then slamming into the boulder and bouncing off. Despite himself, he laughed too.

  “Okay, fine. Keep it. But I get to say who sees it, got it?”

  “Understood.”

  They found the platoon commander, a Lieutenant named Denson. Dash had first met the man when he was a new recruit. Like many of the Realm’s citizens, he’d been a refugee, displaced by the Golden as they attacked and ravaged system after system. Dash remembered how earnestly nervous the young man had been, barely able to fill out his armor. Now, he commanded a platoon, a lean, hard, and competent warrior and leader.

  War changes everyone, Dash thought. Some, like Denson, rise to the challenge and thrive. Others just die. There were far too many of those.

  Dash shook his thoughts off their brooding trajectory and peered around a rock at the domes. The marines had identified entrances into two of them and were setting up breaching charges. Denson watched with a critical eye, snapping out a few, curt instructions as the work progressed. Finally, he glanced at Dash through his visor.

  “We’re ready, sir.”

  Dash looked back toward the Archetype, then up. Both the Swift and the Talon hung motionless a thousand meters above, ready to give heavy fire support if needed. They seemed just as menacing as the Archetype in the pale, colorless light. Somewhere high above them, too distant to see, the Stalwart kept station, ready to protect the ground force from any attempted Deeper intervention from space.

  “Okay, Lieutenant, go ahead.”

  Denson snapped an order. A few seconds passed, then both charges detonated, sending faint thumps through the rock beneath him. The two marine breaching parties, each a reinforced squad, quickly vanished into the gaps blown in the Deeper domes.

  As soon as they were inside, Denson and his fire-team partner led Dash and his partner forward. They stopped when they reached the platoon’s third squad, acting as both overwatch and reserve.

  Time passed. Dash listened in on one of the breaching parties’ comm channels as they worked their way through the Deeper complex.

  “Alpha Team, corridor left. Cover.”

  “Covering.”

  “Bravo Team, forward, next junction.”

  “Moving.”

  Pause.

  “Covering.”

  “Charlie Team, corridor left, pass through Alpha.”

  “Moving.”

  The staccato chatter continued, the marines moving themselves around inside the complex with tense, clipped efficiency.

  “Maybe no one’s home,” Denson said.

  Dash pressed his lips into a thin, skeptical line. “Maybe. But I’d be surprised. This is here for a reason, and nothing launched—”

  “Bravo Team, contact right—!”

  A burst of mag-rifle fire cut the muffled voice, as the acoustic energy had to be transmitted through the firer’s armor and body. More commands and replies rattled across the channel.

  “The other breaching teams made contact, too,” Denson snapped. He turned to the commander of the third squad, issued quick orders that amounted to wait here until I call you, then led Dash and their fire-team partners into the closest breach.

  Dash tried to make out what was happening, but thermal imaging showed nothing but a blur, punctuated by the infrared flare of the heat radiators on the marines’ vac
-armor. The best view he managed was in low light. And best meant horrifying.

  Deeper warriors charged up the corridor, straight at the marines blocking it. Two knelt, while two stood behind them, snapping shot after shot into the Deepers. The hyper-velocity projectiles slammed into chitinous carapaces, punching clean through them and erupting in aerosol showers of gore that quickly became a gruesome mist in the low-g. The Deepers responded with spurts of some powerful bio-acid that etched and slowly began to eat through their vac-armor. Some of the acid was delivered in viscous blobs that burst like grenades when they impacted walls or floor. The marines were forced to start falling back under the onslaught.

  The commander of the breaching team snapped out a mag-rifle shot. “Alpha Team, cover! Bravo Team, fall back!”

  The marines around Dash assumed firing positions, while beleaguered Bravo Team backed up the corridor toward them. As they passed through, Dash saw the bio-acid still bubbling away on some of them, pitting and scoring even the tough, composite vac-armor. Lesser armor would have immediately failed. If the wearers were lucky, decompression would kill them before the corrosive horror of the acid did.

  “Sir, you’d better fall back, too,” Denson said.

  “That an order, Lieutenant? Because I do have a mag-rifle, and I think you could use the firepower.”

  “Can I order you to fall back, sir?”

  “Your show, your call. I’m just a guest.”

  He saw Denson look at him through his visor. Dash saw none of the jittery, uncertain fear he’d seen on this same face so long ago in the Forge’s docking bay. He only saw grim, stoic competence.

  “Well, if you’ve got nothing better to do, sir, that’d be really handy.”

  Dash grinned, raised his mag-rifle, took a sight picture, and fired.

  But the Deepers kept coming. It seemed improbable there could be this many warriors in a tunnel complex Sentinel had described as small, but here they were. The next minutes were a frantic blur of shooting, snapped orders, falling back, and resuming fire, all while the corridor seemed to boil with ever more Deepers. Dash snapped his second to last magazine into his rifle, worried that they might run out of ammo before they ran out of enemies—

  A Deeper scuttled fast up the corridor, spraying acid as it went. Dash lined up a shot, but a marine picked that moment to change magazines, their movements pushing them briefly into Dash’s line of fire. He cursed, and for just a few seconds, the Deeper had a clear run at the marine line. Someone managed to land a shot on it but only gouged a furrow in its carapace, then it leapt and slammed into the vac-armored figure of Lieutenant Denson.

  Dash cursed again, lunged past a marine, planted the muzzle of his mag-rifle against the thrashing Deeper, and fired a burst.

  Liquids, of course, aren’t compressible, and that included the gelatinous goop filling the Deeper. Hydrostatic shock blew the Deeper apart, making it explode like a bomb.

  Grisly shrapnel, chunks of Deeper warrior, and gouts of viscous gore splashed across the corridor, the marines, and Dash himself. It splattered across both his visor and his armor’s sensor clusters, momentarily blinding him. Worse, his armor’s computer triggered an alarm. His left arm joint had been compromised. Sealing foam erupted from a network of capillaries built into the armor, stopping the sudden leak, but also freezing the joint in place.

  He stumbled, desperately trying to extract himself from the battle so he wasn’t just floundering blindly about. Someone grabbed him and yanked him back. A moment later, his vision cleared as his fire-team partner, Scott, doused his helmet with a spray Elois and her people had developed for this very purpose, quickly cleaning away Deeper goo.

  Dash nodded his thanks and turned back to the battle. Denson was still down, the partly exploded Deeper sprawled on top of him in a tangle of jointed limbs and fractured carapace. Dash wanted desperately to get to him, but the Deepers just kept coming—

  A sudden fusillade of fire erupted around him. More marines had appeared, adding the weight of their fire to the combat. One of them shouted, “Grenade,” and coughed out a projectile from an underslung launcher on their mag-rifle. It plowed into the Deepers further up the corridor, then detonated in a searing flash. Had there been any atmosphere, the shock wave probably would have been devastating. It was still enough to break the Deepers’ relentless charge, though, and now the weight of mag-rifle fire finally turned the tide. Another moment of ferocious combat, then silence.

  The marines immediately consolidated, taking stock of casualties and redistributing ammunition to keep everyone as supplied as possible. Dash stared up the corridor, but no more Deepers appeared.

  Dash pushed his way to Denson. Two marines were already levering the Deeper remains off of him, spattering themselves with more of the bio-acid in the process. Dash knelt beside the fallen Lieutenant. His armor was a mess of corrosion and sealing foam. He was stunned, though, to see Denson peering back at him through his acid-etched visor.

  “Holy shit, Lieutenant. You’re not dead!”

  “I hope not, sir. All due respect, but if this is the afterlife, it kinda sucks.”

  Shortly after the marines had breached the Deeper complex, their two assault shuttles had grounded, ready to resupply the troops and evacuate casualties. Dash had accompanied Denson back to the shuttles and boarded, then paused in the airlock as they were decontaminated. When the Lieutenant’s vac-armor had been removed, the medical AI had immediately declared him unfit for combat. It was clear why. His legs were a mess of ravaged, corroded tissue and sealing foam. The foam, which not only sealed rents in the vac-armor, but also acted as both antiseptic and anesthetic, had blocked what would otherwise have been searing pain. But he started to feel it now, prompting the AI to inject him with a powerful sedative, effectively putting him into a coma for transport back to the Forge.

  “Don’t worry, Lieutenant. You’ve got the best physician in the galaxy, Doctor Custodian, waiting for you back home,” Dash said as Denson’s eyes started to flutter closed. The Lieutenant gave a weak thumbs-up, then passed out.

  Dash sighed and then took a long, calming breath.

  War changes everyone.

  He switched to a new set of vac-armor and started back for the Deeper complex in time for the platoon sergeant, now in command, to call him over the comm.

  “Sir, I think we found what the Deepers were protecting here. I’ll send a guide to meet you at the first breach.”

  Dash met the marine assigned to guide him and followed her down into the tunnels but along a different route than the one he’d taken previously. It opened up into an enormous chamber. Dash stepped into it and stopped beside the platoon sergeant, a sturdy woman named Carmine. But his eyes were yanked across the expansive cavern.

  “Holy shit.”

  Three enormous Deeper constructs loomed across the chamber. They were humanoid, but stood at least as tall as the Archetype. They resembled larger, bulkier versions of Battle Princes, but each was draped in a crimson sash made of what looked like chainmail.

  “What the hell are those?” Dash asked.

  “Kinda hoping you could tell us, sir,” Carmine said.

  “Sentinel, are you seeing this?”

  “I am. All I can tell you is that they don’t conform to anything in our databases that pertain to the Deepers.”

  “Yeah, no shit. I’d have remembered these.”

  They stood on a gantry-like gallery, looking directly into what would be the constructs’ faces, except instead of features, there was only a smoothly blank, resinous blackness.

  “So I’m assuming there’s been no sign of life from them,” Dash said. The marines present maintained an understandably wary distance from the enormous—whatever the hell they were.

  “I’d have mentioned if there had been, sir, believe me.” Carmine turned to him. “I think this is beyond our remit, sir. Unless you just want them destroyed, giant, creepy aliens are a little outside our area of expertise.”

  “Mine, too
.” Dash stared at the apparently dormant constructs. “Fortunately, we’ve got the best salvagers in the Milky Way with us, along with their heavy equipment. If they can take apart spaceships, they should be able to handle this.”

  “Are you getting at what I think you’re getting at, sir?”

  “If by what you think I’m getting at, you mean we’re going to recover these things and take them home to study in detail, then yeah, that’s exactly what I’m getting at.”

  “You sure that’s a good idea?”

  “Nope, not at all. But the Deepers put a lot of effort into trying to hide these things here and prevent us from getting at them.” Dash stared into the blank non-face directly across from him.

  “So let’s find out why.”

  6

  Dash glared at the long list of reports glowing on the terminal in his quarters. The tenth Arkubator had just been pulled through the gate from its ancient orbit around the grey dwarf. In the meantime, the sixth they’d recovered was now being stripped and disassembled, its components being sorted between the voracious fabricators and the Shroud. The Forge was nearly ready to be docked with the Kingsport, which itself had started to sprawl off toward its final, colossal form. Then there were reports on the fleet, reports on casualties, reports on other construction, reports on reports—

  “Could do with a win right about now, and by win I mean no admin bullshit.”

  Dash shoved back from his desk and turned to the viewport. He wondered if the Unseen had really intended for the Messenger to have to contend with so much bureaucratic administrivia, or if that was something they, the humans, had added to it.

  He saw a beacon pulsing against the stars. That would be their research ships, the Iron Gate and the Absolute Zero. The former had been fully converted into secure containment for projects and specimens, while the scientists and researchers did their work remotely, from the latter. Right now, essentially all of their efforts were focused on the three huge Deeper constructs, which they’d labeled Bishops. It was the closest thing to a translation Custodian could manage from the small amount of data they’d been able to extract from them so far.