Dark Origins (The Messenger Book 14)

by J. N. Chaney

  A new voice cut in. “Dash, this is Alora.”

  A window popped open, depicting Alora Ellsworth standing on her bridge—or what remained of it, anyway. Smoke fumed the air grey. Behind her, Dash saw blown-out consoles and the flickering orange glow of fire.

  “Think we’ve—” She broke off, coughing. “Think we’ve done pretty much all we can.”

  Dash had to fight back a sudden surge of—something. Anger. Frustration. Sorrow. All of them. “Understood. Do whatever you have to, Alora, to get your people out of there.”

  “Considered abandoning ship, but”—the comm signal fuzzed for a moment—“Deepers around, and don’t fancy them being the ones to rescue us.”

  Dash just nodded.

  “Anyway, hope we did what was needed, sir.”

  “It’s Dash.”

  But she shook her head. “Sorry, sir, just can’t bring myself to call a superior by his first name. Unless it’s over a drink, of course.”

  “I’ll buy, Alora. You just hang on.”

  “Do our best—”

  The comm signal cut out.

  The Absolute Zero and Iron Gate ended up having to weather a little over two minutes of unimpeded Deeper attack. Elois had refused to give up on the Bishops, though. Just as Dash had, she’d reasoned that they were the Deepers’ target, which meant they were, somehow, of critical importance. Instead, she ordered the Absolute Zero to interpose itself between the Iron Gate and the Deepers and stood her ground against long-range missile and x-ray laser fire. Her only real weapons were point-defense batteries, but she was well-equipped with them. She managed to take out all but two missiles, one of which struck her squarely, while the other detonated close to the Iron Gate.

  Dash swore at that. Considering the sacrifices made so far, to lose the Iron Gate at this point would be a devastating punch in the gut. But after a nail-chewing pause, Sentinel was able to restore the telemetry uplink.

  “Minor damage to the Iron Gate only.”

  Dash opened his mouth to reply, but at the same instant firing solutions appeared for the missiles, dark-lance, and nova-cannon. Instead of speaking, he just grinned a feral grin.

  “Okay, you threw the dice, and thanks to our people, you came up short,” he said to the cluster of red icons marking the Deeper fleet.

  “Now, it’s our turn.”

  Once the mechs opened fire, the battle turned. Leira and Jexin focused on blocking the desperate missile salvos still being pumped out of the Deeper battleline, targeting the Iron Gate. Their scattershots, backed up by their own point defenses and those of the Absolute Zero, made sure none hit their mark.

  Dash, in the meantime, plunged into battle with the Deeper ships, an avenging angel born on a storm of blast-cannon, dark-lance, and nova-cannon fire.

  The Deeper ships began to die.

  A few minutes later, Benzel opened fire with the Herald. And a few minutes after that, Ragsdale added the fearsome weight of Eastern’s batteries. The next few moments were an orgy of destruction, Dash spinning and jinking the Archetype through the thick of it, pumping point-blank shots into the Deepers and following up with vicious swipes of his power-sword.

  Then, as quickly as it started, it was over. The battlecruiser damaged by the Taffy was the last to die, blown in half by a close-range shot from the Archetype’s blast-cannon.

  Dash zoomed away from the expanding fireball and immediately turned his attention to the two Deeper battleships that had been trying to keep menacing the Kingsport. Apparently, they had come a little too close to the Forge and Northern, though. One was now nothing but a whirling cloud of debris, while the other was a drifting hulk trailing streams of plasma and atmospheric gas. Their accompanying escort vessels had bugged out completely, apparently deciding there was little point in dying needlessly.

  Dash switched his focus back to the aftermath of the attack on the research ships. The Absolute Zero had taken one solid missile strike that had opened a half-dozen compartments to hard vacuum, and another couple of x-ray laser hits. She was hurt but still operational. The Iron Gate had taken only minor damage from the one missile that had managed to get close to her. The Archetype had taken a few good hits but mostly shrugged them off. The other mechs, the Herald, and the rest of the fleet had taken virtually no damage at all.

  And then there was the Taffy and her task force.

  Dash gritted his teeth and changed course, closing on the battle remnants of the brave little Realm force. Leira followed him.

  “Dash, these people knew what they were getting themselves into,” she said over a private comm channel.

  “I know.”

  “Dash—”

  “Leira, I’m fine. Doesn’t change the fact that this sucks,” he shot back, decelerating to bring the Archetype to a stop relative to the Taffy, or what was left of her.

  The plucky little light cruiser seemed to be made of nothing but battle damage. She was scorched, blasted through with gaping holes, and surrounded by a shimmering haze of frozen water vapor and other atmospheric gas. She was, for all intents and purposes, dead. With the exception of one of her accompanying destroyers, which was also derelict, the remaining ships of her task force were just debris.

  And yet, Sentinel was able to detect power on board both the Taffy and the destroyer. Her emergency power cells had kicked in, providing energy to those parts of the ship not completely destroyed.

  “Any chance there’s anyone still alive aboard her?” Dash asked.

  “Remarkably enough, yes. Her forward missile compartment, a section amidships, and her engineering section are still pressurized and heated.”

  “Rare good news. Okay. Benzel, we need—”

  “Rescue and recovery, and fast. Already on it, Dash. Gonna use the Herald for it ’cause those folks deserve the best.”

  Dash nodded, his gaze still fixed on the battered remains of the Taffy.

  “Damned right they do.”

  7

  Dash stood with his arms crossed, leveling a dour glare at the image on the viewscreen in the Absolute Zero’s primary lab. Dash could hear the distant thumps and clunks of the damage control crews at work, repairing the research ship’s damage. He ignored it, though, and focused his full attention at the three Bishops, each depicted in a separate window. Data scrolled by beneath them, summarizing a multitude of readings and measurements.

  “You’re important enough to the Deepers that they were willing to lose a whole fleet trying to recover you. Why?”

  “Not just recover them,” Elois put in, looking up from a console. “They were willing to destroy them.”

  Dash scratched an ear. “Yeah. The bottom line, either way, is that they don’t want us to have them.”

  Leira, leaning against a nearby table, straightened and walked closer to the screen. “They sure put a lot more effort into trying to take back or destroy these guys than they did that first Battle Prince we captured.” She glanced back at Dash. “We’ve been thinking of them just as big Battle Princes, but I don’t think they are.”

  Elois nodded as Leira spoke. “Neither do I. As we dig deeper into their physiology and inner workings, it’s pretty clear they’re quite different. There seems to be a mostly biological core, which is similar to the Battle Princes. I mean, poor old Rishi ended up inside one of those things.”

  Dash grimaced at the name Rishi. He’d been human, a citizen of the League, who’d turned traitor and collaborated with the Deepers against his own people. His reward had been a tortured existence implanted into the shell of a Battle Prince.

  “Poor old Rishi my ass. He made his choices and had to live with them—and die with them,” Dash snapped back.

  Elois looked chastened. “Sorry, Dash, I didn’t mean—”

  “No, Elois, I’m the one who’s sorry,” Dash cut in. “If I’m pissed, it’s not at you. It’s at them.” He jabbed a finger at the viewscreen.

  “Whoa, sounds like we arrived at the wrong time,” someone said, walking into the lab.
It was Amy, followed by Conover, Viktor, and Ragsdale.

  “Everything okay?” Ragsdale asked, giving Dash a look that said, I’m here to help if you need it.

  Dash took a breath and returned a grateful look. For someone who’d started out so long ago as a potential antagonist for the Cygnus Realm, Ragsdale had evolved into one of Dash’s most trusted advisors, closest confidants, and an all-round friend.

  He finally gave an apologetic shrug. “Yeah, everything’s fine. Or as fine as it can be, anyway.”

  “Well, you’ll be happy to know that Alora Ellsworth is going to make it. Custodian says she’s still in critical condition, but she’s stable and on the mend,” Viktor said.

  Dash paused, taking a breath, then nodded. That was good news. What it didn’t do was make up for the losses suffered by the Taffy and her plucky little task force. Of the one hundred and sixty-two people who’d crewed the flotilla of light ships, fifty-seven had been killed, and all but a handful of the remainder were wounded, twenty of them seriously enough that they’d probably never return to frontline duty.

  “Dash, Custodian said you wanted the Taffy towed into a parking station near the Kingsport, not scrapped. Is that right?” Conover asked.

  “Yeah. It is. We’re going to preserve her as a memorial. Civilized societies remember and honor their dead,” he replied.

  Everyone nodded at that.

  “Anyway, when you guys walked in, I was in mid-rant about these assholes.” Dash jerked a thumb at the viewscreen behind him. “The Deepers were obviously desperate to make sure we weren’t able to keep them intact. The question is, why? What are the Deepers afraid we’re going to learn from them, or do with them?”

  “Maybe they have some sort of religious or cultural significance,” Ragsdale said.

  “Maybe. But let’s assume it’s more than that. Let’s assume there’s something about these Bishops the Deepers don’t want us to know. Something about the Bishops themselves, or data they possess.”

  “What I’m wondering is why the hell they haven’t woken up,” Leira said.

  Amy nodded. “Yeah. You’d think that being excavated from where we found them, hauled all the way back here, stashed aboard the Iron Gate, and then scrutinized up-close would trigger, you know, some sort of reaction.”

  “Maybe they’re dead, or at least dead-ish,” Leira said.

  “No, I don’t think so,” Conover said, stepping toward the viewscreen, his gaze riveted on it. He stopped and just stood, staring.

  Dash cocked his head at him. “Conover? What do you see?”

  “That pattern. Remember I mentioned it? That there was a pattern in the EM pulses being given off by each of these Bishops?”

  “Yeah. What about it?”

  Conover replied by glancing at Elois. “Can you put up a visualization of the EM pulses being given off by each of them? Something we can all see?”

  Elois turned to her console and worked the controls. A moment later, a flashing light appeared, superimposed over each of the Bishops. Each pulsed quickly but in a different rhythm.

  Conover kept staring at the display. Dash exchanged a bemused glance with the others.

  “Uh, Conover? Are you—?” Dash finally said, but Conover held up a hand, then pointed.

  “There. Do you see it?”

  “Uh, a bunch of flashing lights? Yeah, we do.”

  Conover scowled. “Elois, can you play back the last thirty seconds, but at, say, one-tenth speed?”

  Now it was Elois’s turn to give Conover a bemused look, but she was also clearly intrigued, right along with the rest of them. So she tapped at the console again, and the display cleared. When it returned, it displayed the three Bishops, entirely unchanged except that the flashing lights visualizing their EM emissions were pulsing far more slowly.

  “Okay, so each one is flashing in a different pattern, right?” Conover said.

  Dash crossed his arms. “Right.”

  “Now, watch.”

  A few seconds passed, and then the pulses suddenly synched up perfectly. Each one pulsed in exact time with the other two. That lasted for a few dozen pulses, then they drifted into three separate sequences again. Over the next few minutes, they synched up in the same way three more times.

  “Elois, did you and Custodian ever pick up on this?” Dash asked.

  “We did not because this phenomenon hasn’t occurred before now,” Custodian replied.

  “So what’s changed?” Dash asked.

  Shrugs all around, but now it was Amy who stepped closer to the display.

  “Dash, did you ever do a manual docking at Passage?” she asked.

  He blinked in surprise. “Uh—yeah, a couple of times. Why?”

  “Because even when they’re not blinking in sync, you notice how they seem to be blinking in sequence? Just like those strobing guide beacons that flash alongside the entrance to the docking bays on Passage?”

  Dash watched the lights for a moment, then nodded. “Huh. Yeah. They do, don’t they?”

  “So are these things communicating with each other?” Ragsdale asked. “And if they are, do we really want to let them keep doing that?”

  “The question is, what are they saying to each other?” Viktor asked.

  Dash watched the pulsing lights for a moment.

  “That is something we need to figure out.”

  Dash stared down at Alora Ellsworth. Like her ship, the Taffy, she’d taken a pummeling during the battle against the Deepers. But, like her ship, she’d never given up. She’d never ordered her crew to abandon ship and had literally kept every weapon firing until all of them were silenced owing to battle damage. Dash suspected she would have kamikazed her ship into one of the Deepers if she’d been able to.

  “What’s her prognosis, Custodian?” Dash asked.

  “She will recover but will require extensive therapy before regaining normal use of her limbs, particularly her right arm. There will be tank time and regrowth, at minimum.”

  Dash put his hands on his hips and nodded along. Her right arm had been seared almost down to the bone and was now encased in a congealed mass of surgical gel. Custodian could regrow the ravaged tissue, given time, which meant she’d eventually be able to return to duty.

  If that was what she wanted, of course. Although, from the little time he’d interacted with her, Dash suspected she would.

  “You’ve definitely earned yourself something bigger than a light cruiser, Alora. I’m going to talk to Benzel about giving you one of the heavies to command.”

  “A good choice,” Custodian put in. “However, there is another matter that requires your attention, Messenger. We’ve broken the encryption being used by the Deeper Bishops when communicating with one another.”

  Dash patted Ellsworth’s good arm, then turned and strode out of the Forge’s Infirmary. “On my way. Tell Elois I’ll be there as soon as I can scare up a shuttle.”

  “There’s no need to go to the Absolute Zero. Elois is already aboard the Forge. I’ve taken the liberty of requesting that she and the rest of your Inner Circle attend the Command Center.”

  Dash immediately veered aside, changing course. “Roger that.”

  He arrived at the Command Center to find everyone either already there or right behind him. Without preamble, he strode to the front of the big compartment.

  “Okay, Custodian, whatcha got?”

  “The Bishops are communicating in a manner that doesn’t suggest conscious sentience. Rather, they seem to be functioning in some sort of autonomous mode. The three of them work independently at times, and at other times, in concert.”

  “So they’re dead?” Leira asked.

  “Since we have no baseline to establish what alive would even look like regarding them, we have no way of knowing. We aren’t even sure if the concept of being alive applies or is relevant to them.”

  “Okay, but why make something big and humanoid, if you don’t mean for it to be, um, alive?” Amy asked.

&nbs
p; Custodian’s reply was immediate and straightforward. “Unknown.”

  “All of this discussion about whether they’re alive or not is interesting but kinda esoteric. You said you cracked their code. What are they saying to each other?” Dash asked.

  “They are communicating about gates. Specific gates. The implication of their communication is that they can control existing gates at will, effectively determining their destination as they pass through it.”

  “Okay, but we already know how to do that, right? Between the Radiant Points and the gadget Dash took off the Battle Prince he chased through the Backwater Gate to Jackpot, we can tune gates, too,” Leira said.

  “I am not making myself clear,” Custodian replied. “The Bishops are able to direct a gate to take them to any destination—not just another existing gate.”

  Silence.

  Dash glanced around. He saw face after face switch from intrigued puzzlement to dawning understanding and then awe.

  His voice was quiet when he spoke. “Custodian, are you saying these Deepers can open a gate to wherever they want?”

  “In essence, yes. There are limitations and restrictions, which we do not yet clearly understand, but that’s the gist of it.”

  “Holy. Shit.”

  Ragsdale strode toward Dash and stopped a couple of paces away. Dash suspected it was mainly because he just needed to walk in the wake of such a stunning revelation.

  “This means that they could open a gate, like, right out there,” Ragsdale said. “They could open it, any time, and come pouring through, the same way we brought Eastern straight into battle at Backwater.”

  Alarmed murmurs and mutters rattled through the group, but Dash raised his hands.

  “Okay, hold on here, folks. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Custodian, what are these restrictions you’re talking about?”

  “Foremost among them is the fact that gates can be inherently unstable unless they are stabilized by external means.”