Dark Origins (The Messenger Book 14)

by J. N. Chaney

  When she was ready for it, of course—

  “Dash?”

  He blinked. They’d closed more than half the remaining distance to the three Deeper ships, which seemed to be primed and ready for a fight. But he hadn’t noticed it. His mind had been drifting, starting to ponder the nature of the Deepers. And that was damned peculiar.

  “Sentinel, are you detecting anything out of the ordinary?”

  “That depends how you define ordinary.”

  “Please switch yourself out of pedantic mode, thanks.”

  “I’m not merely being pedantic,” Sentinel replied. “I don’t detect anything outside of expected parameters for the operation of the Archetype, nor for the Perseids. The Deepers haven’t exhibited any particularly unusual behavior. Oh, and five minutes to maximum effect missile range.”

  Dash narrowed his eyes at the Deeper ships. Something wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t necessarily wrong, or even bad. But something just wasn’t quite the way it should be.

  He considered pulling the plug and withdrawing. But it might just be him showing the strain of a long war with no end in sight, or it might not even be anything real at all. He gave a mental shrug, pushing the oddness aside, and concentrated on the Deeper ships.

  As soon as they entered maximum effective missile range, Dash ordered Sentinel to activate the JETS, the joint targeting system. When he’d come up with the acronym, the immediate question from his Inner Circle had been about the E, and what it stood for.

  “Uh, let’s say Extra-cool.”

  Leira had given a bemused sniff. “The Joint Extra-cool Targeting System.”

  “Why Extra-cool?” Amy had asked.

  “Because I like JETS. It kinda flows off the tongue, don’t you think?”

  Now, Dash watched as the three mechs linked, sharing targeting and fire-control data. He instructed Lori and her wing to each pick whatever target they wanted and open fire. He did the same, choosing one of the corvettes and loosing a spread of missiles.

  At once, the mechs jointly targeted their missile launches, optimizing an attack with sufficient firepower to take out the destroyer, while directing enough at the two corvettes to force them to defend against the incoming ordnance. Some of the missiles, he noted, actually fell behind, not burning at full acceleration. He frowned at that but just watched and waited.

  The JETS intent quickly became clear. As the first missiles detonated around the destroyer, inflicting critical damage, the slower missiles abruptly changed targets and accelerated. The system played the missiles like a musical instrument, elegantly targeting and retargeting them in accordance with the changing situation—

  And then Dash was somewhere else completely.

  He stood on a barren planet, baking under the searing glow of a fiercely bright, bluish-white star. A flat plain, desiccated into cracked hardpan, stretched to the horizon in all directions but one. That way, a line of jagged mountains rose, starkly black against the ultraviolet sky.

  No. Wait. The horizon wasn’t entirely featureless. A slender spire, barely visible, rose opposite the distant, forbidding mountains. As soon as he saw it, Dash began to move, slowly at first, but gaining speed until he swept across the desolate landscape at breathtaking speed. The ferocious light of the star died away behind him as it set beyond the mountains. The sky darkened, turning black, punctuated by more bright, hard stars. More appeared by the second, a multitude smearing together, whorls and streaks of them emanating from a bright, central hub, forming a spiral shape.

  It was the Milky Way galaxy. Somehow Dash knew that, even though he’d never actually seen the full splendor of the galaxy from a place almost perpendicular to its ecliptic. It was an amazing sight, one that made him catch his breath in awe and wonder. At the very heart of it, he saw a point of utter blackness, surrounded by a lurid, glowing disk. It was Sagittarius A, a supermassive black hole, the ultimate axis around which the galaxy turned.

  He gaped. No one had ever seen Sagittarius A. No one could. Between the stupendous radiation produced as it gulped down matter and the wild distortions its titanic gravity inflicted on space-time, it simply wasn’t possible.

  Except it was, here, in this place far above the galactic plane.

  He began to slow. As he did, his attention dropped from the galaxy above to that slender spire. When he approached it, his gaze tilted back again, until he was once more staring straight up. The spire, an impossibly thin column of midnight-black, rose tens, maybe hundreds of kilometers toward the sky. It was, Dash knew, oriented exactly in line with the axis of rotation of Sagittarius A and, therefore, the entire Milky Way.

  As soon as he realized that, he understood something else. While fundamentally different in detail from the galaxy Dash knew, it was still arranged much the same overall. He knew this was an image from an unguessable time in the deep past, but he also knew that something was very different. The various spiral arms of the galaxy were still recognizable, if changed in shape and their specific positions relative to one another. But there was one arm that wasn’t familiar because it didn’t exist at all. Or it did once but had vanished a very long time ago.

  An entire spiral arm, hundreds of millions of stars, billions of worlds, simply gone.

  He tried to fit the idea into his mind but couldn’t. There simply wasn’t room, no way to even conceptualize something so cosmically profound. Then he reached the base of the spire and ended his wild flight across the star-seared planet.

  The Signal persists until the Second Dream.

  The voice sounded all around him, inside his head, in the bones of the planet, in the spire, in every atom of every star in the Milky Way, in the infinitely dense netherworld of Sagittarius A. It was everything, everywhere—

  “Regarding your inquiry about anything out of the ordinary, I’m now detecting something,” Sentinel said.

  Dash stared for a moment. The Deeper destroyer had been crippled, one of the corvettes blasted to scrap, and the other made a futile attempt to flee. Dash ignored them.

  “What?”

  “This is worrisome. Given your link through the Meld, I shouldn’t have to repeat myself to you. You should receive the essential concepts of what I’m saying directly into your mind.”

  Dash stared a moment longer, then shook away a sudden shroud of mental cobwebs that had draped itself over his thoughts. “Yeah, I think my mind was otherwise engaged.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Dash explained what had happened. He’d obviously never actually left the Archetype, flown across the star-blasted surface of a planet, or really experienced any of the things he remembered. But he did remember them as though they were things that had really happened to him.

  “So how long was I out?” Dash asked as he finished.

  “You were never out at all. There was, however, a zero-point-zero-zero-three-six second interruption in your connection to the Meld. That was the out of the ordinary occurrence to which I was referring.”

  “That lasted a hell of a lot longer than zero-point-zero-whatever seconds.”

  “I am deactivating the JETS and isolating it in protected memory. I’d further recommend we withdraw since the Deeper ships pose no further threat.”

  “Yeah, no argument here,” Dash said. “Let’s regroup everyone and head back to the Forge. We’ve got some questions that need to be answered.”

  Sentinel’s agreement was immediate.

  “Indeed we do.”

  “Are you familiar with the concept of steganography?” Custodian asked.

  Dash glanced around the Command Center. His gaze landed on Conover who, of course, immediately offered an answer.

  “It’s a way of encoding one type of data in another. A digital image, like a picture of a landscape, say, might have a secret message embedded in its specific arrangement of pixels.”

  Dash nodded. “Ah. Okay. Couriers and the like sometimes do that to sneak messages around. We called it spooking, though.”

  “Courier
s and the like?” Ragsdale said, smirking. “Dare I ask what the like includes?”

  Dash smiled back. “Ask Benzel.”

  Benzel suddenly felt a need to inspect his fingernails. “I’m sure I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  Leira gave them an exasperated glare. “Anyway, as you were saying, Custodian…”

  “It would appear that a sophisticated form of steganography has been applied to the Deeper machine code. While the code itself executes in exactly the manner we would expect, the code as a whole contains what appears to be what amounts to memories, in steganographic form,” Custodian went on.

  “How the hell did we not see that?” Viktor asked, his voice hard with anger. Dash suspected it was directed at himself, more than anyone else.

  “We weren’t looking for it. Our concern was the safe execution of the code, so our attention was focused on the specific details of the logical modules and how they interact.”

  “So this really is a case of not being able to see the forest because of the trees,” Amy said. She got quizzical looks in return.

  “That doesn’t make any sense. If you can see the trees, then you can also see the forest they make up, right?”

  “Actually, Amy’s analogy is apt. If you are fixing your attention on the individual trees—or, in this case, the logical modules and the code that comprises them—then you will likely fail to see the greater, overarching configuration of the forest,” Custodian said.

  “So we never took a step back and looked at the Deeper code as a single thing, in its entirety,” Leira offered.

  “Correct. We didn’t see the forest, only the trees.”

  Dash had just let the conversation bounce around but now stepped into the middle of it. “Custodian, could this steganography have encoded something nasty in the Deeper code? Like, a virus?”

  “Potentially, yes.”

  “Dodged a bullet there,” Ragsdale muttered, and Dash nodded.

  “Okay, two things. One, from now on, before we do anything else with data we recover from the Deepers, or anyone else, we examine it for this steganography thing. It doesn’t come anywhere near our critical systems until we do. In fact, we need to go back and do that with all the data we’ve gathered so far.”

  “Kai is going to love hearing that,” Leira said.

  Dash shrugged. “Anyway, two, is there anything else encoded in this stuff? The Deeper code we’ve been using?”

  “No. Each of the other AIs has independently evaluated the code and determined the memories you experienced are the only extraneous material encoded in it.”

  “So what the hell were the Deepers trying to say, or do, or whatever?” Amy asked.

  “Actually, I, and the other AIs, don’t believe the Deepers were responsible for it. Rather, we believe that they actually adapted a pre-existing code for their own use and it already contained the subject material,” Custodian replied.

  Dash crossed his arms and gave a puzzled frown. “So who was responsible for it then? Who wrote the original code and included those memories in it?”

  “And what’s the Signal?” Leira asked.

  “And the Second Dreaming?” Ragsdale added.

  “We have no answers to those questions,” Custodian replied. “Searching for references to the terms Signal and the Second Dreaming returns far too many disparate results to be useful.”

  “Speaking of Kai, what about him and his people? Have you checked with them to see if they have anything to offer?” Conover asked.

  “I have discussed the matter with Kai, and he and the other members of his Order are now searching their archives for references that might apply. So far, they’ve also uncovered nothing useful.”

  Dash blew out a frustrated sigh. “You know, when I got up this morning, I said to myself, self, what we need is another complete mystery.”

  “The big question that’s still hanging is, I think, is JETS usable? Or should we just give up on it?” Leira asked.

  “The steganographic data included in it has no relevance to its function. To use the forest analogy again, regardless of what the forest looks like as a whole, that has no real bearing on the individual trees,” Custodian said.

  “Yeah, but are we going to all experience those memories that Dash did?” Amy asked. “Not that I’m necessarily objecting, because it actually sounded pretty cool.”

  “The only reason Dash experienced it is because his Meld provided a conduit for the imagery directly into his mind. We can configure the Meld to filter out such transmissions. I’ve already done so with the Archetype,” Sentinel put in.

  “And Kristin, Hathaway, and I have done likewise with our mechs,” Tybalt added.

  Viktor straightened. Dash could tell that some of his self-recrimination had faded, but it would be some time before he let himself off the hook for missing the encoded memories. “So the bottom line, then, is that JETS is safe to use, Custodian?”

  “Yes. The steganographic imagery Dash experienced is the only such data encoded at any level in the Deeper code. It otherwise executes exactly as it is intended to.”

  Dash nodded. “Okay then. Let’s do it. We’ll load JETS into all the mechs and give it a thorough tryout the next time we face the Deepers.”

  “And hopefully it doesn’t bite us in the ass,” Leira said.

  “Don’t worry, Leira,” Dash said, then flashed her his best grin. “When it comes to that, I’m the only—”

  “Dear?” Leira asked, her voice frigid.

  “Yesssss?”

  “Shh. After the war.”

  “Copy that,” Dash said.

  14

  Dash stretched out his legs and sighed in relative contentment. “You know, Kai, this was a damned fine idea. I’ve got to start coming here myself when I need to get away from it all.”

  He looked past his feet, through the trees, at one of their ubiquitous remotes. The unobtrusive machines really were the unsung heroes of the Cygnus Realm. The bulbous little machines did the vast majority of their vital fabrication work—cutting, hauling, maneuvering and assembling scrap and components. They did the cleaning, kept things tidy, provided a quick, albeit thrilling way for vac-suited personnel to move around.

  And, perhaps most importantly of all, they tended, watered, pruned, weeded, and generally took care of the crops upon which they relied to survive. The one he was idly watching was pruning dead leaves from a stab-berry bush. When done, it would move on to the next, and the next, and the next after that. Without the remotes, people would have to do these tedious but essential tasks. People who wouldn’t be fighting the Deepers.

  Right now, though, the idea of purposefully pruning stab-berry bushes seemed really appealing—

  Dash smirked at himself. He was jealous of a machine.

  Kai, sitting cross-legged beside him, smiled. “Indeed. I appreciate the enormous work Freya has done in creating her gardens aboard the Forge, but so do lots of other people.” He shrugged. “I find them too well-used, too crowded, to enjoy truly contemplative solitude. Here, on the Greenbelt, there are only the remotes.”

  Dash let the peaceful silence linger. He could hear the distant rumble of the Greenbelt’s systems and the steady snip snip snip of the remote pruning the bushes, and that was it.

  Reluctantly, he sat up and put his back against the rough bark of the mellow-fruit tree behind him. As much as he’d love to languish here, he’d met Kai for a reason.

  “So, I gather you had a chance to read my report? About what happened to me aboard the Archetype?” he asked.

  Kai nodded. “I did. That must have been a remarkable experience.”

  “That’s one word for it. Maybe if it hadn’t happened in the middle of freakin’ battle, it wouldn’t have seemed quite so jarring.”

  “It was a vision. Visions come to their recipients when it is time, regardless of when that time is.”

  “A vision? Like, some mystical thing?” Dash shook his head. “No, it was memories encoded into the
Deeper machine code we were using, by something called—” Dash paused. “I want to say stegosaurus, but I know that’s not right.”

  “Steganography. Unless you were visited by the spirit of a long-extinct dinosaur.”

  Dash chuckled. “These days, who knows? It sure wouldn’t surprise me if it were, and to be candid, I wouldn’t mind having a spiked tail. Some days, anyway.” He glanced at the remote as it moved to a new bush and resumed snipping away.

  He turned back to Kai. “Anyway, there wasn’t anything mystical about it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Dash narrowed his eyes at the monk. Was Kai—joking? He knew full well it was technological mystery, not a supernatural one. But the monk returned a steady, solemn gaze.

  “Kai, I appreciate your beliefs, even if I don’t necessarily share them. All of them, anyway. But in this case, yeah—I’m sure. I mean, we can see the stega—dammit, got the dino term down, not the other, anyway—hell, the encoded memories.”

  Kai waved a hand. “I realize that, and I’m not trying to suggest otherwise. But that’s merely the vehicle. I’m speaking to the intent.”

  Dash sat a little straighter, suddenly intrigued. “What do you mean?”

  Kai closed a book he’d placed in his lap, one they’d retrieved from one of his Order’s abandoned monasteries right before it had collapsed into ruin, nearly killing them both. Lips pursed, he set it aside.

  Dash just waited.

  “Dash, how did you find the Archetype?” Kai finally asked.

  “You know how. I stumbled on it—or thought I did, but the Unseen intimate they played a part in it.”

  “Do you believe them?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Alright, let me ask the question this way. Deep down, do you really believe your finding it was just random chance?”

  Dash leaned back against the tree. “No, probably not. I mean, the chances were—” Dash smiled. “I’m sure Sentinel could tell me if I asked her. But it would be some ridiculously small number.”