The Messenger Box Set: Books 1-6

by J. N. Chaney

  “Yes,” Viktor said. “But what then?”

  Dash shrugged. “Clan Shirna has had its ass kicked pretty bad. I don’t know how much of a threat they’re going to be. But they’re not the real threat anyway.”

  “That would be those Golden, as you called them,” Leira said.

  “Yeah,” Dash confirmed. “But before we can do anything about that, the Archetype needs to be fully upgraded. The Unseen made the process of outfitting the Archetype a true pain-in-the-ass ordeal.” He touched the console in front of him. “My poor old ship here needs some tender loving care, too.”

  “So, ultimately, we have to go find these power cores you mentioned,” Viktor said.

  Dash looked at him, noting he’d said we. “You guys really sure you want to be involved in this? If what’s happened so far is any indication, this may not be good for your health.”

  All three of them nodded.

  “If you were us, Dash, would you bail out now?” Leira asked.

  It struck Dash that, before all of this happened, if someone had told them he was going to risk his life again and again to save the galaxy from a hyper-advanced alien race, he would have said you’re crazy.

  But this wasn’t then. So, he just shook his head.

  “Okay,” Conover said, “that brings us back to the same question. Once we’re ready to leave here, what then?”

  Somehow finding the energy for his own smile, Dash pulled out his comm and thumbed up an image of the Archetype, the Ribbon, and the Lens.

  “There’s a war coming, and this is just the beginning of what the Unseen have stashed out there,” Dash said, his eyes fixated on the screen.

  “What do you plan to do about that?” Leira asked with a curve of her lips.

  Dash smiled back. “Everything I can to stop it.”

  Continue reading for book 2, THE DARK BETWEEN.

  1

  Dash Sawyer loved spending time on Passage. Loved it. The massive space station was pretty much about, by, and for spacefarers; there were no ‘planetsiders’ to speak of, the sorts of people—farmers, settlers, miners, shopkeepers—who knew little about space travel, and cared even less. On Passage, Dash thought, he was amongst his own kind.

  Passage thrummed with life. That was it. Not machines—real life, in the faces and voices and sounds around him. He let his shoulders drop for a moment, reveling in the sensations that were so different from inky blackness and ancient metallic killers.

  He glanced at his chrono, which was synchronized to the Passage clock. He still had time, so he savored his coffee, instead of gulping it, taking wincing sips in a staccato beat. The reconstituted stuff he could make aboard the Slipwing always came out weak and watery—swill, compared to this delightful concoction. He did wonder where they managed to find something resembling real cream aboard a remote space station—but decided some things were probably better to not know.

  In any case, it gave him an excuse to linger on the margin of the promenade lining Merchant’s Row, enjoying not just the coffee, but also the scene splayed beyond the broad, round viewport.

  The moment was, Dash reflected, almost perfect. He had a crew, a trusted crew, a ship that hummed with new efficiency, and a seat in the most lethal weapon he’d ever imagined. The Archetype was built to be legendary, and his role as pilot and warrior was becoming more comfortable as the hours and days wore on. He’d even managed something unthinkable—a bit of time to himself, nowhere to be right away, just him and—

  “Dash? Where are you?”

  He swallowed coffee, sighed, and tapped his comm. “In my happy place, Leira. Why?”

  “Because we’ve got a meeting—”

  “With maintenance. Yeah, I know. But it’s not for another hour yet.”

  “Uh…no, it’s right now. Fourteen hundred Passage time.”

  “Nuh-uh…fifteen hundred.”

  “No, fourteen hundred. You wanted it right after lunch, remember?”

  Dash frowned—but it turned into a wince.

  “Oh, yeah. You’re right.” He released an annoyed sigh then cleared his mind. It did him no good to deny a schedule of his own making, especially when he knew how important it was.

  “See you as soon as you get here…which needs to be, like, right now.”

  “Got it.” Dash looked into his mug, said, “The universe is conspiring against my coffee intake,” and gulped down the rest of the brew. With a salute of his empty mug to the stars, he said, “I win.”

  “What have you won?” Sentinel asked.

  “Proper caffeination.”

  “And this is critical?”

  “It is for the good of the galaxy, so yes,” Dash said.

  “I’ll take that under advisement.”

  He found Leira waiting for him in a surprisingly grubby compartment that seemed to combine attributes of both office and workshop. Parts were scattered about the place, some of which he recognized, while others were entirely cryptic—maybe even just junk. A thin, acrid reek of drive coolant and lubricants fumed the air. Dash wrinkled his nose and stopped amid the clutter, arms crossed. “And I thought I was disorganized.”

  Leira shrugged. “You are. But unlike your actual chaos, this seems like a pretty organized disorganization.”

  “Hmm. So if I start moving things around…”

  “Don’t.”

  Dash flashed Leira a grin. She gave him a wintry smile, waggling her fingers like weapons over the orderly expanse around her. “And don’t touch anything, either,” she added, her tone one of stern warning, but her eyes were crinkled with laughter and he knew it was purely for show. He picked up a small unit—a transducer of some value—and tapped it gently, setting the metal ringing like a soft chime.

  “You never let me do anything fun with engineering,” he said. “And by fun I mean general destruction, but you get my meaning.”

  “That’s because some of this stuff is worth a lot of credits,” a new and bubbly voice said. “And if you break it, you buy it!”

  Dash turned and found himself facing one of the grubbiest people he’d ever seen. She was cute, he thought—although it was tough to tell for sure under the smears of grease and grime. Her coveralls were just as bad, and maybe worse, successive generations of stains rendering their original color to something between grey and…darker grey. It all made her bright, cheery smile stand out that much more.

  Leira grinned. “Hey, kid. Dash, this is Amy.”

  The newcomer turned her grin to Leira then crossed to her, and the two embraced warmly, despite the grubby coveralls. “Buried in work,” Amy said, “but what else is new.”

  Dash smiled, then gave a half bow with some gallantry. “Charmed, I’m sure.”

  Leira scowled as she and Amy separated. “Amy, this, ah, gentleman, is Newton Sawyer—”

  “Call me Dash.”

  “—the owner of the Slipwing, and my…let’s call him a business associate. Dash, this is Amy Anson, my cousin, and probably the best ship mechanic at this end of the sector.”

  “Don’t let Viktor hear you say that,” Dash told her.

  Amy grinned again. “Viktor taught me a lot of what I know,” she said, wiping a hand on her coveralls and holding it out for Dash to shake. He did, even though the wipe had probably just made her palm even dirtier. Her hand was callused, with a grip like a hydraulic vise, but surprisingly warm. “So, I hear you guys need some work done on your ship.”

  Dash nodded. “Yeah, my poor old Slipwing took quite a beating.”

  “From what?”

  Dash glanced at Leira. “A few fights, almost being crushed by a gas giant…it’s a long story.”

  “We’re hoping you can get to work on her right away,” Leira said. “I know you’re busy, but—”

  Amy held up a hand. “Never too busy for my favorite cousin. I might need a day or so to get a few things out of the way, but after that, I’m all yours.”

  “You know, I hate to bring this up, but what are your rates?” Dash sai
d. “We’re not exactly flush with credits right now.”

  Amy grabbed a jacket hanging from a power coupling sitting on the edge of a workbench. It was, if anything, even dirtier than her coveralls. “For my cuz, here, my rate’s whatever you guys can afford. It’s the parts that are going to be the issue.” She pulled the jacket on. “First thing’s first, though. I have to see your ship before I can even start to guess what this is going to cost.”

  Dash nodded and gestured toward the door. “Right this way. We’re docked on E-ring.”

  “E-ring? Why all the way down there?”

  “For…reasons,” Dash said, preferring to leave it at that. E-ring was sometimes called The Barrens, a remote part of Passage far removed from the bustle of Merchant’s Row, where almost all of the wheeling and dealing for cargo and other jobs happened. E-ring did have the advantage of relatively cheap docking fees, but the bigger benefit was the fact it saw little use. You could get away with things at E-ring you simply couldn’t elsewhere on the station. It was cozy, in the way required by people on the cusp of respectability.

  And, holy crap were they trying to get away with something now.

  As they made their way through the expansive sprawl of Passage, by foot and turbotrain, Amy asked, “So, Leira, we’ve been out of touch for a while. What’s new?”

  Leira looked at Dash, then simply said, “It’s complicated. Easier if I just show you.”

  “Okay…”

  “Let’s wait until we get to the Slipwing.”

  Amy turned her perpetual grin from one to the other, then shrugged and stretched her booted feet out into the turbotrain aisle. “Fine,” she said, putting her hands behind her head, “be all cryptic like that.” Then she closed her eyes and apparently fell asleep. It was an ability that Dash found more than a little amazing, and he watched her for a second with an approving gaze.

  Dash raised his eyebrows at Leira, but she just smiled and shook her head in a way that said, Don’t worry, this is just Amy being Amy.

  A few minutes later, the turbotrain slowed, its mechanical voice announcing their arrival at E-ring. Amy came instantly awake and followed Dash and Leira along a desolate corridor leading away from the station, her eyes bright and alert in seconds.

  “Wow, you guys are really out here in the boonies,” Amy said. “Together with all this secrecy, it makes me think you guys are into something shady.” Her grin suddenly faded. “Wait. You guys aren’t into something shady, are you? I mean, I don’t necessarily mind, but there’s shady, and then there’s shady.”

  “It’s nothing like that,” Leira said as they reached a viewport beside the Slipwing’s assigned dock. “Like I said, it’s just…complicated.”

  “Complicated how?”

  Leira gestured to the port. “See for yourself.”

  Dash watched Amy as she looked out the port. At first, she just seemed puzzled. But then something caught her attention, and she said, “What the hell is that?”

  Dash couldn’t see out the port, but he didn’t have to. He knew what Amy saw. Floating alongside the Slipwing, hugging the hull of Passage for concealment was the massive alien mech known as the Archetype.

  Dash and Leira put Amy off with a promise to explain everything but convinced her to do a damage assessment of the Slipwing first.

  It wasn’t pretty.

  Dash and Leira, joined by Viktor and Conover, gathered as Amy emerged from the Slipwing’s engineering bay. She’d been immersed in digging through the ship’s guts, chasing myriad faults, failures, and error messages to their ultimate sources. And there were a lot of sources for them, judging by the long list Dash caught on Amy’s maintenance table as she untangled herself from skeins of optical cable.

  Fluid glistened on her face, shimmering pink. Dash recognized it as coolant for the thermoelectric converters that used the incandescent heat of nuclear fusion to generate electrical power. If that was leaking, it meant the Slipwing’s wounds went much deeper than any of them had feared. Dash could feel the credits piling up.

  Amy frowned, then stuck out her tongue and touched it to the coolant spattered across her face, following with a grim nod. She brightened as she wiped a sleeve across her mouth, her conclusion apparent. “Yeah,” she said, “that’s going to need to be topped off, too.”

  Despite his discomfort over what these repairs were going to cost, Dash couldn’t resist a smile. Amy hadn’t wiped the coolant off, as much as she’d moved it all to one cheek. She really was a mess, but she absolutely didn’t seem to care, and it was incredibly endearing.

  Viktor raised bushy eyebrows. “You know that coolant from its taste?”

  “Can’t work around the stuff without eventually getting some in your mouth,” Amy said. “But let’s talk about the heavy-duty stuff. This ship’s got problems.”

  “As in?” Viktor asked.

  “Okay,” she said, “we’ve got distorted hull plates—upper and lower—a couple of bent structural trusses…sheesh, you guys must have been deep in that gas giant’s atmosphere.”

  “Crush depth, technically,” Conover said. “I’m surprised we even survived.”

  Amy looked up at Conover’s flat, matter-of-fact tone. “Okay, then. Anyway, let’s see, a dozen power couplings need replacing, your comms array is almost completely shot, your fusion containment system has so many extraneous harmonics going on you could sign it up for a gig playing The Retro Room up on Merchant’s Row, you need a complete rebuild on one of your inertial dampers…”

  “What absolutely needs to be done? Leira asked.

  Amy thumbed the screen, scrolling. “Uh, well, let’s see. Reducing it to the barest bones possible”—she looked up, her grin cheerfully unchanged—“all of it.”

  “Suppose we just fixed the things we absolutely need to fix to be able to fly,” Conover said, peering over her shoulder. “Like, we could take that inertial damper completely offline, and just rely on the other three.”

  “Sure,” Amy said. “And as long as you don’t lose another, you’re fine. But if you do, then…well, you’d better be belted in really well before you do any hard burns.”

  “I think we should listen to Amy,” Viktor said. “If she thinks it needs to be fixed, then it probably needs to be fixed.”

  “Bottom line,” Dash said, “how much is this going to cost?”

  “Mindful of the fact that I’m your favorite cousin,” Leira added, smiling sweetly.

  Amy laughed. “I already said I’d work for whatever you guys can afford. Which, from all these uncomfortable looks I’m seeing, is pretty much nothing.” But her grin faded. “You’re not going to get around the cost of parts, though. We can 3D print pretty much anything that I don’t have in stock, but that’s going to cost. Same with the drone time it’s going to take to do the exterior work. I’m guessing”—she scrolled through the list again—“probably a couple thousand credits, give or take.”

  Dash winced and looked at Leira. “And fuel on top of that.”

  Conover shook his head. “We have one thousand, one hundred, and four credits. You’re saying we need twice that.” He looked at Dash, Leira, and Viktor. “It would seem we’re stuck until we can come up with more funds.”

  “Eh, not necessarily,” Amy said. “If you don’t mind going off the books, I know a guy who has access to the printers and can make what we need. And I have a friend who owes me some drone time. I can probably get you spaceworthy again, if you’re okay committing to an IOU.”

  “I’ll do what I can to help,” Viktor said. “That should take some of the burden off you, Amy.”

  “I’d certainly like to get more hands-on experience with these systems,” Conover added.

  Dash looked at Leira, who shrugged. He turned back to Amy. “Sure, let’s do it. When can you start?”

  Her grin returning, Amy clapped her hands together in apparent excitement, then pulled a component out of her tool belt, its outline blurred from melting. “I already have. This is what’s left of your hy
giene system controller. I bypassed it for you, so the toilet works properly again.”

  Dash had to smile. “Well, that’s definitely a good start. I don’t want a repeat of the toilet backup incident from two years ago.”

  “Should I ask?” Leira said, arching a brow.

  “It’s better if you don’t,” Dash said, grimacing.

  As they left the Slipwing, Dash noticed that she’d been hooked into the station’s power. Amy explained that it would speed up recharging and regenerating her systems, while lessening the burden on her own power generation and saving a bit of fuel while doing it.

  “Can you do that?” Dash asked.

  Amy’s grin didn’t falter; she just shrugged. “This station makes more power than it knows what to do with. Honestly, I think it should be available to everyone. In any case, I think we can sneak a bit for your ship. Think of it as taking a sip from the community beer keg.”

  Dash found himself smiling yet again. He simply could not resist liking this woman.

  True to her word, just over a Passage day after Dash had first met Amy, she had thrown herself into repairing the Slipwing. They’d moved her away from the station to give the drones room to work. Dash had eagerly offered to help with that—manipulating the handy little drones looked like fun—but Amy had said, “Uh-uh. They’re on loan, and I’m responsible for them. Sorry. We crash, we buy.”

  He pointed at Leira, whose fingers were dancing across a drone controller. “So how come she gets to do it?”

  “Because I signed the IOU,” Leira said, without looking away from the controller. “You didn’t want to, remember? That means I get to play.”

  “That, plus Leira spent over a year helping me repair ships on Tegan’s World,” Amy said.

  “You never told me that, Leira.”

  “Oh, Dash, the things I haven’t told you about myself make what I have told you pale into insignificance.”

  “Oh, really?”

  Leira answered by giving him a coy glance but quickly turned her attention back to her work.