The Messenger Box Set: Books 1-6

by J. N. Chaney

“What purpose would that serve? It is an inefficient use of resources.”

  “Again, you will find that the Messenger is closely bonded with his vessel, as well as the other life-forms aboard it,” Sentinel supplied. “He will incur great risk to protect both. It is not surprising, therefore, that he seeks to ensure that it, and they, can also be maintained.”

  “To reiterate, it is inefficient, and a poor use of resources,” Custodian said. “But it is possible, yes, albeit to the point of being trivial.”

  “You could have just said yes and kept the peace between us.”

  “The bigger issue is the power state of the Forge,” Custodian said. “Shedding the protective shell of the moon depleted much of the remaining reserves. What is left is sufficient for only minimal function.”

  “That’s why most of the place is dark,” Dash said. “It’s all shut down to conserve power.”

  “That is correct.”

  “Okay. So how do we power it back up?”

  “Fully powering the Forge requires installation of power cores.”

  “Oh, of course.” Dash let a breath trickle out through his nose as he stared upward. “You can’t make cores, and I understand that, but prior to this conversation moving forward, along with our war effort, let’s clarify a couple points.”

  “I am listening, Messenger.”

  Dash felt a wintry smile cross his features. “I’m glad you chose that term. From this point on, I don’t want to try out for the team.”

  “What does that mean?” Custodian asked.

  “It means I’m the Messenger, and a proven pilot. It means my ship is a valuable shooting platform that we need, regardless of your disdain for the technology that keeps her running. It means—and this is the critical part—that I don’t want to waste another second passing some test designed to see if I’m worthy of being the Messenger. That’s already a known fact, and we don’t have the time to waste.”

  “Any tests designed to—” Custodian began, but Dash spoke over the voice without hesitation.

  “Irrelevant. I understand the wisdom of the Unseen, or at least I’m getting a feel for it, but sending me to find power cores as some kind of skill test isn’t just wasteful, it’s dangerous. From a tactical standpoint, it’s risky. From a strategic standpoint, it’s stupid, and I won’t allow us to go down that path. Does that make sense?”

  “Perfectly, and I assure you, there are no tests in your future other than the rigors of battle,” Custodian said.

  “Good. Now explain why we’re in semi-darkness, if you will.”

  “In the case of the Forge, there is a practical reason the power cores are not installed. The ones used here degrade over time. Accordingly, they are kept in stasis fields that preserve them. The cores that you immediately need will be found aboard the Forge.”

  “Oh. Well, that’s something, at least.”

  Dash stared, formulating his next question, but before he had a chance, another wave of change slammed his awareness into oblivion, and the world he knew came apart at the seams.

  Again.

  9

  “Dash? Dash, can you hear me? Dash!”

  “Is he even breathing?”

  “Dash!”

  The voices seemed to emanate from a dazzling glare of light. A bright light. I’ve heard of this, Dash thought. Going into a bright light. That was what dying was like, apparently.

  Dash panicked, thrashing, trying to turn aside from the light. Something pressed down on him.

  “Dash! It’s okay!”

  He blinked up at a fuzzy shape. “Leira?”

  She nodded. “You’re awake, Dash. Just take it easy.”

  “Guess he was breathing after all,” Amy said.

  Dash blinked and looked around. The others crowded around him—no, above him.

  Above him?

  Oh. He was lying down.

  “Help me…get back up,” he croaked.

  They maneuvered him to his feet. They were still in the chamber that contained Custodian. That’s what the massive cylinder, and the other devices surrounding it, were. It was Custodian, or a part of it at least.

  “What happened?” Conover asked.

  Dash groaned. He felt like he’d been dragged behind a ship doing a full-power fusion burn. “First, you guys tell me what happened here. What did you see? Did you hear Custodian?”

  The others exchanged blank looks. Viktor said, “Custodian? What’s that?”

  “You walked up to that thing,” Amy said, waving a hand toward the looming cylinder with a look of suspicion, “and then you just sort of fell down. You were out cold.”

  “For how long?”

  “Maybe thirty seconds,” Conover said.

  Thirty seconds. Dash’s conversation with Custodian and Sentinel had seemed to last a lot longer than that. And now as soon as he thought about it, it all came flooding back to him, like a breeze rolling back thick fog.

  He recounted what had happened in a toneless report, pausing occasionally to add clarity or sensation.

  “You were in unSpace?” Viktor asked, his bushy eyebrows lifting. “As in, you were there bodily, without a ship?”

  “As far as I understand it…sort of?”

  Amy whistled. “Holy crap, what was that like?”

  Dash looked at her. “You ever been to the beach?”

  “Have I ever?” She shrugged. “Sure. Once, on Sagan’s Landing.”

  “Well, it was nothing like that.”

  The first of the Forge’s power cores proved remarkably easy to retrieve, being in the same room as Custodian. Dash walked a few meters, touched one of the cryptic polyhedral constructs scattered around the chamber, and it vanished as though it had never existed. What remained was a squat, hexagonal rod of dark crystal, with bronze-toned cylinders a few centimeters long emerging from either end. Before he could reach for it, though, a deep voice resonated through the room.

  “Do not attempt to touch it until you have deactivated its stasis enclosure.”

  Amy yelped when Custodian spoke; the others looked around, instinctively trying to find the speaker.

  “I assume that’s Guardian, I think you called it?” Leira said.

  “Custodian. Everybody, meet Custodian. Custodian, this is everybody.” He looked back at the power core. Nothing about it even hinted it was enclosed in a stasis field, but now that he thought about grabbing it, he knew he shouldn’t. His senses sang with a primal warning, loud and clear. Instead, he needed to touch a sequence of colored panels on another of the devices nearby, this one a slender tetrahedron.

  “Just out of curiosity,” he asked Custodian, “what would have happened if I’d just scooped the thing up?”

  “In a manner similar to what happens on the event horizon of a black hole, in your frame of reference, your hand would seem to move ever more slowly, until it appeared to stop. It would then take an infinitely long time to reach the core.”

  “Oh, wow,” Amy said, her eyes wide. “And in your hand’s frame of reference, nothing would change—but you’d go slower and slower, until you were stuck, I guess, reaching for the core for the rest of eternity.” Her eyes shone as she worked through the implications. “That is so cool!”

  Conover nodded, his eyes on Amy. “Yes. It is cool.” He turned to Dash. “Probably not very good for you, though.”

  “So, what then?” Dash went on, speaking to Custodian. “I’m just stuck like that forever, reaching into eternity?”

  “The effects of such an anomaly are difficult to predict, because they depend on the specific space-time conditions local to the anomaly when it forms,” Custodian replied. “The most likely outcome would be a severe spatial distortion.”

  “That sounds bad,” Dash said, entering the last of the sequence. “Maybe you should put up a warning sign or something. The idea of warping space with a touch is disconcerting, to say the least. We haven’t even hung curtains yet.”

  “Curtains?” Custodian asked.

  Dash
waved a hand. “Decorative fabric to add a homey touch. We won’t need them here, although at some point, I wouldn’t mind a bar.”

  “Or a pool,” Amy said.

  “There are bars of various metals, as well as pools of liquids designed for—” Custodian said, but Dash laughed and cut him off.

  “You teach me about containment systems, and I’ll teach you how to live,” Dash said. “Safely, of course.”

  “This power core was locked away inside a container probably only you could open, Dash,” Leira said. “On board a self-aware alien space station, that was itself locked away inside a moon. I think it was probably pretty safe.”

  “Don’t underestimate what someone can manage when they think vast wealth is on the line.”

  “Someone like you, you mean,” Leira said.

  “And you. Don’t tell me this place doesn’t make your eyes water a bit at the thought of its value.”

  Leira shrugged. “You got me there.” Then she smiled, knowing Dash was right. The Forge was mindboggling on so many levels, each passing moment making them think of another angle that the Unseen technology presented.

  Dash turned to the core. Nothing had seemed to change.

  “How do I know that stasis field is really gone?” he asked Custodian.

  “You have successfully deactivated it.”

  He looked at the others. “You know, maybe you guys should go back to the Slipwing, take her away from here while I—”

  Amy snapped, “Oh, stop being a weenie,” and reached for the core.

  Dash though he could feel the adrenaline squirting into his bloodstream, like the spray from a broken hydraulic line. He started to move, to open his mouth, but Amy just grabbed the core and hefted it. Seeing everyone gaping at her, she just grinned and said, “What? Custodian said the stasis field was switched off.” She offered the core to Dash. “You’ve come a little too far along this road, Dash, to suddenly stop trusting these aliens, don’t you think?”

  Taking the core, he nodded toward Amy’s suit. “What’s that stain?”

  She looked down. “Candy, why?”

  “Did you drop it?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “And you loved candy, right?” Dash said, holding the core with ease.

  “Well, yeah, but I was—”

  Dash grinned. “Then maybe I’m not worried about the Unseen. Maybe I’m worried about your grip.”

  Amy looked sheepish, then embarrassed. “Oh.”

  Viktor gave Amy a fond smile and said, “For a young engineer who forever seems to need a good scrubbing, you are very wise, Amy.”

  Conover nodded. “You are. Very wise.”

  “But at some point, you need to understand that Dash is something we aren’t, and act accordingly,” Viktor continued.

  “Which is?” Amy asked.

  Dash turned on his heel, taking the power core to its receptacle. “The Messenger, of course.” He inserted the core with an ease that surprised even him, and he grinned broadly. “And a handyman.”

  As soon as he installed the core, many more of the otherwise lifeless devices clustered around Custodian flashed to life. That was, it turned out, the only core and receptacle in Custodian’s chamber. The other receptacles were in the engine room, in a part of the Forge that had been powered down and, until now, inaccessible, at least without a vacsuit. Thanks to the new core, Custodian was able to restore life support to that section, along with two other sections containing further cores.

  The Guardian explained that the remaining cores were scattered around the rest of the Forge; the stasis fields containing them required a minimum separation, because the Unseen had a penchant for adding extra steps to everything. Even something as mundane as turning off a shield.

  Custodian was now also able to keep life support, including lights, operating when Dash wasn’t in the immediate vicinity. Some compartments, however, remained closed to Leira and the others. Still, it made exploring the station easier, since Dash no longer needed to try and be everywhere at once.

  “Where do we start?” Leira asked.

  Dash knew before she’d finished speaking. “Engine room.”

  The engine room, it turned out, was a truly vast space located only a short distance from Custodian’s compartment. It contained a multitude more of the mysterious, polyhedral things that were coming to embody Unseen tech for Dash. A few of these were huge, including a massive octahedron that seemed composed of something frozen halfway in a transition from metal to crystal, but that also had a rather unsettling organic look to it. It was the eight power core receptacles that snagged his attention, though.

  “Eight? I only know where to find two more! Where are the rest?”

  “In currently inaccessible portions of the Forge,” Custodian replied.

  “Let me guess—those two will let you power up some of those parts, so we can get a couple more, and then power up more parts of the thing.”

  “Correct.”

  In other words, another puzzle, albeit one with a definite ending. The upside of the search was power on a scale that made Viktor and Conover giddy. Amy was nearly overwhelmed by it all, and Conover was still overwhelmed by Amy.

  Conover and Amy in tow, Dash headed for the first of the accessible cores. Leira and Viktor had returned to the Slipwing to take a break, eat, and begin a diagnostic on what the ship might need for full fighting readiness. As they made their way along the empty corridors, Viktor’s voice came over the comm.

  “You’ll be glad to know, Dash, that the Archetype seems to be almost fully repaired now, based on looking at it from the outside.”

  Dash thought about the damage done by the exploding missile to the Archetype’s hand. Based on past experience, he’d expected it to take much longer than this, and said as much to Sentinel.

  "The Forge is equipped to facilitate rapid repairs on the Archetype. Remember, that is essentially the reason this station was created in the first place.”

  “Good point. And good to know.” He looked at Amy and Conover. “Sounds like we might be calling the Forge home, at least for a while.”

  Amy grinned. “Sounds good to me.” Her enthusiastic answer was just short of a shout.

  Conover just gave her the same attentive look he did whenever she spoke. Dash made a mental note to have a quiet chat with the kid. Conover obviously had no experience with women, which made him think about his own experiences with women—and there were a lot of them, the vast majority of which were complicated, even in the best circumstances. For now, in an ancient relic on the brink of galactic war, a crush took on levels of complexity Dash couldn’t imagine, but he couldn’t let it dilute their effectiveness as a team.

  Yeah, maybe he should have Viktor speak to the kid instead, but if it came down to it, he could step in. Puppy love or not, Conover was a critical part of their team, and watching him drool through his days was going to cause problems sooner rather than later.

  After what felt like hours of trudging along corridors and through compartments crammed with yet more of the enigmatic Unseen tech, they retrieved the two cores and returned with them to the engine room. As he put the second one into place with a satisfying thunk, more of the engine room flared to life. Dash stepped back and looked around. One of the devices that hunkered nearby, a cube about as square as Dash was tall, suddenly vanished, revealing receptacles for two more power cores.

  Dash rubbed a hand through his hair. “This sucks a bit.”

  Amy giggled, but Dash decided to just ignore it for now. Instead, he said to Custodian, “I know this is called the engine room, but are any of these things actually, you know, engines? Can the Forge actually move under its own power?”

  “When fully powered up,” Custodian said, "The Forge is, indeed, capable of limited—”

  Then there was silence. Dash tensed. When Sentinel went abruptly silent, it inevitably meant something was up—and so far, it had never been a good something.

  “An object has just translat
ed from unSpace and entered this star system. Now there are several such objects,” Custodian said in its resonant male voice.

  Dash cursed. “How many? And what are they?”

  “There are twenty-four objects, inbound at high acceleration.”

  “We need to get back to the docking bay,” Conover said.

  Dash felt a flash of irritation, then pushed it aside. When he looked at Leira, she tilted her head in question.

  “Fight now. Rest later,” Dash said.

  Leira shook her head. “Not for you. You’re the Messenger, and I don’t think you get days off.”

  10

  They’d started back to the docking bay at a quick walk, which became a jog, and then a run as Custodian reported the insane velocity the two-dozen inbound whatevers had achieved, and in a stunningly short period of time. That sort of acceleration would have ripped the Slipwing apart, which meant these things had to be advanced alien tech—and since neither Sentinel nor Custodian could readily identify it, it meant it probably wasn’t Unseen tech. As he sprinted into the docking bay, he wheezed out, “You sure…it’s just…like when we entered the…the system? You couldn’t…properly ID us…either.”

  “The power cores you have installed have restored close to full sensor capability,” Custodian replied. “These objects, to the extent of the information I have available, do not correspond with anything of the Creators’ design.”

  Dash stopped near the Archetype, catching his breath, glad they had ditched the cumbersome vacsuits once it was clear Custodian wouldn’t let them wander into places without working life support. Leaning on his knees and gasping, he said, “Okay, so either it’s something…the Unseen made, and didn’t tell you about, or…”

  “Or they belong to the Golden,” Viktor said, ushering Amy and Conover aboard the Slipwing, which Leira was already powering up.

  Conover stopped on the Slipwing’s ramp and called back, “It could also be a third alien race, one we haven’t encountered yet.”

  Dash straightened. “I’d prefer it wasn’t that, but we should be ready for anything.”