The Messenger Box Set: Books 1-6

by J. N. Chaney

  But the agent just watched the monk approach, apparently unconcerned—even uninterested.

  The monk limped up to the agent, and Dash wasn’t quite sure what happened next. One instant, the monk shambled along like a bent, old man; the next, he was a blur of movement as the staff struck home with a vicious crack, then the Clan Shirna agent was toppling over, a ribbon of spittle and blood flying from his face. The monk caught him and swiftly pulled him into an alley. A moment later, he emerged, casually strolled up to the intersection and looked around, then turned back and gave them a thumbs-up.

  “You know,” Dash said, “you can say that martial arts is good for your soul and all that, but that was amazing. Nothing like a little well-practiced violence to lift my spirits.”

  Conover, who hadn’t been able to see around the corner, asked, “What happened?”

  “One less Clan Shirna guy to worry about, that’s what happened,” Dash said. Conover looked vastly relieved, but Dash held up a warning finger. “Before you get all relaxed, we still have a long trek back to the ship.”

  Conover’s face tightened again, but he nodded and said, “Right. Got it.”

  Once more, they set off, one block closer to getting away.

  The climb up the ridge proved laborious, but not for the monks. Their faces were relentlessly upbeat despite the afternoon heat, but Dash and Leira were soon gasping with exertion as they trudged up the steep path. Conover struggled in a way that verged into danger. Twice, they had to stop to let him catch his breath.

  “The atmosphere is a little thinner than standard,” Leira said to him as he slumped on a boulder.

  Conover winced as he shifted on the rock. “Not that. Out of…shape.”

  She shrugged. “It happens when you live on a spaceship. Drink some water.”

  He shook his head. “Out.”

  She dug into her satchel then pulled out her own water bottle and sloshed it around. “I have some left,” she said, offering it to him.

  “No.” He shook his head. “That’s yours.”

  “You need it way more than I do.”

  Dash frowned at the little tableau. “Guys? Hate to hurry you along, but we don’t really have time for this.”

  Conover took the water, muttered, “Thanks,” drank it, and levered himself to his feet.

  “We’ll be at the top shortly,” Kai said. “Five more minutes, perhaps ten.”

  Dash nodded, activating his comm. “Ten minutes out, Amy.”

  “Got it,” she replied. “Everything’s powered up. Just gotta hit the thrusters and we’ll be flying.”

  They resumed the climb. The path had its own switchbacks, but it mostly went straight up the ridge. It gave them a terrific view of Featherport sprawled along the coast behind them, but it also left Dash feeling exposed to discovery by any enemy with a drone, field glasses, or even decent eyesight. “How about our friends up there, Amy? What are they up to?”

  “We’ve got two still outside their ship. Three or four more just wandering nearby. And I know there’s at least one more still aboard.”

  “Okay. As soon as you see us, hit those thrusters. I wanna be lifting off while the ramp’s still closing.”

  “Got it.”

  They finally reached a flat spot just below the crest of the ridge. Another short climb and they’d be at the top and on the edge of the spaceport. They wouldn’t be too far from the Slipwing, but Dash wished they could have ended up closer.

  He turned to Kai. “Thank you for your diligence. I know that’s not enough, but—I’m in awe of your commitment. I’ll use this core to fight the enemy until I can’t fight any more. You have my word.”

  “You’re not aboard your ship just yet.”

  Kai turned away and started up the last bit of the trail. Dash opened his mouth to protest, but with a half-dozen Clan Shirna goons lurking around the spaceport, he realized they might still need the monks’ help.

  They reached the top and paused. A security fence surrounded the spaceport, with a trail stretching both directions, paralleling both it and the crestline. Dash cursed; they’d still have to walk a long distance one way or the other to enter—and he could see the Slipwing maybe a hundred meters away. But Kai just nodded to two of the monks, who stepped up to the fence and simply pulled a section away from a post, opening a gap.

  “We’ve had reason to surreptitiously access this place in the past,” he said, shrugging.

  “There’s a story in that, isn’t there?”

  Kai smiled. “Isn’t there always?”

  Once through the fence, they moved behind a blast shield and peered at the Slipwing. They faced a straight, one-hundred-meter shot across thruster-scorched duracrete. He could see the Clan Shirna ship sitting another hundred meters or so to the left of the Slipwing. They’d have some cover part of the way from a bulky corporate freighter and some cargo pods piled near it, but they still faced a good two-thirds of the distance in the open. Heat shimmered over the surface, warping distance and vision into a scene that was even less inviting than at a distance.

  “Amy, we’re here,” he said, then went on, describing their location. He wanted to make sure she and Viktor knew the direction they’d be coming from in case they needed some help.

  “Yup,” she shot back. “I can see where you’re talking about. Viktor’s down by the ramp with one of those cool plasma pistols.”

  “Got it.” Dash looked at the others, pausing on Conover. “You ready?”

  The kid’s eyes were wide and white against the sweaty grime smeared across his face, but he gave a quick nod. “Yeah. Mostly got my breath back.”

  “Everyone else?”

  There were nods all around.

  “Okay, let’s do this,” Dash said. “Fast walk; it’ll draw less attention. We won’t run unless we have to.”

  They started for the Slipwing.

  The monks spread out into a loose fan, with Dash, Leira, and Conover in the middle. In the fading light, they had a faint hope anyone looking at them might think they were just a group of robed monks walking across a spaceport, from a direction that wasn’t an official entrance or the terminal building.

  Yeah, not likely, Dash thought, grimly gripping his slug pistol. The only way they’d pull that off was if no one bothered looking at them in the first place.

  “Maybe we should have waited for dark,” Leira said.

  Dash curled a lip. “It would cost us at least another hour.”

  “More like two,” Kai said.

  “Meantime, the rest of those Clan Shirna guys down in the city might be back here by then—and then we’d be outnumbered, on top of everything else.”

  They walked on, their feet thumping and scraping against the blast-scarred spaceport pad.

  “I see you,” Amy said.

  Dash replied, “Yup. So far, so good.” They’d reached the looming bulk of the freighter and deviated off the straight path slightly, nudging themselves a little further into its shadow. It would have been nice to get right under it to benefit from the cover of its ponderous landing gear, but Dash didn’t want to enter its security zone, triggering an alarm inside and bringing some confused and wary corporate ship’s crew into the mix.

  “Okay,” he said as they stepped out of the freighter’s shadow and back into the glare of the lowering sun. Forty meters left. “Kai, you guys can stay here. Any closer, and you’ll catch some blast from us as we lift, and we really don’t want to have to wait.”

  “We’re coming with you,” the monk said.

  “You’re what?” Despite the urgency, Dash stopped. “No, you’re not.”

  “It’s the reason we exist.”

  “But you’ve done your duty—I’m telling you this not just as me, but as the Messenger. You’ve fulfilled your promise, Kai, beyond anyone’s possible expectation. Go, and live,” Dash said.

  “No, Messenger, we can’t. Our Order wasn’t merely formed to guard the Orb until your arrival. We exist to oppose the Enemy of All Lif
e at every turn—and to assist the Messenger in doing the same.”

  “Look, you can’t just—”

  “If I may intervene,” Sentinel said, her voice ringing in Dash’s head, “taking these monks with you is actually a wise course of action. They are familiar with the Creators, their language, and their technology, and could prove useful in assisting you to activate the Forge and oppose the Golden.”

  Kai leaned into Dash’s sudden silence, his face determined. “Standing against the Enemy is what we have been preparing to do for all of our lives. Do not deny us this.”

  Dash sighed. Both Kai and Sentinel were probably right.

  “Uh, Dash?” Conover said. “That guy over there, near the Slipwing, he’s looking at us.”

  Dash turned, looked, and groaned. The figure standing near his ship reminded him of Nathis, the supposed religious fanatic—although it turned out, really just a stooge of the Golden—who led Clan Shirna’s relentless pursuit of him and the others. The reptilian jerk had been desperate to get his scaly hands on the Lens, the Unseen device Leira and Viktor had found that had the power to blow up stars. The guy looking at them now had the same reptilian build and appearance, right down to the patches on his neck that would change color with his mood.

  Well, they were about to turn very, very red—the color Nathis’s had gone when he was pissed off.

  “We probably should have had this conversation a while ago,” Dash said to Kai. “Anyway, you need to get your people somewhere safe. We’ll take it from here.”

  Kai gave a sharp jerk of his head. “We’re wasting time,” he snapped, then motioned for the other monks to follow him. And they did, all of them—heading straight for the Slipwing.

  Dash weighed his options as a courier, and then, as the Messenger, an angle that was coming to dominate his thought process.

  “They come with us,” Dash said, simply.

  And then all hell broke loose.

  In true Clan Shirna fashion, it wasn’t subtle. A plasma shot pulsed overhead, exploding against a cargo pod. Dash wasn’t sure if it was meant as a warning shot, or just a miss, but he didn’t take time to try to figure it out. He shouted, “Move!” and started running for the Slipwing. As he did, he raised his slug pistol, intending to send some shots downrange at the Clan Shirna thug they’d seen—but Kai and his monks blocked the line of fire.

  Dash raced on, feet pounding the duracrete. The thug lifted his plasma pistol and snapped off a shot, incinerating a monk in a flash of incandescent discharge. Dash cursed, but Kai was on the man before his pistol could recycle. After a flurry of blows, the thug dropped like a sack of rocks, blood spraying in an arc as Kai’s staff swung.

  The Clan Shirna goon who’d fired the first shot was lining up another, right until his head exploded in gory fragments. Dash glanced back and saw Conover, slug pistol still raised, staring in surprised horror at what he’d done.

  “Good aim. Now shake it off and let’s go!”

  Conover turned, hesitated, then broke into a run. Leira snapped shots in the opposite direction, her rounds sparking off the freighter’s landing gear, where two more Clan Shirna had taken cover. Alarms sounded from inside the freighter, and Dash saw a woman appear in an open hatch, but immediately duck back inside as gunfire crackled. He made to join Leira in doing a run-and-shoot, keeping the two lurking under the freighter suppressed, but someone leapt out from behind another cargo pod, right into Dash’s path.

  Clan Shirna, Dash saw, so he lashed out with the slug pistol, aiming to pistol-whip his foe across the face.

  The man dodged back then kicked out, getting a solid blow on the thick muscles of Dash’s leg. Dash spun and almost fell, but windmilled one arm to recover, while punching with the slug pistol. He caught the man in the chest, making him grunt and recoil. He followed up with a kick to the man’s stomach, before finally getting the pistol-whip he wanted and smashing his opponent’s nose into bloody ruin. Then he gave one more chop, with the pistol butt on his head. The man dropped and went still.

  Dash raced on. Conover and Leira were ahead of him now, doing the smart thing and passing Dash while he fought, keeping an eye out for other bad guys. Ahead of them, the monks had reached the Slipwing—just as one more Clan Shirna agent appeared around a coolant truck parked near the ship.

  Dash braced himself. The monks had bunched up, so a plasma shot would turn most of them to glowing ash. One of the monks leapt, though—actually leapt, like some predatory animal on its prey. He managed to deflect the plasma blast up, so it flared into the sky, but the shot vaporized his forearms and head. The Clan Shirna agent stumbled back, shocked by the flash right in front of his face. Two more monks immediately closed in, unleashing a deluge of blows from their staves. Dash caught dazzling, neon-blue flashes as they connected; some of their weapons were electrified. It seemed like overkill, considering the way the blows alone so obviously turned the man’s bones to splinters, but he appreciated the lethality of their art even more.

  Then there was another plasma blast, but this one detonated near the Clan Shirna ship. Dash saw Viktor on the ramp, weapon raised, ready to take another shot when it had recycled. That gave a man taking cover under the ship a chance to raise his own weapon and aim it straight back at Viktor.

  Dash stopped, raised his slug pistol, and snapped off the longest shot he’d ever tried—at least fifty meters. It actually took a noticeable instant for the round to travel that far. Dash knew that because of the brief delay before the back of the man’s head spattered across the ship’s engine fairing.

  “Okay,” Dash said to himself, breaking back into a run, “that was a damned fine shot, if I do say so myself.”

  Viktor stared, wide-eyed, as Kai and the remaining seven monks pounded up the ramp into the Slipwing. Leira and Conover followed. A sole Clan Shirna agent stepped out of their ship and snapped off a plasma shot that slammed into the Slipwing, forcing Dash to dodge glowing, white-hot droplets of melted ablative armor. It looked spectacular, but the armor was meant to take far worse hits from far more powerful weapons, so Dash ignored it, jumped onto the ramp, and shouted, “Amy, go!”

  A rising whine filled the air as the thrusters came to life. Dash followed Viktor up the ramp as the roar of mounting thrust rose behind him, heated air and dust swirling into the ship as the ramp closed. With a thump, it seated and sealed, and the Slipwing lifted.

  “Shylock traffic control is ordering us to stay put, Dash,” Amy said. “Something about the magistrates being on their way.”

  Dash looked around at the crowd suddenly jammed into the Slipwing’s cabin. “Anybody here plan to come back to Shylock any time soon?”

  “We might need to get back into that Unseen complex,” Conover said. From the tremble in his voice, Dash could tell he was still recovering from the adrenaline-pumped shock of having just killed a man. He favored the kid with a look he hoped was reassuring.

  “We’ll deal with that if and when we have to. In the meantime, I suspect all that Unseen stuff down there will be pretty much fine on its own.”

  “It did look after itself for hundreds of millennia,” Kai said.

  “Amy, tell traffic control you’ve got a bad comm circuit, and that you can’t make out what they’re saying. Then hand the ship over to Leira. You’re a terrific engineer, but—”

  “She’s the hotshot pilot in the family. Roger that!”

  16

  Shylock traffic control pestered them as they sped away from the planet, demanding they return to answer for their role in the fracas at Featherport. Dash eventually just set the comm to ignore them, enjoying the blissful silence that fell with the touch of a key.

  “That’s better,” he said, and everyone grinned in agreement.

  While his act was a gross violation of spaceflight regs, it seemed monumentally unimportant given what might be waiting when they returned to the Forge. Galactic war had a way of making officious idiots seem a lot less important.

  The bigger concern was more
Clan Shirna ships waiting for them in orbit, or in the space near Shylock. Dash fully expected a fight once they broke atmosphere—but there was nothing, just a bit of routine traffic. The Clan Shirna gang that they’d confronted on Shylock must have gotten wind of them somehow—probably by paying off some traffic controller to alert them if the Slipwing happened to show up—but they likewise must have been the only ship near enough to respond. It meant they now had to worry about Clan Shirna pretty much everywhere they went—at least anywhere inhabited. Again, though, it just seemed not that big an issue, compared to the threat of the Golden themselves, who intended to end all life, not just theirs.

  Now, as the Slipwing prepared to translate to unSpace and hurry back to the Forge, Dash sought out Kai. He found him crammed into the crew hab, along with the other monks. The ship hadn’t been designed to accommodate this many people, and Dash had found it uncomfortably crowded with just him, Leira, Viktor, and Conover aboard. Adding Amy made it even more congested, and now, with eight more people jammed into her confined interior, it actually hit Dash with flickers of claustrophobia, but he steeled himself with a deep breath.

  He stopped and leaned against a conduit. “Kai, I just…I’m sorry. About your people back there. I never got to know them, but they helped us get out of there alive.”

  Kai nodded. “They were good men, and we will certainly miss them. But they were fortunate. They died having fulfilled their purpose of seeing that the Messenger was united with the Orb. Many more of our Order have died in the past, having only their faith that the Messenger would some day arrive to sustain them.”

  Dash nodded back, impressed by Kai’s attitude regarding the sudden, awful deaths of people he must have known all his life. In his travels through the galactic arm, Dash had brushed up against many different religious beliefs, but had never given any of them much credence. If anything, he’d generally considered most of them silly at best, destructive at worst, and potential tools of manipulation and control in any case. But the simple, absolute certainty in Kai’s words made him wonder if there might something more to it all—something that he’d been missing.