The Messenger Box Set: Books 1-6

by J. N. Chaney

  “They’ll be back,” Viktor said. “We might have defeated the Golden today, but they’ll be back.”

  “Of course they will,” Custodian said. “The transmission the Harbinger generated after it arrived in this system was undoubtedly intended to alert the Golden. It was almost certainly a warning about the emergence of the Forge and the Archetype.”

  Viktor nodded, watching the Harbinger being towed by. “In other words, a call to arms.”

  “Yes. The Golden will now marshal their forces and return in earnest.”

  Dash took a breath and braced himself. “So how long do we have until they’re back?”

  He was ready for something measured in days, or maybe weeks, at best. But hours wouldn’t have really surprised him, either.

  Custodian replied, “Several months. There are likely to be minor incursions until then, and there will likely be covert surveillance—indeed, that is probably already underway—but based on the Creators’ analysis of past Golden attacks, it will likely be several months before they return here in force.”

  Dash eased a breath out. “Okay. Months. So, we have some time. The question is, what do we do with it?”

  “Study that Harbinger, for one,” Amy said. “I can’t wait for Conover and me to start tearing it apart, figuring out what makes it tick.”

  Conover gave her a look that managed to be surprised, wary, and delighted all at once. “You and me?”

  “Well, duh. Who better?” She stopped as soon as she said it and looked at Viktor. “Well, except you, of course, Viktor.”

  Viktor laughed and put his arm around her shoulder. “No, you’re right, Amy. Conover’s your man. The two of you make a very good team.” He winked at Conover, who turned an even deeper shade of red.

  “At least this time we can do our thing without worrying about running out of air,” Amy said.

  Viktor grinned, then turned toward the monks who were standing nearby. “It’s just like how I think Kai, his colleagues, and I are something of a team now, too. With their help, I’d like to start trying to make sense of this place. We’ve barely even scratched the surface of what the Forge is all about.”

  Kai nodded. “We are honored for such consideration from you, Viktor. We look forward to doing all we can to resist the Enemy Of All Life.”

  Dash looked at Leira. “Guess that means you and I can just kick back, put our feet up, and take a break.”

  “Yeah, I could use a vacation. What’s the beach situation on that gas giant?”

  “Dense and hot. Just right,” Leira said.

  “I am afraid that you have little time for leisure, Messenger,” Custodian said. “It is essential that you continue to prepare the Forge for the resumption of the war against the Golden.”

  “And I will,” Dash said, wincing as the joke missed. “You know, Custodian, I really have to teach you something about humor. It’s a high form of art among sentient beings.”

  “I look forward to such nuance,” Custodian said.

  “The pleasure is mine.”

  He turned back to Leira, whose smile had been replaced by a determined look. “We need weapons, Dash,” she said. “Better defenses. Ideally, allies, too. More ships would be a force multiplier, and that could be the difference between playing defense or taking the fight to them.”

  Dash nodded. “Yeah. That means we might have to start telling anyone who’ll listen about what’s coming. I’ll be the Messenger in more than one way, and it won’t be entirely welcome.”

  “Mindful that some of them might very well be Golden agents,” Viktor put in.

  “The most effective way to increase our effectiveness against the Golden is for you to gather the remaining power cores for both the Archetype and the Forge,” Custodian said.

  “Agreed,” Dash replied with a sigh. “The big scavenger hunt goes on.” He turned to the others. “We can spend time studying the Harbinger and learning about the Forge, sure, but I think our priority has got to be those cores.”

  “What will they do, exactly?” Conover asked. “Especially for the Forge? Custodian should be able to at least tell us that.”

  “Yeah,” Amy said. “No reason to keep it a secret, right?”

  Kai nodded. “Certainly not from the Messenger.”

  Dash shrugged. “Okay. Tell me, Custodian, what will more cores do for the Forge, exactly?”

  “They will enable more and more powerful offensive and defensive systems. Ultimately, the Forge, when fully powered, will rival the capabilities of the Archetype.” Custodian said it in a way that seemed just slightly condescending, like this should be obvious.

  But Dash ignored the AI’s disdain. “Hang on. I thought this place was a factory. A place to build more Archetypes. Are you saying it’s not?”

  “The manufacture and maintenance of the Archetype is one of its purposes, yes. That is not its primary one, however.”

  “Alright, so what is its primary purpose then?”

  “This facility, Messenger, was not made merely to fight the Golden. It was made to defeat them. This station, the Forge, was meant to finally end the war.”

  Continue reading for book 3, STAR FORGED.

  1

  Dash hurled himself across a small ravine and landed with a slide that spattered mud skyward in clumps. Leira landed beside him, windmilling her arms to stop herself from pitching face-first into the thick foliage. They both turned and looked back as Conover put on a burst of speed then launched himself into the air. The kid was moving.

  And he almost made it. His feet hit the very edge of the ravine on their side, but the sodden earth collapsed under his impact. With a yelp, he plunged straight down, his feet plowing furrows in the muddy side of the gulley as he dropped. Dash and Leira each grabbed an arm to stop him.

  Though not before his face had buried itself in the muck. He looked up, pale eyes wide and almost glowing through the mask of black paste.

  Dash braced and pulled himself up, fighting a smile. “Close. Very close.”

  They dragged Conover up and back onto what passed for solid ground. The snap and crack of branches behind them announced their pursuers, who were doggedly closing in.

  Conover wiped at his face as they broke back into a run, flicking mud off his fingers with a disgusted scowl. “Gross.”

  They pounded on through the jungle, gasping at the rich, damp tang of rotting vegetation, the warm air steaming as their lungs worked like bellows. As they splashed through a shallow creek, Dash glanced at Leira, making sure her backpack was still in place. They’d found not just one, but two power cores in the Unseen outpost.

  GC098-something-or-other was a terra-class planet orbiting an unremarkable star with no name, just a catalog number and surrounded by a gulf of empty space. With two cores secured on the lonely planet, Dash had given one to Leira, so if they got separated or something bad happened, they wouldn’t lose them both at once.

  Although something bad happening here on this dank, savage world would be an irony, as every meter of the land had been a low-level disaster thus far. To be skewered by a spear or arrow on this unknown backwater would be sheer comedy after surviving a ferocious attack by the Golden Harbinger on The Forge, and then their deliberate, partial collapse of a star to save Leira would be unfair. The universe had a sense of humor, and it was grim.

  Dash vaulted over a fallen log and pushed on, dodging a rotting stump that teemed with larvae the size of his thumb. This would all have been much simpler if they’d just been able to land the Slipwing and the Archetype right outside the Unseen outpost where the power cores were stored. But the Unseen didn’t seem to do anything simply. Their outpost generated some sort of suppressor field that shut down any tech around it in a wide, silent circle.

  At least, it shut down anything more advanced than a bow and arrow. If they could just get outside it, they could call the Archetype for help. The key term being if.

  They hit a wall of colossal ferns at full speed, the fronds lashing all thre
e of them like whips. Conover glanced back toward the racket of their pursuers. “How are there even humans here in the first place? We didn’t find records of any settlements.”

  Something uttered a piercing shriek overhead. They all flinched and ducked. Dash braced himself, but nothing horrible came swooping out of the tangle of leafy branches.

  “Probably a long-lost colony ship or something,” Leira said, shoving aside a frond as big as she was. “There are more than a few of those. One time, Viktor and I—”

  Dash pushed apart hanging vines, thick as his wrist and heavy with glistening sap. “Save the war stories. Concentrate on speed and breathing in this soup if you can.”

  One of the thicker vines almost caught Leira across the nose. She glared at it while ducking as nimbly as a dancer. She was like that, even when being chased by humans who thought sharp sticks were the height of warfare. “Passes the time.”

  Dash wiped sweat from his eyes and charged on. “You know what else passes the time? Avoiding holes. In us.”

  “You’ve changed from a cynical courier to a rather grim—well whatever this is. Why?”

  “Someone decided I had to save the universe. Doesn’t leave much time for humor— hold!” Dash barked, digging his heels into the spongy soil.

  Dash skidded to a halt. The jungle ahead abruptly thinned as a rocky ridge climbed away from the boggy watercourses behind them, and they could actually see more than just a few meters ahead. They could pick up the pace, maybe put some distance between them and their pursuers. The only trouble was the trip wire—a coarse, braided rope strung among the sturdy trunks—blocking their path.

  Dash flicked his eyes over the scene. “A trap.”

  “Not a very well hidden one,” Conover said, still wiping at his face, but accomplishing little more than smearing the residual muck into a sweaty mess.

  Leira nodded. “Not really hidden at all. Which kind of defeats the point, doesn’t it?”

  “Nope,” Dash said. “They wanted anyone coming this way to see it. Knowing there are traps slows us down. And they know where the traps all are.” More snaps and cracks echoed through the jungle like gunshots, and they were much closer now. Dash cursed and jabbed a finger at a stretch that wasn’t the easiest, and therefore most obvious route. “That way. If it’s a tough path, then it’s harder to place traps. Be quick, but don’t hurry.”

  “Another one of your old philosophers teach you that?” Leira asked, spurring herself to motion.

  “A coach from a long time ago,” Dash said between breaths.

  “What’s a coach?” Leira asked.

  “Like a general, but his soldiers used balls.”

  “Sounds kinda sexist, but whatever,” Leira said.

  “Not that kind of—never mind,” Dash said, almost laughing. “Just breathe and run.”

  They moved on as fast as they dared in the trap-laden landscape. After only a couple dozen paces, they came across more trip lines draped among the trees. Dash glanced along one of them, following it to a pile of logs that would come thundering down a rock face at them if they tripped it. They weren’t hard to avoid, but it slowed them down while their pursuers inexorably gained on them.

  Leira snapped out a frustrated curse as she stepped over a rope. “Why so many damned traps? For that matter, why any traps at all? They couldn’t possibly have known we’d come this way!”

  “Or that anyone would come this way.” Conover followed her, lifting one foot then the other over the trip line.

  Dash took a moment, thinking. “It tracks with what we’re seeing. Remember, this might be a temple for them—where we see a muddy hellhole, they see the path to heaven. Different eyes, different minds.”

  “Same bugs,” Conover said, slapping at his neck.

  Dash grinned. “Think of them as the advance guard for the real villains.”

  “Now there’s a cheery thought,” Conover muttered. “More bad guys.”

  “Remember, Conover, these aren’t bad guys, just innocent bystanders,” Leira said.

  “Innocent bystanders with spears.”

  “True, but the actual bad guys are the Golden. Don’t forget that," Dash said.

  “Hey, I—shiiiiiiiiit!” Conover said behind them.

  Dash spun around in time to see Conover suddenly plunge from view, like he had back at the ravine. This time, he’d fallen through perfectly solid ground. Dash lunged toward the pit now gaping through the undergrowth where Conover had vanished, his face a mask of furious intent. A flurry of terrifying images cascaded through his mind—Conover with a broken arm or leg or back, Conover impaled on spikes, Conover stuck in a hole so deep they couldn’t even reach him.

  As he hit the edge of the pit and fell to his knees, Dash saw the reality wasn’t quite that bad. At least, not yet. Conover had only dropped a few feet before wedging his hands and feet into walls of the pit, his fingers white with effort as he dug hard for purchase. But with each second, the walls crumbled from holding his weight, chunks cascading into the darkness below. Even worse, somewhere far below, Dash heard rushing water, probably an underground stream. In a few seconds, when the soil finally gave way, Conover would plunge into the unseen torrent and be swept off to a terrifying death.

  Dash threw himself prone and reached down. “Conover, take my hand!”

  Conover looked up, his eyes wide with raw, primal fear. “I can’t. Dash, help me!”

  The dirt gave way. Conover fell.

  Dash drove his hand down and caught Conover’s wrist just before it dropped out of reach. Leira, a few seconds behind Dash, grabbed his other arm. The engineer swung from inertia, desperately holding onto them with a tenacity born of terror.

  Dash groaned and braced himself, teeth bared in savage effort. “Conover, push up! With your feet!”

  Conover pumped his legs like he was trying to run, but all he did was kick more dirt into the depths. His weight pulled on Dash, hard and relentless, yanking him a few centimeters over the edge of the pit.

  Leira, her face pressed into the ground, gasped. “Dash, we have to do something."

  “I know. No talking. Pull.”

  Conover kept kicking at the dirt, but his feet got no purchase. He just dangled in their grip, a panicked, squirming mass of human that was scared beyond belief. And now, just to make things even more interesting, Dash felt the edge of the pit starting to crumble away beneath him.

  It was now or, quite literally, never.

  With a hoarse shout, Dash heaved. Slowly, painfully, he and Leira dragged Conover back up toward the top of the pit. Conover managed to get his feet working, his toes scrabbling at the dirt to give a bit of lift. They finally managed to work him back onto solid ground. Once Conover was safe, Dash flopped onto his back and closed his eyes, needing a moment.

  But there was no moment to take.

  Dash wedged himself up to his knees, gasping. “Okay…let’s go…we can’t—”

  He stopped, going utterly silent and still, eyes fixed on the gleaming tip of a spear hovering inches from his face.

  Dash slowly raised his hands. “Okay. Let’s not do anything hasty. We’re friends.”

  He tried to make his voice as unthreatening as possible. The man—or woman, it was hard to tell through the tangle of hair—narrowed his eyes and kept the spear leveled at Dash’s face.

  Dash looked around. At least a dozen more people surrounded them. Most had spears, but a few held bows with arrows notched, and a couple more brandished vicious wooden clubs, each with a hook on the end. All were dressed in loose robes, cloaks of tanned animal hides and had intricate, colorful designs either painted or tattooed onto their faces, arms, and legs.

  “Dash, look at those tattoos,” Conover said.

  Dash kept his eyes fixed on that menacing spear point just centimeters from his nose. “Kind of got my attention elsewhere at the moment.”

  “No. Look at them. It looks like Unseen writing, doesn’t it?”

  Dash refocused his eyes, taking in
the tattoos scrawled across the arms holding the damned spear. Yes, the swirls and lines seemed more than just random decoration. Dash could read bits of it. It was gibberish, though, likely rough copied from the outpost exterior. Much was lost in translation, but their intentions were clear. This was more than a simple hunt for these people. This was religion.

  It was sacred.

  Dash thought of Clan Shirna’s fervor and forced himself to remain calm. The parallels were obvious. The outcome was uncertain, given how hot the blood of zealots ran when someone broke their ancient rules.

  Their reality was that they faced some seriously pissed-off people, with whom they shared no language, and he had seconds to find some kind of accord with them or they would likely be ventilated with weapons he’d only seen on a vidscreen.

  The man holding the spear on him suddenly spoke, a rapid-fire string of syllables that were just as much gibberish to Dash as his tattoos were.

  “I’m sorry,” Dash said, “I don’t understand—wait—Sentinel, you getting this?”

  “I am,” Sentinel said, her voice tinged with irritation. She was getting more human with each day.

  “Translate, please?”

  After another burst of chatter, the spear jabbed at Dash. He flinched back with a yelp. Another man with a spear trained on Leira yelled something, as did a woman with a club raised over Conover’s head. Dash looked around with his eyes narrowed in concentration, desperate to find something, anything, to prevent bloodshed.

  Nothing came to mind other than a frontal assault. They couldn’t even use their plasma pistols or slug guns because of the damned suppressor field.

  “Um. Sentinel? Translate?” Dash said, his eyes never leaving their captors.

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  Another chorus of shouts went up from their captors. Dash braced himself and tried to formulate a plan. He’d knock the spear aside, lunge, fight back, maybe manage to get away before these people killed them, and inadvertently brought about the extermination of all sentient life by the Golden. But he froze as a massive shadow swept over them. Now what?