The Messenger Box Set: Books 1-6

by J. N. Chaney

  “Exactly,” Leira said. “And out of everyone who tried to work the problem—which included a couple of pretty experienced engineers—you were the only one to think of looking upstream of the engine, instead of just focusing on tweaking the engine itself. Why?”

  “Uh…because it seemed obvious?”

  “To you. Not to anyone else. Did you do a detailed fuel flow analysis? Use a bunch of analytical gear, run a pile of tests and simulations?”

  Amy frowned. “No.”

  “Then what made you think the tanks were the wrong shape?” Leira asked.

  “I just…figured that was probably the trouble.”

  “And there you go. That’s the feel.” Her smile was pure grudging admiration.

  “Oh.”

  Dash made an impressed face toward the heads-up at Leira’s terrific explanation, but before he could reinsert himself into the conversation, another voice cut him off.

  “I get the sense that Leira did a good job of explaining the concept you were trying to communicate to Amy, by means of a related anecdote,” Sentinel commented.

  “Yeah, she did. Better than I would have, that’s for sure.”

  “Unfortunately, such a personal anecdote is of little value to an outside observer, who might seek to understand what you mean by the feel,” Sentinel went on.

  Dash smiled. Sentinel had lately become keenly interested in things like intuition and instinct and, yes, the feel of things. The AI that ran the Archetype was supremely intelligent but, as Dash had come to learn, simply didn’t have the means of treating problems as anything other than a set of data to be input, run through a series of calculations, then output as the optimum and most efficient actions. That was great for things like complicated navigational tasks or managing the stability of the many systems that were incorporated into the Archetype. But it also made her somewhat predictable, a trait shared by other AI’s he’d encountered, such as Custodian, or the various constructs of the Golden.

  But Sentinel wanted to learn. She’d made it clear to Dash that coming to understand how he came to do the things he did was important to her. He wanted to help her but, just as he’d balked at explaining the feel of things to Amy, he couldn’t quite figure out how to communicate it to Sentinel, either.

  “Well, you’ve got your own bunch of personal anecdotes with me,” Dash said.

  “True. However, despite attempting to connect them through unified threads of understanding and reasoning, they remain isolated, each unique. I can discern no problem-solving or decision-making process that is common to all of them.”

  “Are you saying I’m random?”

  “I am saying you are unpredictable.” Sentinel paused, then said, “Which, I must admit, can appear to be random to an observer.”

  “Yeah, but it’s not random.”

  “You do it because of your feel for the situation.”

  “Exactly. It’s all about…” Once more, he struggled for an explanation; once more, all he could come up with was trailing off into a lame, “…uh…the feel. Sorry, there’s no better word.”

  “This conversation has returned to its beginning,” Sentinel concluded.

  “Yeah, I know. Okay, look. It’s like this—”

  “The detector’s online,” Conover said over the comm. “We’re ready to launch it.”

  “All right, folks, practice time is over,” Dash said, a little relieved he could take some time to think about how to respond to Sentinel—because she seemed genuinely interested, and genuine interest deserved a measured answer. “It’s time to do what we came out here to do.”

  The Archetype and the Slipwing both cruised just a few million klicks away from the Forge, still well within the star system Dash had come to think of as Forgeville. The Slipwing would launch a missile, modified by having its warhead replaced with the experimental Dark Metal detector. Dash had already seeded a small piece of Dark Metal among some nearby asteroids so they could run a control test.

  “So, as I understand it, you and Custodian have come up with some way of using neutrinos to detect Dark Matter, right?” Leira said, letting the comm carry her voice to Dash.

  “That’s right,” Conover replied. “A neutrino can pass through a million miles of lead without slowing down, so normal matter is basically transparent to them. Dark Metal, though, somehow stops neutrinos dead. So that’s what our detector does. It looks for what are basically shadows in the neutrino field. Those shadows have to be Dark Metal…or, at least, something opaque to neutrinos, but Dark Metal seems to be the only thing we know about that is.”

  “So, since neutrinos pass through matter without interacting with it, how does your detector even, well, detect them, in the first place?” Amy asked.

  “Ah, well, that’s where Custodian came in. See, it turns out neutrinos do interact with things at the quantum level. It’s those interactions we can detect. I can explain the math if you want.”

  “Okay, whoa there, Conover,” Dash said, holding up a hand. “This could be a great discussion over some of Freya’s plumato hooch back on the Forge. Right now, let’s just fire this thing up and see if it works out here in the field.”

  “Right, of course. Any time you’re ready, Leira.”

  “Missile away,” Leira said.

  Dash tracked the missile as it zipped away from the Slipwing. It immediately started along a corkscrewing spiral trajectory designed to let it scan as much of the starfield as possible. Conover had explained that the detector could only see a narrow angle of space at any one time, so figuring out a course that would let it scan through a full sphere, using only the fuel it could carry, had been a much bigger challenge than it had first appeared.

  If this didn’t work, they’d try an even lazier, lower-g course. They could even have the thing sit in place and rotate around, using the inertia of spinning flywheels, or else some weird Unseen tech. In any case, if they could get this detector working, they could use it to scan old battlefields or abandoned Golden outposts to quickly locate and recover scrap Dark Metal.

  “Got a hit,” Conover said. Dash had to smile at the smug satisfaction in his voice.

  “That was quick,” Dash replied. “Good work.”

  “Yeah—except the hit isn’t from that piece of Dark Metal you seeded out here, Dash. It’s coming from a moon orbiting that brown dwarf.”

  Dash narrowed his eyes at the detector’s data that was being repeated on the Archetype’s heads-up. “Huh. So it is. Sentinel, any ideas?”

  “You did engage the Golden Harbinger in combat in the vicinity of the brown dwarf. Perhaps it is a remnant of that.”

  “It might also be something the Golden put there,” Leira said. “Maybe something that’s spying on us.”

  “That’d be a definite upside,” Amy put in. “Gives us a way of detecting any sneaky crap the Golden try to pull on us.”

  “Only one way to find out,” Dash replied. “Let’s recover Conover’s detector then go find out whatever the hell this is.”

  Dash cut the power to the Archetype’s drive and let it drift, the brown dwarf a wall blotting out half the starfield. Whatever had triggered Conover’s detector was somewhere ahead, trailing a small moon only a few hundred kilometers across. Ironically, Conover’s device was the only thing that could actually sense it; radiation from the brown dwarf, a gas giant so large it hovered on the edge of collapsing under its own gravitation and igniting as a star, simply washed all other signatures away.

  “How far ahead of me now?” Dash asked.

  “About a thousand klicks,” Conover replied. “If you just keep closing on that moon, you should eventually see it.”

  Dash stared intently, his nerves on alert. They'd recovered the detector, then redeployed it in a higher orbit where it could keep the source of neutrinos in sight. It helped that the detector also saw the Archetype, its Dark Metal components casting their own, unique shadow. What he didn’t like was that the Slipwing had to come in a lot closer than he wanted. They�
��d never anticipated taking this prototype Dark Metal detector into a situation that might be a threat—not on its inaugural run, anyway. So it used only a simple comm system to send its telemetry back to the Slipwing, and in the electromagnetic hurricane raging around the brown dwarf, that meant it had to stay close to the ship and the receiver apparatus Conover had rigged up for it.

  “Leira, make sure you stay as far away from all this as you can.”

  “We will, promise. Oh, and I’m not flying. Amy is.”

  Dash opened his mouth, then closed it with an effort. He’d have much preferred Leira being at the controls, but this was, he had to admit, good practice for Amy—and Leira wasn’t far away from the helm. “Okay, I’m going to close in. And if I yell for you to run?”

  “We’ll come flying in to join you as fast as we can,” Amy said.

  “What? No, wait. I don’t want you—”

  Amy’s laughter cut him off. “I’m just screwing with you, Dash. I’m all in on this. No mistakes.”

  Dash exhaled, if slowly. They knew their stuff, which meant they knew the Slipwing—even with her drive and weapons upgraded by Amy and Custodian—was still no match for Golden tech. Taking a breath, he resumed closing on the target.

  At two hundred klicks, he could see it: a small, black shape silhouetted against the deep, ruddy glow of the brown dwarf. At a hundred, the Archetype’s scanners could finally resolve it through the soup of radiation and electromagnetic noise emanating from the wannabe star.

  “That’s a Golden missile,” Dash said.

  “That is correct,” Sentinel replied. “It matches the configuration of missiles fired by the Harbinger when you were fighting it.”

  “Yeah, I remember, believe me.” The Harbinger, a powerful mech sent by the Golden to attack the Forge, had fired a multitude of these things at him and the Archetype. They’d destroyed most of them, but they’d also taken a few hits.

  There was only the missile before them left from that fight. It had either malfunctioned when the Harbinger fired it, or it had some more sinister reason for just lurking in orbit around the brown dwarf.

  Either way, Dash kept himself poised, ready to instantly react, in case the missile came to life and attacked the Archetype, or the Slipwing, or did…anything else, really. Ideally, the thing was dead, and he could just recover it; it contained hundreds of kilograms of Dark Metal they could most definitely use as feedstock for the Forge.

  If it was dead.

  At twenty klicks, Dash stopped relative to the missile again, eyeing it warily. He could see and scan it clearly, which meant it could just as easily see and scan him. It just hung there, though, about five hundred klicks behind the brown dwarf’s small, rocky moon. The moon itself was probably an asteroid captured by the wannabe star’s prodigious gravitation; the missile was likely the same, powered down and effectively dead, caught in the gravity well the same way and now another, tiny moon of the brown dwarf.

  “Okay,” Dash said. “This is just way too easy.”

  “I am detecting no power signatures or other emissions from the missile,” Sentinel said. “It does, indeed, appear to be dead.”

  “I know. Like I said, too easy.”

  “That is your sense of the feel of the situation?”

  Despite his tense suspicion, Dash couldn’t help smiling. “Yeah, it is, actually. Something about this just feels…off.”

  “Off?”

  “Not right. Like, we’re not getting the whole picture, here.”

  “You suspect a trap, in spite of the available data, which suggests this missile is entirely inoperative.”

  “Yup, I do.”

  “Interesting.”

  Dash thought about saying more, but a conversation about something possibly being a trap, while in close proximity to said something, seemed like a reckless distraction. Instead, he resumed closing on the missile.

  He eased the Archetype to within five klicks of it. Sentinel had raised and boosted the big mech’s protective shield, but even so, a detonation at this range could do serious damage. Still, he wanted to recover it, and its precious Dark Metal, so he needed to get closer still—literally close enough for the Archetype to reach out and grab it.

  “Okay, we need to disable that thing’s warhead,” he said. “Any suggestions?”

  “Unfortunately, even at this extremely close range, it is not possible to develop a firing solution that will ensure only one, particular part of the missile is affected. The Archetype’s weapons were not designed with that degree of precise discrimination in mind.”

  “So, that’s a no.”

  “That is correct. I would note, however, that destroying the missile will still allow you to reclaim at least some of the Dark Metal from the debris.”

  Dash thought back to long and tedious spells in the Archetype, doing nothing but tracking and recovering debris in the aftermath of battles with the Golden—a kilogram of Dark Metal here, a few hundred grams more there. It was a colossal time sink; they’d eventually decided it would be more efficient to just keep using the Archetype to harvest Dark Metal from the crashed Golden ship they’d found near Port Hannah, on the planet named Gulch. That took the Archetype away from the Forge for a few days at a time, though, and the Golden could return and attack the station at any moment. Speeding the whole process up to gather the Dark Metal feedstock the Forge needed was the reason Conover and Custodian had developed their new detector in the first place.

  Time. There just wasn’t enough of it.

  “No,” he finally said. “I want to grab this missile more or less intact, not turn it into a million little pieces of scrap flying in every direction. It should give us enough Dark Metal to pretty much finish off the Swift and get Leira deployed in it.” He sighed. “So, let’s just get this done.”

  He eased the Archetype toward the missile.

  “Dash, are you sure you want to do this?” Leira asked.

  “To answer that, I don’t want to,” he replied, his eyes locked on the heads-up. “But I’m going to, because it has to be done.”

  One klick.

  “Sentinel, if that thing detonates now—?”

  “Damage to the Archetype would likely be severe, but not catastrophic,” Sentinel replied.

  “Well, that’s something, at least.”

  Hundreds of meters. A hundred.

  Close enough to touch.

  Still, the missile just hung there, a silent, ominous shape a few meters away.

  “Messenger, I have a concern,” Sentinel said.

  Dash’s stomach tied itself into an even tighter knot as he studied the missile. “Just one?”

  “It strikes me that this could be a subterfuge on the part of the Golden,” Sentinel went on. “Perhaps their intent is that, believing it to be entirely inert, we take this missile intact, hoping that we will take it aboard the Forge, whereupon it will detonate and do maximum damage.”

  Dash gave a quick nod. “That’s possible, yeah.” He glanced at the heads-up. The missile’s systems were still showing as fully powered down. There were no emissions, and not even any heat being given off; the missile showed the same temperature as the surrounding space.

  “However, the Golden would presumably know that we might suspect that, and would attempt to disarm the missile first,” Sentinel said. “They could further reason that we would attempt to do so with a view to keeping it as intact as possible.”

  Dash pulled his gaze away from the missile, suddenly intrigued. “Go on.”

  “Therefore, the missile will continue to appear entirely inoperative. However, once we are engaged in disarming it, detonation will occur. This will set a precedent of doubt for all future stray Golden weapons, as well as causing injury or death to everyone investigating.”

  “What are you basing this on? Do you have any data saying this is what they’re up to?”

  “I do not. This is merely speculation. At best, it is an extrapolation from previous behavior we’ve seen the Golden exhi
bit—albeit, an admittedly tenuous one.”

  Despite the razor-edged tension, Dash couldn’t help smiling. “So, you have a feeling this might be their nasty little plan?”

  “I am not sure. It simply occurs to me as a potentially troublesome possibility.”

  Dash’s smile became an involuntary laugh. “Well, congratulations, Sentinel. Next to your occasional snarkiness, you’ve just done the most human thing I’ve seen from you yet—you’ve managed to start worrying about something.”

  “I am not sure this is desirable. There is an effectively infinite number of possible outcomes that are not based on available facts and data about any given situation. Considering them all would be an enormous waste of time and effort.”

  “So, don’t consider them all. Just consider the ones that really stick out—like you just did.”

  “Stick out?”

  Still chuckling, Dash shook his head. “You know, I’d be happy to help you explore this growing humanity of yours, but now isn’t the time.”

  “I agree. Moreover, raising the possibility of this Golden subterfuge is not the same as finding a solution to it.”

  “Ah, but there you’re wrong.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, if the Golden really are playing us, then we need to play them right back.”

  “How?”

  “Like this,” Dash said, suddenly reaching out and grabbing the missile with the Archetype’s massive hands. Straining, he twisted it, until the forwardmost quarter of it containing the warhead ripped free. He flung that piece toward the nearby moon; at the same time, he decelerated the Archetype, hard, so it and the rest of the missile abruptly plunged toward the brown dwarf. Before he lost the warhead in the stew of radiation and emissions from the wannabe star, he targeted it with the dark-lance and blasted it to tiny fragments.

  “That was unexpected,” Sentinel said.