The Messenger Box Set: Books 1-6

by J. N. Chaney

  “If it would cost them more to recover and transport it than to just buy new stuff for their other mining operations, then they would, sure,” Viktor said. “These little frontier mining companies usually run on the edge of bankruptcy as it is—until they either strike it rich, or go belly-up entirely, that is.”

  “And if they’re mining illegally, they might just abandon their stuff anyway,” Dash said. “If they think they’re about to get caught.”

  In theory, mining permits throughout the galactic arm were administered by the bloated bureaucracy known as the Unified Planetary Directorate. All inhabited planets, colonies, and stations were supposedly signatories to it, agreeing to allow the UPD to administer not just mining and other resource extraction, but also astrogation conventions, interplanetary trade, and myriad other things for which regulation and standardization was simply a really good idea. In practice, though, the UPD was a creaky, grossly inefficient, and hugely corrupt institution mostly concerned with making those overseeing it rich.

  Frankly, Dash didn’t care if this was an illegal mining setup. All he wanted to ensure was that they didn’t get in the way of what they’d come here to do. Unfortunately, illegal miners could be fiercely—even violently—protective of their shady operations. So what was needed here was a show of force to convince the miners not to interfere.

  “So what’s the plan here, Dash?” Viktor asked.

  “I’m going to take the Archetype down and flex some alien muscle at them—convince them right up front that they don’t want to screw with us, but also that we don’t want to screw with them. The classic ‘we come in peace.’ Sort of.”

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

  “No, of course not. But we don’t have time to screw around with this. And, if tiptoeing around Port Hannah when we went to find that crashed Golden ship on Gulch taught us anything, I think it’s that, one way or another, the dust clouds are going to part and let the truth show through anyway.”

  “That’s a good point, yes.”

  “Okay, then. Amy, put the Slipwing into a high orbit and wait for my signal to come down.”

  “Or to run like hell?” she said, chuckling.

  “Yeah, or to run like hell,” Dash replied. “No matter what, we live to fight another day.”

  Dash landed the Archetype just a few hundred meters from the power emissions, which turned out to be a cluster of prefabs. They squatted atop a relatively dry piece of high ground surrounded by gloomy, noisome swamps. The Archetype actually sank to its ankles as it set down, giving Dash a momentary flash of fear that it would get stuck or even topple over. And neither of those things would do much to instill fear in whoever these people were.

  But the mech’s feet finally either touched bottom, or simply compressed the slimy muck enough so that it could hold its weight. Right away, Dash could tell the place wasn’t abandoned; light flared atop tall poles, illuminating not just the buildings and the metal-mesh walkways connecting them, but also spilling across the surrounding swamp. A drill sat among the buildings, whirring away as it chewed into the bedrock, probably to collect core samples of what would hopefully turn out to be valuable ore.

  Dash waited.

  As the minutes dragged by, he was beginning to wonder if having giant mechs come drifting out of the sky was no big deal around here, such a commonplace thing that no one found it all that interesting. But movement caught his attention, resolving into a small group of four figures approaching the Archetype from among the nearest buildings. The shapes appeared human, even at a distance. They picked their way cautiously toward the Archetype, their weapons—three slug-rifles and a thermal carbine—at the ready. They stopped about fifty meters away, then one of them stepped forward. Dash saw a sturdy, hard-faced woman, probably in her mid-thirties, with close-cropped hair and a missing hand, now replaced by a sophisticated prosthetic.

  She stopped. “Hello?”

  Dash smiled. The woman was doing her best to come across as tough, no nonsense, and unimpressed, but the querulous tone in her voice hinted at just how unnerved she was by the abrupt appearance of the Archetype.

  “Hello,” Dash said, Sentinel broadcasting him from the Archetype’s external speakers. “How goes it?”

  The figures behind the woman winced, one of them ducking. The woman herself managed to at least keep up the pretense of not being utterly terrified.

  “It goes okay—” she started, then shook her head. “Wait. No, it doesn’t go okay at all. Who the hell are you? And what the hell is this thing?”

  “This is the Archetype,” Dash said. “It’s a mech built tens of thousands of years ago by an alien race. You’ve probably heard of them. They’re called the Unseen.”

  She gaped, then shook her head again. “The Unseen? They’re just a legend.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought, too,” Dash said. “Turns out they’re not. Anyway, this thing, the Archetype, was theirs. Now it’s mine. It’s built to fight a war against another alien race called the Golden, who are bent on wiping out all sentient life in the galactic arm. That war is heating up again, and that’s why we’re here. There’s something we need to help us, and it happens to be located really close to your mining operation here.”

  “Just hang on a second,” the woman said.

  “Actually, how about I just dismount from this thing and tell you guys the whole story,” Dash cut in. “You can ask as many questions as you want when I’m done.”

  “So you’re human?”

  “Yup. My name’s Newton Sawyer, but my friends call me Dash. And you are?”

  The woman laughed, but there was no humor in it, just amazement. “Dash. Well, okay, Dash, my name is Harolyn deBruce, and I’m the project manager here.”

  “Nice to meet you, Harolyn,” he said. And then, because he couldn’t resist, he stretched out the Archetype’s hand.

  Harolyn’s eyes widened as the massive hand approached her, stopping a few meters away. Then, to her credit, she shrugged, slogged a few paces through the swamp, and put her own hand, the prosthetic one, on the very tip of one of the massive mechanical fingers.

  “Fair enough,” she said. “Welcome to Orsino, Dash.”

  Dash laughed. He was probably going to like this woman.

  Dash wrinkled his nose at the pervasive reek of drill lubricant. It seemed to permeate every nook and cranny of the small outpost, including the compartment Harolyn called “the board room.” It was really just a space with a table, a few chairs, and a plethora of maps, drill data, and ore reserve calculations tacked to every available surface. He made himself ignore the oily stink, though, and concentrate on the proceedings. The Slipwing had touched down on a rough landing pad a couple hundred meters away from the outpost and connected to it by another string of mesh walkways. Now Amy, Conover, Kai, and Viktor were jammed into the board room with him, leaving barely enough space for Harolyn and her operations manager, a thin, intense older man named Preston.

  Harolyn leaned back as Dash finished telling her his story, a dramatically abbreviated recounting of everything he and his friends had experienced so far. He didn’t try to conceal anything, only leaving out things he considered unimportant in the interest of saving time. Deception, like they’d tried at Port Hannah, just didn’t seem worth the effort, the time, or the distrust it would ultimately engender. Besides, it was time, Dash thought, to start waking people up to the threat humanity was facing.

  “Well, that’s quite a tale, Dash,” Harolyn said. “I’m sure you’d understand why my inclination is to label it bullshit and just move on. But, well, I can’t really ignore that big mech thing of yours out there, the Ark…er—”

  “Archetype.”

  “Right. The Archetype.” She put her prosthetic hand on the table with a metallic click. The Archetype’s scanners had already registered it as surprisingly sophisticated tech; Harolyn saw Dash noticing it and smiled.

  “Lost my hand in a drill accident a few years back, on…oh, crap, I
can’t even remember the name of the planet now. Anyway, decided to go all out on a replacement. Cost me a fortune, but it’s one of those things it just doesn’t seem worth skimping on, you know?”

  “I can imagine,” Dash replied. “Having the best tech available is critical.”

  “Which is why you’re here, I gather,” Preston said, his eyes narrowed at Dash. “There’s supposedly something here that you need for this war of yours.”

  “It’s not our war,” Viktor said. “It’s everybody’s war.”

  Preston leaned forward. “Actually, I believe you. I took a look at that Archetype. It’s got components and contains materials I can’t even begin to identify.”

  “And if Preston believes it, then so do I.” Harolyn flexed her prosthetic fingers. “Now, of course I want to run and hide somewhere on some out of the way place where these Golden aren’t likely to come looking for me—”

  “Won’t make any difference,” Conover cut in. “The tech these two races have, there isn’t anywhere they couldn’t eventually find you.”

  “Well, aren’t you the little ray of starshine,” Harolyn replied. “Anyway, it might make me want to do that, but I think it might be better for all of us just to help you out however I can. So, Dash, what is it you need from us?”

  “Somewhere near here there’s a facility that belonged to the Unseen. It’s a—” He glanced at Kai. “A library, I guess.”

  “A data archive,” the monk said, nodding. “A large facility. As far as we know, anyway. Probably very secure, and also probably well hidden.”

  Preston turned to Harolyn. “The Pillar,” he said, and she nodded.

  Dash raised his eyebrows. “The Pillar?”

  Preston stood then wormed his way around Dash and the others, stopping near one of the geological plans on the wall. He pointed at a circular blank spot amid a multitude of data points. “The Pillar. It’s literally that—a cylinder of rock smack in the middle of our western survey grid that we can’t sample, can’t drill, can’t seem to affect at all.” He moved to another chart, this one a cross-section built up from drill core results and remote geophysical readings. This time, he traced his finger along a straight, vertical path empty of data, extending downward from the surface. “We’ve tried every drill bit we can think of. We’ve tried explosives, even shaped charges. Nothing even scratches it.”

  “Yeah, that sounds like Unseen tech,” Amy said. “No matter how sophisticated you think it is, it’s a little more sophisticated than that.”

  “We can’t even get any data about it from geophysics,” Harolyn said. “Magnetic, electromagnetic, conductivity, resistivity, gravimetric—every survey we could think of, and it just shows up on every output as a place where we can’t get data.” She gave Preston a bemused glance. “We assumed it was something natural. Weird, sure, but natural. We were actually going to let the UPD geological survey know about it, maybe find out it was some new type of rock or mineral and it’d be named after us.” She smiled. “Harolynite. Has a nice ring to it.”

  “I prefer Prestonite,” Preston said.

  Harolyn chuckled, but it quickly faded back into a grave look. “Have to admit, alien tech wasn’t very high on the list of things we thought it could be.”

  “Well, that’s got to be it,” Dash said, glancing at Kai, who nodded.

  “The Unseen facilities on Shylock were similar. Though, they just didn’t show up on planetary surveys at all. We believe they were being deliberately concealed,” Kai said.

  “Unlike this one, it seems,” Viktor said, his eyes on the cross-section and the blank stripe of the so-called Pillar. “This one seems to just be entirely impervious.”

  “Makes sense for a secure data archive,” Conover said. “Whether you hide it or not, you’d want it to be secure, right?”

  Dash rubbed his eyes. “So, we have to dig to get to this thing? I mean, you guys haven’t actually started mining and excavating yet, right?”

  “No,” Harolyn said. “We’re still in the exploration stage of the project. We’ve got some promising results, but it ain’t ore yet. We don’t have to dig to get to the Pillar, though—your archive, that is, if that’s what it is.”

  Dash frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “What I mean is that the damned thing sticks about fifty meters out of the ground, like a tower. No idea how deep it goes.”

  “So that doesn’t really rule out digging,” Viktor said.

  “Or having to climb it,” Conover added.

  Dash stood. “Only one way to find out. Harolyn, can you spare us a guide?”

  “Oh, hell, I’ll take you myself. No way I’m missing out on this!”

  Dash frowned as murky water slowly rose up the waterproof boots Harolyn had procured for them. Away from the mining operation itself, the ground seemed to get less and less solid—more a gelatinous muck than actual soil, into which you’d slowly sink if you stood in one place for too long. He extracted one foot, then another, with loud and somewhat disgusting slurping sounds, moved a few paces, and immediately started sinking again.

  “Is there a bottom to this swamp somewhere?” he asked.

  Harolyn grinned. “Bedrock’s about eighty meters below us here. Nothing but water and organic mud sitting on top of it.” Her grin broadened. “So you don’t have to worry, that’s as deep as you’re going to sink.”

  “Good to know,” Dash said, shading his eyes against the midday glare of the sun and peering up at the Pillar towering over them.

  It rose fifty meters for sure, and probably a little more. He could have mistaken it for a steep-sided hill, rising only a little higher than some of the trees towering around them—things like colossal ferns, growing from the swamp in discrete clusters as far as he could see in every direction. Apparently, their entangled roots made each of these clusters the only thing resembling solid ground for kilometers around; Harolyn’s people used them as natural platforms for their drills and other equipment. As soon as you stepped away from them, though, you were right back in the sucking muck.

  It all stank, too—an acrid, sulfurous reek edging toward outright decaying corpse. And there were clouds of nasty little bugs, things like flying caterpillars that tried boring into flesh by using their multitude of legs like the teeth of tiny chainsaws. Dash flicked one off his face, tugged his feet out of the muck again, and found a new place to stand.

  “It’s going to take us forever to figure out exactly what’s underneath that mess,” Viktor said, and Dash nodded.

  Foliage, apparently ecstatic at actually finding something to grow on, had rooted in even the tiniest hint of soil caught in cracks and fissures on the Pillar’s surface. That was why it could be mistaken for a hill—bushes, grassy fronds, vines, and even trees festooned the thing, burying it under a pile of lush greenery. They’d hacked their way through it in a few places, revealing what looked like nothing but blank, dun-grey stone. So Viktor was right. They could spend days, maybe weeks, worming their way through all the greenery, trying to find some clue as to exactly what the archive was and how to access it.

  “We don’t have time for this,” Amy said, chewing her lip.

  Dash turned to Kai. “Do you have any ideas about this? Do you remember reading anything that might help us here?”

  “I’m sorry, Dash, I don’t. The records on Shylock were clear that this facility existed, but they didn’t really offer any other details.”

  Conover looked at Dash. “I take it that there’s nothing you can tell about this from your Meld. Frustrating.”

  Conover had been pulling his own feet out of the swamp, and one popped free without a boot. He wobbled on one leg and windmilled his arms, then he snapped out a curse and planted his bootless foot back in the muck. When he lifted it again, his sock was black and dripping brownish water.

  Harolyn chuckled. “Now you see why I told you to make sure those boots were strapped up good and tight.”

  While Amy helped Conover recover his boot, Dash sighed
in frustration. “To answer your question about the Sentinel, no. It just looks like a big hunk of rock covered by plants. Didn’t even get a flicker when I tried touching it."

  Dash grimaced, yanked his feet out of the gooey sludge slowly drawing him down, and found a new spot where he could start sinking again. “Anyway, it looks like this might have just been a big waste of time. Whatever is inside that thing is just going to have to stay there, at least for now.”

  “I believe I can offer some assistance,” Sentinel said.

  “I’m listening. Please continue,” Dash said, waving grandly.

  They’d left the Archetype where Dash had landed it, since the ground around Harolyn’s mining operation proved stable enough to support its weight—and also to provide immediate protection to the miners, in case they managed to rouse something dangerous. Dash exchanged a hopeful glance with Kai, then said, “Go ahead. Anything would be a hundred percent better than what we have right now.”

  “The archive, which you refer to as the Pillar, is impervious to any scan. It is composed of a Dark Metal alloy, composited with a ceramic-like material”

  “Understood, but let’s skip ahead to the part where you give us a solution,” Dash said.

  “The only anomaly is from the top of the structure. There is a weak power emanation from there, barely detectable, even at this relatively close proximity.”

  They all craned their heads upward, at the top of the matted pile of foliage.

  “So up there, huh?” Amy said. Dash caught a hint of nervous quaver in her voice.

  “Amy, are you okay with heights?” he asked.

  She grinned, but he could tell it was forced. “Absolutely. As long as I don’t have to experience them, that is.”

  “Amy, you’ve worked in space most of your adult life,” Viktor said. “You’ve been literally hundreds of kilometers up, working on ships in orbit.”

  “Hey, hundreds of kilometers, no problem.” She looked up at the Pillar and swallowed. “Fifty meters? Yeah, that shit’s scary.”