The Messenger Box Set: Books 1-6

by J. N. Chaney

  Conover opened his mouth to say something, then winced and said, “Crap.”

  Dash looked at him. “What? Don’t tell me you’re no good with heights, either.”

  “No, it’s not that. I’ve got water and…whatever’s in the water inside my boot now. Got it squelching between my toes.” He grimaced again. “Yuck.” He turned to Amy and gave her the warmest smile he could muster. “Anyway, if you don’t want to make the climb it’s no big deal.”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “I’ll make the climb. I mean, it would be pretty silly to be able to fight nasty alien robots but wimp out at facing heights, right? I just need a few minutes to work up to it, okay?”

  Harolyn reached for her comm. “We’ve got climbing gear back at the camp. I’ll get a crew to bring it out here.”

  “Why not just have the Archetype lift us up to the top, Dash?” Kai asked.

  For the umpteenth time, Dash dragged his feet out of the swamp before they sank too deep. “With our luck, it’d get stuck in this crap and then wreck the archive getting back out again.” He nodded to Harolyn, who began rattling orders into her comm.

  Conover waved at her, getting her attention. “While they’re at it, could you have them bring along a dry pair of socks, too?”

  As it turned out, Amy didn’t have to confront her fear of heights. At least, not this time. Sentinel described the top of the Pillar, if all the sprouting, dangling vegetation were removed, as being only three meters across. After discussion, Dash decided that he and Kai would make the climb, while the others worked safety lines and supported from the ground.

  Viktor had climbing experience from his younger days, and had even scaled a mountain or two. “There was one climb on…hell, I don’t think the planet even had a name, just a number,” he said, sorting through ropes and pitons. “Low gravity, too. It made climbing this one peak called the Spike a lot easier. But the low gravity meant the mountains could get a lot higher, and this one actually stuck above the atmosphere.”

  Dash smiled and nodded as Viktor went on with his story, which was both interesting and engaging. But his mind was really focused ahead and upward. So far, every Unseen outpost they’d encountered had either posed some kind of threat or been far more complicated than they’d anticipated. This one, Dash sensed, would be no different.

  Harolyn’s people had brought a portable, floating platform aboard the hover buggy they’d used to reach them, finally giving them a solid surface upon which to stand—and change into dry socks, in Conover’s case. They’d also brought along a pair of drones, which were able to fasten lines to the top of the Pillar. Once they were rigged up, Dash and Kai started their ascent.

  Their gear, combined with the handholds and footholds the vegetation provided, made the climb less laborious, but it still proved hard and sometimes dangerous work.

  Dash picked his way carefully, stopping to loosen his foot from a loop in the rope.

  “Are you alright?” Kai asked.

  “Fine. Just aware of our height. And gravity.”

  “These are good qualities in the Messenger,” Kai said, smiling up at him.

  “Let’s just make sure I’m not the Traveler.”

  “How would that become your name?” Kai asked.

  “By falling,” Dash said.

  They proceeded with care, in good, if cautious humor. Dash’s lines got fouled twice, requiring Kai to climb up to him and help him work free. By the time they reached the top, they were both soaked in sweat, smeared with sap, bruised, scratched and covered in itchy little wounds from the saw-bugs, as the miners called them.

  Dash levered himself past a massive fern and clambered over the rocky lip at the summit of the Pillar. Turning, he helped Kai up beside him, then they both took a few moments to just drink water and rest.

  “Quite the view,” Kai said, looking out.

  “Just swamp,” Dash said. “I’m sensing a theme on this world.”

  Indeed, framed by his own splayed feet as he sat in the damp moss and rested, Dash could see nothing but flat swamp, punctured by clumps of fern-like trees out to the horizon. It was one of the most dreary, desolate landscapes he’d ever seen.

  Kai shrugged. “This part of it certainly is nothing but primal swamp.” He patted the ground beside him. “Hard to believe that when the Unseen constructed this it was entirely beneath the ground.”

  Dash nodded. Harolyn and Preston had explained how the part of the Pillar now extending from the bedrock almost a hundred and fifty meters below them had been exposed by erosion over the past two hundred thousand years. Even to Dash, who knew little about geology and rocks beyond the fact that you had to avoid smashing into them while flying a ship, thought that seemed unusually fast.

  Apparently, it had something to do with the chemistry of the bedrock and the air and water on top of them; the rock hadn’t been eroded away by the steady chew of the elements, as much as it had been dissolved away by the relatively acidic water of the growing swamps. He wondered if the whole planet would someday just be a ball of acidic mud, then decided it didn’t matter. He had a war to fight first.

  Dash shook himself out of his reverie. They only had a few hours of daylight left, so they needed to do what they came here to do: get inside the archive and climb back down before it got dark. Otherwise, they’d be spending the night up here, because Viktor had already declared climbing in the darkness too dangerous.

  “Okay, Sentinel, where exactly is this power signature you’re detecting?” Dash asked.

  “I can only resolve it to an approximately two-meter circle.”

  Dash and Kai looked around at the top of the Pillar, which was covered in moss, long and sharp blades of some sort of grass, a few bushes, and who knew how much mud. “That’s most of the top of the thing,” Dash said.

  “I’m afraid I can’t resolve it any more clearly than that.”

  They’d brought a portable scanner with them and tried to use it, but its returns weren’t much better than Sentinel’s.

  Dash groaned and lowered himself to his hands and knees. “I guess we dig and see what we can find then.” He clawed at the moss, pulling it aside, then scraping away handfuls of the black mud exposed by his efforts. Kai did likewise, the two of them trying to be methodical by digging a rough grid of small pits. Fortunately, there was less than half a meter of wet, organic soil to excavate; unfortunately, it was dense, heavy, and clung to them like grease. By the time he’d started on his fourth pit, Dash felt like he’d run a long-distance relay. He wiped sweat from his forehead with his forearm and looked at Kai.

  “Who’d have thought saving the universe could be such a grubby job?”

  “And tedious,” Kai said, then he tossed aside a handful of mud with a wet plop. “Actually, Dash, I think I’ve found what we’re looking for.”

  Dash crawled to join him. Sure enough, what Kai had exposed wasn’t rock. It was something flat and metallic.

  “That looks like a hatch,” Dash said. “See, this little indentation here seems to be where you grab it.”

  “It seems rather small,” Kai replied, as they both began pulling away moss and mud.

  By the time they’d fully exposed it, Dash had to agree. The hatch was only about a quarter of a meter square, far too small to allow anyone human-sized to enter. He reached for the handle, but hesitated, then looked at Kai.

  “Care to do the honors? This is your history as much as my duty.”

  Kai gave a why not shrug, grabbed the handle, and opened the hatch. It swung open without a sound, revealing a keypad—nine square, illuminated touch-pads, each bearing a symbol Dash knew were numeric characters.

  “Don’t suppose you know the key code we’re supposed to enter, do you?” Dash asked.

  Kai shook his head. “No. If there was anything like the recorded one on Shylock, we never found it.”

  “Okay. Sentinel, please tell me you can offer some insight here.”

  “Actually, I can.”

  Dash raise
d his eyebrows. “Really? Outstanding.” He’d been expecting a no, followed by some laborious, convoluted way of finding out the correct code.

  “Yes. Anticipating such a security feature, I have been analyzing the available data, along with similar situations recorded in the archives to which I have access, as well as our own experiences.”

  Dash gave Kai an impatient glance and made a hurry up gesture with his hand. “Yeah, okay. And?”

  “And, the Creators employ a complex mathematical equation to encode information in the environment of each outpost. That equation can, therefore, be solved by extracting that information and using it—”

  “Sentinel, this is all very interesting, and I’d love to hear all about it on the way back to the Forge. Right now, though, do you know the code we need to input into this thing?”

  “Very well,” Sentinel said. Dash could swear she sounded a little petulant, like she resented not being allowed to explain her findings. The twelve percent personality in her was beginning to make itself known. Twelve point five, Dash corrected himself.

  She recited the digits of the code that she’d calculated to be the correct ones, and Kai input them.

  Nothing seemed to happen.

  Well, Dash thought, at least I’m going to get to tell Sentinel she was wrong about something.

  But the moss suddenly shifted, and then slowly began to rise.

  Dash and Kai were forced back toward the edge of the Pillar’s top as a large hatch slowly swung open. It took an agonizingly long time, but eventually Dash and Kai were left staring into a dark opening, down into which a narrow set of stairs spiraled and disappeared.

  Dash looked at Kai. “Well, that doesn’t look too ominous, does it?”

  5

  They decided to bring Conover up to go inside the Pillar with them, reasoning his unique tech-sight might come in handy. Dash also invited Harolyn to join them, but she declined—apparently not being much better with heights than Amy was—so Preston climbed up instead.

  By the time they reached the top, they were down to just over an hour of daylight. Dash decided to proceed anyway, reasoning that if anything went wrong, they could also have the Archetype perform a quick extraction of the four of them, even in the dark. It was, he thought, a risk worth taking, rather than losing the night and waiting until the next day to enter the archive.

  Dash led the way, walking a short distance down the stairs, then doing a comm check with Viktor, who was still on the floating platform at the base of the Pillar. “Loud and clear, Dash,” was Viktor’s reply, meaning the comm repeater they’d set up at the top of the stairs was working. Dash hoped it would keep working as they descended, since the Pillar itself was as opaque to comm signals as it was to apparently everything else.

  “Everyone ready?” Dash asked, looking back up the stairs.

  Kai nodded, followed by Conover and Preston, then they began to descend. Dash took a last look at the late-day sky then carried on down the stairs, their steady, right-hand twist soon taking him out of the spill of daylight. He switched on a lamp, lighting the way. One hand rested on the grip of a slug-pistol, a much-improved version Ragsdale, ex-soldier and their security liaison from Port Hannah, had worked out with Custodian back on the Forge. This version not only had better range and accuracy, but it could fire multiple kinds of rounds—regular slugs, explosive anti-personnel, and an armor-piercing round that should be able to penetrate the armored carapace of the Golden bots they’d encountered so far. All were housed in a compact drum magazine, and the ammo type could be changed before each shot. Dash kept it set to regular slugs for now. The Clan Shirna plasma pistol hung on his other hip, but it would be suicidal to start firing blasts of incandescent, ionized gas in the cramped little stairway, so he kept his hand well away from it.

  As they wound down inside the Pillar, forever turning right, Preston said, “This is amazing. We had absolutely no idea what this Pillar was.”

  “Is it going to get in the way of your mining operations?” Conover asked.

  “Don’t know. We’re not even sure if there are going to be any mining operations here yet.”

  “You seem to have done an awful lot of work, and invested a lot of time and resources, in something that might not pay off,” Kai said.

  Preston laughed. “You just perfectly described mining, my friend. For every one of these jobs that leads to a profitable mine, there are probably a hundred more that don’t.”

  “So what happens if you don’t find—what exactly is it you’re looking for here, anyway?” Kai asked.

  “Thorium, mainly for fusion initiators. We’ve got some promising results, but promising results are a long way from credits in the bank.”

  Dash held up a hand and stopped. “Sorry, guys, I hate to interrupt, but there’s something lit up ahead of us. Eyes forward now.”

  They fell silent as Dash cautiously resumed his descent, approaching a panel illuminated with a soft, pastel blue glow. It was set into the wall beside a landing on the stairs. Studying, Dash could make out more characters.

  “Looks like an actual data repository of some sort,” he said.

  Kai nodded and pointed at a particular symbol. “We’ve seen that same character marking empty data ports on the Forge.”

  “Conover, what do you see?” Dash called back. “Does this lead into a room or something?”

  “No. There’s no space behind that wall.”

  “Uh, how could there be?” Preston asked. “This whole Pillar’s not much bigger in diameter than this stairway.”

  Dash gave a grim laugh. “A place being bigger on the inside than the outside wouldn’t surprise me at all when that place was built by the Unseen.”

  “There is a small compartment there, though,” Conover went on. “Right behind that panel.”

  Dash glanced at Kai, shrugged, and touched the glowing panel. It flashed once, turned from blue to yellow, then slid silently aside. Inside a small space that was, sure enough, right behind it, was a small crystalline slab about the size of Dash’s palm.

  He reached for it, ready to snatch his hand back. But nothing happened, and he was able to extract it from the little compartment. As soon as he did, the light turned a pinkish color and the panel slid closed again.

  Dash held the object, which he presumed was some sort of data storage device, up so the others could see it. Kai pointed at a grooved strip along one edge of it.

  “That also matches the empty receptacles at the Forge. It would appear that this is meant to be plugged into one of them.”

  Dash nodded. “Well, that’s a good sign. Let’s keep going down and see what else we can find.”

  By the time they reached the bottom, they’d retrieved seven more of the data modules. All looked outwardly identical, but Conover said there were slight differences among them, minor variations in the way their crystalline structure had been composited. He also described a weak but steady emanation of radio-frequency energy from the Pillar, which got stronger as they went deeper. Sentinel analyzed it and declared it was frequency-modulated, which meant it was carrying data.

  “It appears to be encrypted,” she said over the comm. “And this time, I am aware of no corresponding encryption key. Without that, all I can do is record it so that it can, perhaps, be unencrypted at some point in the future.”

  “That’ll have to do, I guess,” Dash said, then turned to the others. “So this place isn’t just storing data in these modules, but it’s…what, broadcasting it, too?”

  Conover and Kai shrugged. Preston just held up his hands in a helpless gesture.

  “Perhaps the answer is beyond that door,” Kai said, gesturing ahead.

  The stairs ended at a door. This time, there were no lit panels or keypads, just an indentation in the middle of it. It resembled a small, four-fingered hand. Dash put his own hand next to it, and the indented handprint looked like that of a young child, in comparison to his.

  He thought back to the one time he’d seen what
seemed to be the Unseen themselves in a data playback shortly after he’d first hooked up with the Archetype. He remembered vaguely canine-like creatures, probably a good head shorter than the average human. This indentation would probably fit their hands perfectly.

  “That’s an Unseen handprint,” he said.

  Kai pushed in beside him and gave it a reverent look. “So this is what their hands would have looked like? Amazing…”

  “You mean that in all the time you studied them, you never saw any images or recordings of the Unseen?”

  “They seemed to be most reluctant to record themselves,” the monk replied. “It was a striking omission from their otherwise comprehensive archives.” Kai looked at him. “Why? Have you seen them, Messenger?”

  Dash shrugged. “Think so. They kind of looked like—”

  He was going to say dogs but realized how mundane that might sound and didn’t want to deflate Kai’s opinion of the beings he’d revered all of his life. So he stopped and shook his head, instead.

  “Now that’s weird. I can’t remember how they looked. It’s like the memory is, I don’t know, just gone.”

  Kai gave a sage nod. “The Unseen obviously had good reason to guard their appearance. It certainly isn’t my place to question their wisdom.”

  Okay, Dash thought, let’s go with that, and not the fact that this mysterious alien race, who created all of this almost magical tech, looked a little like something that might like ear-scratches and belly rubs.

  “Regardless, let’s see if we can get this open,” Dash said.

  He placed his hand in the indentation, or tried to, but it wouldn’t properly fit, of course. Squeezing his hand into it as best he could had no effect. Kai tried the same, just in case the door might somehow recognize him because of his connection to the facility hidden on Shylock, but that did nothing either.

  “Conover, anything?” Dash asked.

  “Sorry, Dash. I can’t see past this door. It’s the same way I couldn’t see inside this Pillar in the first place. Whatever it’s made of, it really is totally opaque.”