The Messenger Box Set: Books 1-6

by J. N. Chaney

  Benzel wasn’t sure why so many spacers hated free-flight. Being stuck on a tether meant you were really just still part of whatever ship or station you were tethered to. Flying free meant you were yourself, separate and distinct. It was freedom.

  And, yes, it was risky, even if you knew what you were doing. Frankly, though, it was also a hell of a lot of fun.

  “Okay, gang,” he said. “Once we catch this thing, we need to enact the next part of my cunning plan.”

  Wei-Ping, who drifted along beside him, rotated herself to face him. “And what would that next part of your cunning plan happen to be, boss?”

  “No idea.”

  She laughed.

  Benzel grinned back at her, then focused on the data-pad strapped to his arm. He tapped at it, calculating what they could accomplish with the reaction fuel they all had remaining. Seven Gentle Friends besides him, and assuming they still had eighty percent of their reaction fuel left, that meant—

  Problems. At the very least, one big problem.

  He frowned. “Shit. We can probably bring it to a stop, but that’ll use up all of our fuel. Hey, Custodian, can you send some of your maintenance remotes out here to help us?”

  “You are currently beyond the range of the remotes’ operating envelope. They do not have actual propulsion systems, but rather rely on polarizing the Forge’s gravitation.”

  “Of course. Okay, Friends, it looks like we have to do this the hard way. Looks like I’m venting my suit. And I need”—he tapped at the data-pad—“three more volunteers.”

  “Count me in,” Wei-Ping said.

  Everyone else volunteered, too. Benzel picked two of the Friends at random; each returned a thumbs-up.

  “Okay, so you know the drill. We burn our reaction fuel until it’s gone. The rest of the thrust we need comes from those of us stupid enough to vent our suits. We use the kick from the releasing air to start us back toward the Forge. And then, we’ll have to share the air in the remaining suits until we get close enough for Custodian to help out. Questions?”

  “Yeah, I have a question,” Wei-Ping said. “Dozer over there rips loose with some wicked farts. Damned things’ll abuse the shields. Do I really have to share his stinky air?”

  Viktor watched in satisfaction as the Catch lived up to its name, neatly catching the next Dark Metal fragment, bringing it to a full stop, and pulling it down toward the Forge.

  “I love it when a plan works out,” he said.

  “The use of a net was an inspired decision,” Custodian said. “I am intrigued as to how you arrived at it.”

  “Fishing.”

  “Fishing?”

  As it descended toward him, Viktor studied the cargo net he’d taken off the Snow Leopard and quickly pressed into service on the Catch. He hadn’t been sure it would be sturdy enough, but it looked entirely undamaged. “When I was a boy, I used to go fishing with my grandpa. We’d use a line to hook a fish, but we’d use a net to finally grab it and add it to our haul,” he said.

  “I understand the words you just used, but their context eludes me.”

  Viktor laughed. “When we have some time, Custodian, I’ll happily sit down and tell you all about fishing.”

  “Hey, Custodian,” Benzel’s voice cut in. “How much longer until we’re close enough for the remotes to come get us?”

  “At your present velocity, approximately twenty minutes.”

  “Damn.”

  “Is there a problem? Did you misjudge your remaining air?”

  “Oh, I misjudged it all right.” He made a gasping sound. “Ask Wei-Ping how.”

  “Told you,” Wei-Ping said. “Dozer, you need to go see a doctor. Seriously, man.”

  Dash watched as the latest piece of Dark Metal broke orbit and started for the Forge. It was only sixteen kilos of the stuff, hardly worth the effort.

  “I think we’ve done all we can. This is just too slow and complicated, without enough payoff to make it worthwhile,” Dash said.

  “I have another suggestion,” Sentinel said.

  “I’m listening.”

  “Now that we have begun scanning the system thoroughly for Dark Metal, we are finding more of it than had been anticipated. In this case, there is almost one thousand kilos available.”

  “Yeah, I don’t like the sound of that,” Dash said. “If it hasn’t even been detected until now, then it’s got to be somewhere—let’s call it awkward.”

  “Where is it?” Leira asked, her voice the very definition of a resigned sigh.

  “It is orbiting in the upper atmosphere of the brown dwarf planet. There is actually nuclear fusion occurring in the core of the brown dwarf, and the resulting generation of neutrinos obscured this debris. Additional data obtained by Conover, when testing his new Dark Metal detector, has allowed it to be resolved.”

  “So how would we go about retrieving this Dark Metal?” Dash asked.

  “I calculate that the Slipwing, with its modified magnetic drive, along with the Archetype and the Swift, should be collectively powerful enough to pull the debris from orbit and place it on a trajectory to the Forge.”

  “But?”

  “But, given its depth in the brown dwarf’s atmosphere, it would expose you to—”

  “Being crushed like an empty can.” Dash sighed. “Gravity. It’s my nemesis.”

  “Mine too,” Leira said. “That’s how I almost died in space the time before I almost fell into that damned star, remember? When the Slipwing dropped into that gas giant to get away from Clan Shirna?”

  “Oh, I remember, all right,” Dash replied.

  “I get to relive all of my worst moments, it seems,” Leira said, her tone flat. “Yay me.”

  “Okay, tell Amy to take the Slipwing back to the Forge. We’ll get her refueled and re-rigged. And then, you can tell everyone that, for our next performance, we’ll be heading to the brown dwarf.”

  19

  Dash gave the heads-up a long frown. The hurricane of radiation from the brown dwarf degraded the effectiveness of even the Archetype’s scanners, a fact which had made it a great hiding place during his fight against the Golden Harbinger. Now, though, it just made trying to discern what, exactly, was going on with the Dark Metal that much more difficult.

  “It looks like one large, and a bunch of smaller fragments, tied into orbit with that little moon,” Leira said.

  Dash nodded. The moon barely rated the name, just a hunk of rock maybe ten klicks long, and two across. Its orbit had degraded enough that it had actually dropped into the brown dwarf’s atmosphere, its passage through which left a wake of gas heated to glowing by friction. The atmospheric drag slowed it further, causing it to fall even deeper into thicker atmosphere, which slowed it even more.

  “Yeah, and it doesn’t have long to live, does it? Dash said.

  “No, it does not,” Sentinel replied. “In approximately six months’ time, it will have fallen irretrievably far into the brown dwarf’s atmosphere.”

  “I’m surprised it’s intact at all and hasn’t just broken up from all that drag and turbulence,” Viktor said. Aboard the Slipwing, he, along with Amy and Wei-Ping, hung well outside the envelope of radiation and charged particles billowing off the brown dwarf. “For that matter, I’m even more surprised it just hasn’t started to vaporize entirely.”

  “The moon is actually the remnants of a Golden missile platform,” Sentinel answered. “It is reinforced throughout with Dark Metal, which gives it far more structural integrity than it would naturally have.”

  “So it can actually survive a plunge into the guts of this brown dwarf?” Dash asked.

  “In a manner of speaking. The Dark Metal will eventually reach a stable depth inside the brown dwarf and remain there. The rock, however, will soon break apart and being to vaporize.”

  “It’s already pretty deep,” Leira said. “I don’t think we’re going to have time to try and mine the dark metal out of that moonlet.”

  “We won’t,” Dash sai
d. “And we’re not even going to try. There’s still at least a couple thousand kilograms of Dark Metal in orbit around it, most of it in that one big piece we can see. We’re going to snag that and bring it back to the Forge.”

  “The effects of the brown dwarf’s environment will severely degrade the capabilities of both the Archetype and the Swift,” Tybalt said. “Even retrieving that single, large piece of Dark Metal will be problematic.”

  “That’s why Leira and I are only going to try boosting its orbit back up until its high enough for the Slipwing to join in the fun and add its pull. That should be enough to get it clear of the brown dwarf and start it back to the Forge. At least, that’s the plan, right, Sentinel?”

  “It is. I estimate that it has at least an eighty-five percent chance of success.”

  “That’s a fifteen percent chance of failure,” Viktor put in.

  “Hey, it’s our devil’s advocate,” Dash said. “But you’re right, Viktor. Still, we can’t pass this up. That’s too much Dark Metal to just let fall into this brown dwarf, to be lost forever.”

  “Actually, this brown dwarf will only continue undergoing nuclear fusion for approximately ten million more years,” Tybalt said. “And then—”

  “Effectively forever,” Dash cut in. “Longer than I’m going to be alive, anyway.”

  “Indeed, much longer,” Tybalt said.

  “Anyway, if we’re all set—”

  “Uh, Dash?” It was Amy.

  “Go ahead.”

  “I’m pretty happy with how I’ve come along as a pilot. But I’m looking at this trajectory Sentinel’s put together for the Slipwing. It’s pretty hairy. There are some really fast corrections that have to be made so we don’t spend too long being blasted by x-rays and other crap from this brown dwarf—not to mention screwing up compensating for atmospheric drag and falling into the damned thing.”

  “I have faith in you, Amy. You can do this.”

  “I’m glad you have faith in me, Dash. Trouble is, I don’t.”

  “Well, that’s why we brought Wei-Ping along. She’s an experienced pilot, so she can help you out.”

  “Yeah, well, Wei-Ping and I have been talking, and we both kind of agree that she should be the one doing the flying here.”

  “To put that another way, if I’m going to be aboard this ship when it does a dive into a brown dwarf’s upper atmosphere, I want someone really good at the helm,” Wei-Ping said, coming on the comm. “And Amy here is a nice girl and all, and I’m sure she kicks ass as an engineer, but, well, she ain’t what I’d call really good. Yet.”

  Dash frowned. “You’ve never flown the Slipwing before. You don’t know how she handles.”

  “All due respect, Dash, but in my line of work, you often have to get very good at flying ships you’ve never flown before, and you have to do it really fast.”

  “When you steal them, you mean,” Leira added.

  “When they come suddenly into my possession,” Wei-Ping said. “Steal sounds so unpleasant.”

  Dash’s frown remained, but both Wei-Ping and Amy had a point. Now was not the time to worry about egos or hurt feelings—not that either of those things seemed to be an issue here. Nor was it time to worry about being able to trust the Gentle Friends, whose performance so far had been nothing short of amazing. “Okay, go ahead and switch seats,” Dash said. “Amy, set Wei-Ping up with access to all the Slipwing’s systems.”

  “Already done!” Amy said, then she put on an apologetic tone. “Sorry, Dash, we were kind of going to do this anyway.”

  Dash opened his mouth to snap something back, but he closed it again and just smiled. Wasn’t that sort of decisive initiative exactly what he should want from these people?

  “Okay then, folks,” he said. “Looks like we’re ready to do this. Wei-Ping, you stand by up here. Leira, you all set?”

  “Ready as I’ll ever be,” she replied.

  “Alright then, here we go,” Dash said, and dove the Archetype toward the moonlet and its precious Dark Metal, Leira in the Swift right behind him.

  Dash could feel the upper reaches of the brown dwarf’s atmosphere roaring against the Archetype, like an atmospheric re-entry that went on and on. The hull temperature of the mech shot up to well over a thousand degrees Kelvin as it plowed through the stew of gases, leaving its own glowing wake of friction-heated gas. He wasn’t used to anything but smooth silence from the Archetype, but now he could actually hear the distant thunder of its passage and sense the tremors running deep through its structural bones.

  “Sentinel, how are we doing?”

  “Hull temperature is stable at one thousand two hundred and twenty degrees Kelvin. Flight is also stable, but variations in gas density require constant course adjustments.”

  “I’ll leave that in your more than capable—well, you don’t actually have hands, but I think you get the point.” He studied the heads-up. The wreckage was about two minutes away at a steep angle from the galactic plane. He kept the Archetype aimed at it, coming at the moonlet and Dark Metal fragments from an angle that avoided its shimmering coma and tail of sublimated gases.

  “Leira, still with me?” He could see she was, of course, on the heads-up, but wanted to keep the chatter up. It was as much to help dissipate his own tension, as hers.

  “I’m here, still in one piece. I wouldn’t give the Slipwing long in here, though. We’re barely inside this thing’s atmosphere and its already a lot denser than she’d be able to take.”

  “Which is why we have to boost that big piece there up to where she can grab it.” He sighed. “I hate leaving the rest of this Dark Metal here, though. Inside that moon, there must be—I don't know how much more. Lots, anyway.”

  “Thousands of kilograms,” Sentinel said. “However, the mass of the moon far exceeds anything the Archetype and Sentinel could accelerate beyond a crawling pace.”

  “Yeah, I know. Still sucks.” And it did. This moon probably contained as much Dark Metal as they’d managed to harvest from this entire system so far, all in one place. The fact that this place happened to be drilling through a brown dwarf’s atmosphere at terrifying speed meant it might as well be on the other side of the galaxy.

  Dash shoved away his regret at not being able to recover more of the precious stuff and concentrated on the Dark Metal fragment they were going to recover. Thirty seconds now.

  “Okay, Leira, looks like the plan still holds. You ease the Swift in behind that chunk to the right, and I’ll go left. Nothing fancy, we just boost as hard as we can. Sentinel, Tybalt, you two work out the details to keep us in sync. The last thing we want is for the two of us to be pushing in two different directions.”

  Both mechs acknowledged. Staying on top of the details was vital, but that’s what the AI’s were good at. The Swift accelerated faster than the Archetype, but the Archetype could sustain a higher velocity and push harder. If they didn’t keep the complex array of forces absolutely synchronized, then the Dark Metal chunk might start to tumble, even lose orbital velocity and fall deeper into the would-be star.

  “Wouldn’t it be a hell of a thing if the Bright showed up right about now?” Leira asked.

  “You trying to give me ulcers? Let’s just let Custodian and the gang back at the Forge worry about that for now and focus on this, hmm?”

  “Sorry. I just don’t like being so blind.”

  Dash had to nod at that. Between the friction-heated gas enveloping the mechs and the powerful emissions of heat, x-rays, and charged particles pouring out of the brown dwarf, their effective scanning range had been reduced to a few hundred kilometers, at best. In celestial terms, that was like being able to see nothing beyond the first few millimeters of your nose.

  “Ten seconds until you are on station,” Sentinel said.

  Dash nodded again, easing the Archetype forward and down, sliding in behind the Dark Metal chunk. As he did, he raised the mech’s shield. The rush of gases immediately abated, deflected by the invisible barrier.
At least it would normally be invisible, but now it glared in the heads-up as a fierce corona of shimmering light. The mechs’ shields would smooth their flight somewhat, but they could only absorb so much energy before they had to recycle and radiate it away.

  Dash nudged the Archetype’s hands against the fragment. The Swift did likewise as Leira slid in behind her end of the fragment. Now both mechs were in place, side-by-side, one at each end of the Dark Metal debris roughly shaped like a dumbbell. It had rotated somewhat along its short axis in the time since they’d started their approach to it, the geometry of its flight changing as it passed through pockets of more or less dense gas.

  “Let’s straighten this thing out before we start pushing,” Dash said. “Leira, can you nudge your end forward—a little more—good. Okay, ready?”

  “Ready.”

  “On three. One, two, push!”

  Both mechs shoved hard, Tybalt keeping the Swift’s acceleration tied to that of the more massive Archetype. Their velocity increased, raising their orbit and pushing the debris up and away from the doomed moon.

  Dash watched the heads-up closely. “Okay, we’ve got about thirty seconds of shields left. Delta-V is right on the curve. Looks like this is going to work.”

  Leira said, “Yeah, I—”

  She never got to finish, because the universe suddenly wrenched hard one way, then the other, and then dissolved into a swirling blur.

  Dash tried to make sense of what he was seeing, but the heads-up was just a smear, the attitude and acceleration data for the Archetype fluctuating wildly.

  “Sentinel, what’s going on?”

  He half expected no answer, thinking frantically that the mech had suffered some sort of catastrophic control failure, from heat or radiation or something else. But Sentinel’s reply was calm and measured.

  “We have been caught in a powerful convection current carrying heat upward from the brown dwarf’s interior. Turbulence has introduced a significant spin component to our trajectory.”