The Messenger Box Set: Books 1-6

by J. N. Chaney

  “So how long does that one have left?” Wei-Ping asked, pointing up.

  “Perhaps another five years. We have replacements already identified that are sufficient for at least the next century.”

  “So what do you do with what’s left?” Benzel asked. “Or do you use every bit of it?”

  “To answer that, my friends, we must take a little trip,” Al’Bijea said, gesturing toward a small shuttle parked on the other side of the landing pad.

  Wei-Ping glanced at Benzel, who just shrugged and followed the dapper little Governor.

  “So this is what’s left of one of your comets?” Benzel asked.

  Al’Bijea nodded. “This is the core of the first comet we mined. The core of the second is directly opposite”—he pointed straight up at the far side of the Ring—“to maintain the Ring’s balance. The one we’re now mining is the third in just over twenty-six years.”

  Benzel nodded. They stood at the foot of a…mountain, for lack of a better term. There were actually lots of mountains on the Ring; both rims were lines of sheer mountains, intended to prevent the Ring’s atmosphere from simply flowing off into space. But this mountain stood starkly apart, a single, rugged peak almost four hundred meters high.

  “It looks like you’re still mining this one,” Wei-Ping said, nodding toward a robotic excavator chewing into the former cometary core.

  “We are. It still contains significant quantities of various metals.”

  Benzel scratched an ear. “This is very interesting, but you could have just showed us images of this old core, or even just told us about it. Why did we have to take an almost hour-long shuttle flight to come see it?” He grinned. “To put it another way, Mister Al’Bijea, I think you’ve got some not-so-hidden agenda here.”

  Al’Bijea grinned back. “You are a very astute man, my friend.” His grin faded. “Tell me, as an astute man, what can you tell me about this Dash, and his claims regarding the Unseen and the Golden?”

  “Well, if you’d asked me a few months ago, I’d have said he was a crazy man.”

  “But not now.”

  “Oh, by the deep black, no. You’ve seen those mechs, the Archetype and the Swift. And our ships. None of that was made by humans, or anything else currently alive in the galactic arm.”

  “I do accept that the evidence is clear,” Al’Bijea said. “That what Dash has claimed about the aliens and their war is true. I just wonder about Dash himself. He is your leader, correct?”

  Benzel nodded. “He seems pretty surprised about that himself. But yeah, he is.”

  “Is he effective?” Al’Bijea asked. “I ask because I did some research into the man. He’s a minor courier, and not an especially successful one, at that. He owes various people considerable amounts of money, has outstanding warrants in several systems—”

  “Yes, and I’m what you would call a pirate,” Benzel said. “What’s your point?”

  Al’Bijea raised his hands in a surrender motion. “I do not mean this disrespectfully. It just seems that Dash is, let’s say an unlikely individual to lead the effort to protect all life in the galaxy from extermination by the Golden, who seem to be an inordinately powerful threat.”

  Benzel crossed his arms. The way Al’Bijea described the Golden made it seem as though he had some insight into them, which would be unusual—and potentially worrisome, in light of the presence of Golden agents and minions in the arm. He decided to just humor the Aquarian Governor, though, to see where this went. “I’ve seen him fight. I watched him take on Golden mechs called Harbingers head-on, take hits that would turn a regular ship to scrap in a single shot, and go on fighting, beating the living hell out of the enemy. He risks his life constantly, and he is almost always the first one into trouble, and the last one out.”

  Wei-Ping gave a firm nod. “There are three Unseen AIs that basically acknowledge him as their leader. They call him the Messenger. Who are we to second guess them?” She gave a thin smile. “I sure don’t. I’d call him our leader, too.”

  “So would I,” Benzel said. “And I’ve never called anyone leader before. That wasn’t me, anyway.”

  “Well, considering what’s at stake, it’s good to know such a man as Dash—and such people as yourself—are devoted to the cause against the Golden.” Al’Bijea pursed his lips as though considering something, then nodded at whatever answer he’d come up with. “You have inspired me, my friends, to be just as devoted to the cause. And that means there is something I must show you.”

  Benzel opened his mouth to ask what, but Al’Bijea simply turned and walked toward the mountain.

  “We call it Mount Primus,” he said as they fell into step with him, striding across a grassy meadow from the shuttle pad. “The one on the other side of the Ring is Mount Secondus. The current Hub Comet is Tertius, and its core will eventually become Mount Tertius, and so on. We selected each from among many possible candidates, based on a number of criteria, including size, volume of water and other resources present, and structural integrity. That is very important, because the comet must not only survive being transported here, it must reliably remain intact during the entire duration of its being the Hub.”

  “This is all very interesting—” Benzel started, but Al’Bijea cut him off.

  “But why am I telling you this, yes?” He smiled. “Because Primus was a particularly strong candidate. So much so, in fact, that it stood dramatically apart from any comet we have studied, before or since.”

  Wei-Ping frowned. “I still don’t see where you’re going with this.”

  They reached the base of Mount Primus, where a sheer wall of greenish-black crystalline wall rose, flecked with chunks of something metallic, likely a naturally occurring iron-nickel alloy. Not unusual, Benzel thought. Pretty typical for primordial rock that ended up stuck in a comet. What was unusual, though, was the fact it contained a door.

  Benzel narrowed his eyes at it. He recognized it as a ceramic composite fastened with a magnetic lock. None of it seemed to be alien in origin; he could have purchased any of it on several dozen worlds, albeit for a small fortune. Whatever lay beyond it must need to be kept really secure.

  Al’Bijea touched the lock and it lit up. A few seconds later, it snapped open, and the door swung wide, revealing a rough tunnel leading into the mountain.

  “That’s one hell of a lock,” Wei-Ping said. “The kind I always hated finding on board a—” She paused.

  “A ship you were planning to relieve of its cargo,” Al’Bijea said, chuckling. “I’m sorry, I thought I’d spare you the necessity of offering appropriate euphemisms for piracy.”

  “Privateering,” Wei-Ping shot back. “Anyway, I’m guessing some sort of biometrics, right?”

  “DNA and brain-wave patterns, yes,” Al’Bijea answered, reaching inside the door and retrieving a helmet for each of them. “You’ll want to wear these. The ceiling is quite low in places.”

  “So what is it you’re keeping so damned secure?” Benzel asked.

  Again, Al’Bijea gestured for them to follow him, and he led them into Mount Primus.

  The passage was indeed low in places, and narrow in others. At one point, they had to bend almost double. Wei-Ping still banged her head on the rock, provoking a curse.

  “Imagine doing that without the helmet,” Al’Bijea said, grinning back at Wei-Ping, then leading them on. Benzel had wondered about air and light, but lamp strips illuminated the way, while ventilation systems hummed in the background, keeping the air fresh. After about ten minutes of threading their way along the tunnel, it suddenly opened up. Al’Bijea moved to one side, letting the other two step into the space. More lights flared to life as they entered, revealing a large chamber.

  Benzel walked a few paces in, then he stopped and looked around. “All right, just what the hell am I looking at?”

  The chamber’s walls were pitted and scarred, as though the rock had been scorched by tremendous heat. Sinuous, humped piles of glassy slag were scattered a
cross the floor. A cylindrical contraption hunkered against the far wall, about three meters across, partly crushed as though squeezed by some tectonic upheaval in the mountain’s core. Two metallic pipes protruded from it, a blackish material somewhere between organic and metallic extruded from them, as though spilled as a liquid which subsequently solidified.

  “What the hell are you looking at?” Al’Bijea said. “An excellent question. And the answer is, I don’t know. None of us know, but I can tell you this—it’s got antimatter inside it, and none of my engineers will go near it. And I can tell you something else. It clearly isn’t made by humans, or anyone else I could name, and that material frozen coming out of those pipes is on no element chart I’ve ever seen.”

  “It all gives me the creeps,” Wei-Ping said.

  Benzel nodded. It did, indeed, give him the creeps, too. Something about the chamber, the ruined machine, and all the rest of it scraped at his senses, like someone, somewhere just within earshot, scraped fingernails across something rough—as though a faint harmonic had started up in a ship’s drive, maddeningly on the very edge of hearing and feeling.

  But Benzel and Wei-Ping shared a discreet look. They both knew what the mysterious metal was, having seen something very similar on the Forge. They also knew who had built the wrecked device.

  The Golden. Which meant they’d stumbled upon the source of the aliens’ Dark Metal—or one of them, anyway—locked away in the heart of a cold, dead comet, where it was never meant to be discovered.

  8

  Dash drew in a calm breath and exhaled. No tension, no combat awareness tickling his senses. Just breathing. Like a normal person on a normal day.

  He almost marvelled at the fact that he and Leira had been able to board the Golden station, poke around in it, learn it’s remaining secrets, and do it all without being molested in any way. There were no killer robots, no horrific traps, nothing. Somehow, the utter lack of anything happening actually put him even more on edge, his nerves scraped raw by the time they returned to the airlock, his hands holding the pulse-gun in a death grip. But they’d returned to their mechs, and that was it.

  As Dash settled back into the Archetype’s control cradle, he asked Sentinel, “Can you reach the Forge from here? I know it’s pretty far, but, let’s test it.”

  “Custodian here.” The answer came a second later.

  Dash directed a jaunty salute in the general direction of the Forge. “I guess that’s a yes.”

  “There is an approximately one second lag in the comm. Even using Dark Metal to augment the comm data-exchange rate, there is a small, residual delay from the real space portions of the transmission,” Sentinel said.

  “Got it. Custodian, what’s your situation?”

  After a minor lag, Custodian replied. “All is quiet in the vicinity of the Forge. All systems are operating normally. Benzel has reported his arrival at the Aquarian Ringworld, and he has established a patrol pattern for his ships in the area. He reports no contacts or activity of any significance so far.”

  “Can you patch Benzel into this?” Dash asked.

  After the delay—which wasn’t really a problem but was still long enough to be annoying—Custodian said, “I will attempt to raise him. Standby.”

  As they waited, Dash studied the heads-up. The next system the Wind of Heaven’s trajectory would have intersected was as nondescript as it could get, with almost no information available about it, other than data about its star, including a description of miniscule wobbles that suggested it had at least one massive body orbiting it. Being on the margin of intergalactic space, it had never been a priority for a detailed survey, and no one had otherwise had any reason to visit it. It appeared that the Wind of Heaven intended to use its gravitation to alter their course slightly, but only planned to pass through.

  It seemed innocent enough, to the point of actually being uninteresting. Maybe it was just the residue of his raw nerves from the old station, but somehow that very lack of anything notable made him even more wary of it. Such a boring, out of the way system would be the perfect place to hide away and do—things. Probably awful things.

  “We might as well get underway, Dash,” Leira said.

  Dash grunted but kept his attention on that next system, as though staring hard enough at the icon representing it on the star chart might force it to reveal some secret.

  “Dash? You okay?”

  “What?” He blinked. “Oh. Yeah, I’m fine. Just fuzzed out there for a minute.”

  “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “Yes. It’s just that—I don’t know. This old station, all those missing people, that next system…”

  “Yeah, it’s kind of creepy, I know,” Leira said. “Doesn’t help that it feels so lonely out here, right on the edge of the arm.”

  “Yeah.”

  A new voice broke in, its gruff cheerfulness exactly the antidote Dash needed to his feelings of vague dread. “Benzel here. Dash, how goes the battle?”

  “Fortunately, it doesn’t. Everything’s quiet out here, at least so far. We did find this old Golden station, though.”

  He went on to describe what he and Leira had found. When he was done, yet another voice, which Dash recognized as Al’Bijea, replied.

  “I am…” the Aquarian Governor began, then paused before continuing. “I am stunned, Dash. All those people aboard the Wind of Heaven. All those other ships. It’s no wonder the region of space you’re now in has a reputation for ships getting lost.”

  “Does it? We were going to check on that but just hadn’t gotten to it yet.”

  “Oh, yes. Several dozen star systems, within a few light years of your present position, are reputed to be haunted by—something. Something that causes ships to simply vanish.”

  “There are all sorts of those, though,” Benzel said. “All across the galactic arm. They’re always called the ‘dark graveyard’ or the ‘ship-eater.’”

  “Or something about a triangle,” Leira put in.

  “Triangles!” Benzel said. “I know. What’s up with that?”

  “There are even old stories about ships vanishing from this region of space near the Ring,” Al’Bijea said. “But there are many such stories, probably grown around actual, but otherwise mundane disappearances. Ships do get lost and destroyed because, well, space is a dangerous place.”

  “Except it really was happening here,” Dash added. “Ships really were disappearing, because the Golden were yanking them out of unSpace. That means maybe some of those other graveyards or triangles or whatever are also thanks to the Golden.”

  Silence followed, and not just because of the lag. “Well, that’s a terrifying thought,” Benzel finally said. Before Dash could reply though, he went on to describe what they had found inside the remnant of the comet on the Aquarian Ringworld, now called Mount Primus.

  “Okay, that could be rather important,” Dash replied when he was done. “We’ve been wondering where the Golden are getting all their Dark Metal. Maybe this is part of the answer. See what you can find out about it. Get Harolyn and her people involved, too. Mining and smelting and the like is what they do.”

  “In the meantime, what are you and Leira going to do?” Benzel asked.

  “Well, all those people from the Wind of Heaven and those other ships went somewhere,” Dash said. “We’re going to see if we can figure out where.”

  “Sentinel and Tybalt have figured out that the Wind of Heaven’s course was the optimal one for passing through this region of space,” Leira said. “You know, taking advantage of gravitational boosts, avoiding navigation problems, that sort of thing. So we’re going to check out the next system that the Wind would have entered.”

  “Be very careful, my friends,” Al’Bijea said. “That station you found might have been abandoned, but you have no idea what else might be lurking out there.”

  Dash actually chuckled, but it had a grim edge to it. “Believe me, we’ve gone blind into what turned out to be terrib
le danger so many times now that I think these situations where nothing happens are almost worse.”

  “Really?”

  “No, not really. Give me quiet and boring any time.”

  As he and Leira signed off and launched their mechs to follow what would have been the Wind of Heaven’s course, Dash realized he really wasn’t sure if he’d meant that or not.

  When they dropped out of unSpace, Dash saw that this system was, indeed, as boring as it seemed on the chart.

  A single, large gas giant, embraced by fitful rings and a cadre of moons, swung a lonely orbit around the unremarkable G-class, yellow-white star. And that was about it. Dash scanned the heads-up for any other bodies of note and was just in the process of concluding that, aside from a few scattered hunks of rock, there were none, when the threat indicator lit up.

  “Leira—” he started, but she cut him off.

  “I see it. Three ships, matching the design used by the Bright.”

  Sentinel extrapolated the Bright course, a high-speed burn toward the mechs. Two smaller ships led a larger one, their course bringing them for a close pass by the two mechs. If they kept to it, they’d then race out of the system, their trajectory apparently aimed at intergalactic emptiness.

  “Sentinel, open a broadcast channel.”

  “Channel open.”

  “Attention approaching ships. We represent the Realm of Cygnus, a new interstellar alliance devoted to the defeat of the Golden. We’re here looking for answers about what happened to the Wind of Heaven and other ships that have vanished in this area.”

  Dash waited. He fully expected the Bright to reply with some variation on, we are the high-and-mighty Bright, let us elevate you, or something similar. But there was no reply at all. The oncoming ships just kept coming, silently racing toward the two mechs.

  “I guess they’re not interested in talking,” Leira said.

  “Yeah,” Dash replied. “Weird. In my experience, types like that love the sound of their own arrogant voices.”