The Messenger Box Set: Books 1-6

by J. N. Chaney

  “It is possible. Technologically, both of these Harbinger are identical to the one that you first fought near the Forge. However, their tactical behavior has varied from what we’ve seen them previously exhibit. It wouldn’t be surprising if their respective AIs were sharing information in an attempt to adapt to your uniquely human approach to fighting—at least until their technology can be upgraded.”

  “Makes sense,” Dash said. There had to be the Golden equivalent to the Forge out there somewhere, working hard to upgrade and improve their Harbingers and other military tech. It underscored why Dash and his cohorts of the Cygnus Realm had to stay on their toes and not take anything for granted; these two Harbingers might be older versions, less capable and easier to defeat, but the next ones might not be.

  “Ten seconds to the upper atmosphere,” Sentinel said. “I no longer see any sensor returns from the Harbinger.”

  “He must have dived even deeper,” Dash replied. “I really don’t want to lose this guy. I’d love to take one of these things more or less intact, because if there’s any way to stay ahead of these bastards on the tech curve—”

  The Archetype shuddered and rocked as it plowed into the first wisps of atmospheric gas. Dash shallowed out its trajectory slightly, at the same time slowing the mech. He wanted to reduce the friction of its passage through the atmosphere; too much superheated, ionized air around the mech would just further diminish the effect of its sensors.

  Now muffled clicks and thumps rose as the Archetype raced through roiling clouds laden with ice chunks. The stratospheric winds of this planet were ferocious, racing along at hundreds of klicks per hour, fast enough to keep big pieces of ice aloft. It seemed counterintuitive, this high in the atmosphere, but Dash was no planetary scientist—this might be a treasure trove of research-worthy data, but to Dash it was just another battlefield. He kept his attention on the heads-up, hunting for any hint of the elusive Harbinger. Their last clear sensor return had been less than a hundred klicks from here—

  Something slammed into the Archetype, hard, pitching it into a slewing skid. Dash recovered and frantically scanned the heads-up. Fragments of a missile spun off into the roaring sky. Sentinel tracked the trajectory to its source and tagged the Harbinger on the display, a flickering signal among the clouds several kilometers below them. As he dove, he did a quick check of the Archetype, concentrating on the left leg where he’d felt the impact through his Meld with the mech. Superficial damage, nothing more.

  “Why didn’t that missile detonate?” he asked Sentinel.

  “Unknown. It is most likely it hadn’t yet travelled far enough to arm itself, possibly because it was fired inside a planetary atmosphere.”

  “What, the Golden are worried about safety? I find that hard to—dammit.”

  He skidded the Archetype hard aside, narrowly missing a burst of fire from the Harbinger and darting among the thickening clouds below. It was just point defense fire, though, little threat to Dash’s mech.

  “Oh, okay—it’s got weapon problems. We’ve probably disabled that damned chest cannon, so they’re probably just trying to buy time to get it working again.”

  Dash knew from hard experience that the chest cannon, the Harbinger’s most potent weapon, could disable the Archetype with a single, well-placed shot. That meant he had a window of opportunity here. Powering up the mech’s drive, he raced after the Harbinger, accelerating hard. The clouds became a soft blur and ice pellets hammered on the Archetype hard enough to vaporize on impact, leaving the mech trailing a billowing contrail of water vapor.

  The Harbinger powered on ahead of him, flickering as it passed through clouds. A sonic shockwave now built around both, abruptly parting and passing down the mech’s length as it passed into supersonic flight. The Harbinger swung hard aside, friction making the air ploughing ahead of it suddenly glow. Dash veered to follow. The Golden mech tried frantically to break contact, but Dash stayed doggedly on its tail, closing the distance.

  They punched through the eyewall of a massive storm. A vast column of clear air rose to the upper edge of the atmosphere, the cloudless sky a pale blue-grey. The Harbinger suddenly climbed, zooming straight up, apparently heading back for space. Dash grimly followed. He was determined to disable this Harbinger, not destroy it, and recover whatever tech he could. This wasn’t just about Dark Metal, this was about getting a leg up on the AI that drove these Golden constructs. This chase was about knowing, instead of guessing at what made them tick.

  Less than a klick away now, the Harbinger abruptly slid aside and vanished back into the eyewall. At the last instant, Dash saw the wind shear warning and decelerated hard. The rushing river of air, a massive jet stream tearing along the top of the atmosphere, caught the Archetype and cartwheeled it sideways.

  “Are you shi—”

  “Is this your new combat methodology?” Sentinel cut in.

  “What? Firing and sweating and being generally pissed off?” Dash asked while somersaulting toward the Harbinger.

  “Yes to all of those things, but I refer specifically to what Leira calls your potty mouth, a term which makes little sense given that Freya says you can kill artificial plants,” Sentinel said.

  “What? She swears like a—well, a sailor, but then again she is one, technically—”

  “As are you. Note, we have entered the top of a thermal updraft, which feeds a—"

  A dazzling flash enveloped the Archetype. For an instant, Dash thought the Harbinger had reactivated its chest cannon. But there was no impact, no discharge of energy that engulfed the mech. It was just a pulsing flash and a spike in electromagnetic discharge.

  “Oh, that’s lightning,” he said. “Hell, that’s lightning like I’ve never seen before.”

  “Yes,” Sentinel replied. “The upper portion of this storm is highly energetic atmospheric gases being strongly charged by static electric effects—”

  Then came another searing flash; this time, Dash felt a deep bass boom through the Archetype’s structure.

  “—which is interfering with scanner operations. This planet is well suited to lightning on a grand scale.”

  Massive hail hammered the Archetype, lofted by hurricane-force updrafts that swirled around them in a tumult. Worse, though, ice was now accumulating on the mech, supercooled water droplets hitting its hull and instantly freezing. The musical pinging accelerated into a long, steady noise as the storm intensified.

  “How is this thing rated for ice build-up?” he asked. “Had it happen in the Slipwing once, led to a pretty hairy minute where she didn’t want to fly on thrusters alone.”

  “It should have little direct effect. However, it may further degrade sensor efficiency.”

  It was a terrible environment for even trying to pursue a wounded foe like the Harbinger. Dash’s bubble of awareness had shrunk to about a klick, a claustrophobically tiny volume compared to the virtually infinite expanse of space through which he was used to flying and fighting. On instinct, he deployed the power-sword and charged it, then took the Archetype straight up.

  “I really don’t want to lose this guy, but this is getting too tight even for me. Remember, this, Sentinel—Dash is admitting that sometimes discretion really is the better part of valor.”

  A dark blur flashed past and shook the Archetype. Dash lashed out with the power-sword at the same instant and was rewarded with a shock of collision through it, the blade biting through—something.

  The Archetype spun through another cartwheel. With both left leg actuators abruptly offline, the Harbinger managing to get in a solid hit as it flashed by. Dash recovered and raced after it, chasing it straight up the core of the storm. Lightning flashed like detonations; thunder boomed as distant blasts. Once more, they punched through supersonic flight and, again friction began to heat the mech, quickly puffing away the accumulated ice as steam.

  Any second now they should reach the top. Should, Dash thought. There were no guarantees in this atmosphere.

  The A
rchetype erupted into clear air shot through with rippling crimson light, punctuated by fleeting, fountain-like jets of bright blue. A distant memory—such strange phenomena sometimes happened at the very tops of big storms, the curtains and jets and fountains given equally-strange names like elves and sprites. The effect was strikingly beautiful, but Dash didn’t have time to admire it. The Harbinger was dead ahead, still rocketing straight up, apparently determined to return to space.

  A poor tactic, Dash thought, but he could sense desperation in the alien mech, as its remaining weapons had scant chance of finishing the Archetype off. Maybe the Harbinger’s AI was damaged, and this last effort was a failsafe built for escape, not victory.

  Dash shrugged to himself. It didn’t matter. If he could just catch up to this thing—and he would, sometime within the next minute or so—he could disable it with the power-sword then lug it back to the Forge for detailed study.

  Or, it was up to something.

  But Dash would never have the chance to find out. A few seconds later, something slammed into the Harbinger, shoving it hard aside and ripping chunks of it free. Its left arm simply spun away. A collision warning crashed across the Meld and Dash flung the Archetype into a hard, lateral acceleration that yanked it away from the trajectory of whatever had just struck his opponent.

  The crippled Harbinger decelerated then began to fall back into the atmosphere.

  “You have got to be shi—”

  “Again with the potty mouth? It truly is your default setting,” Sentinel chided as Dash decelerated the Archetype in turn, then reversed course and plunged back after the Harbinger. Before it dropped back into the clouds, he saw that its emissions had dropped to nearly zero, its power levels flat. It was falling, and would continue to fall until aerodynamic forces ripped it apart and the debris struck the planet’s surface like a shower of meteorites.

  “Sometimes, you need words with a bit more oomph,” Dash ground out.

  “But the sound you made sounded nothing like oomph. In fact, it was likely the beginning of your third favorite curse, invoking an archaic terminology for excrement. In case you were wondering, I have no experience with excreta, or any other body functions for that matter. You may be interested to know that—”

  “Sentinel,” Dash said, as the mech streaked down at maximum thrust.

  “Yes?”

  “This isn’t the time for a lecture on bodily functions,” Dash growled, making a desperate lunge for the dying Golden mech—but the Archetype couldn’t gain velocity fast enough. The Harbinger plummeted into the clouds and vanished. Dash raced back in behind it, trying to follow, but was again immersed in howling, lightning-charged gloom that squelched any signal he might have followed.

  “Shit!”

  “Now that seems appropriate,” Sentinel said.

  The Harbinger could have been blown by the spiraling winds in any direction. Desperate, he picked an arbitrary heading and burned that way, emerging back into clearer air. There was no sign of the Harbinger, though—just a few flickers of sensor return, then it was gone, lost in the vast layers of cloud below.

  “I can offer an estimate of where the Harbinger is likely to impact,” Sentinel said. “So it should at least be possible to find and recover the remaining debris.”

  “Yeah, well, just put a pin in that for now and add it to the list of Dark Metal recovery sites.” He shook his head. “So close to having an intact Harbinger, too. Damn it all, and damn these winds.”

  Dash sighed and took the Archetype back into a steep climb, racing up the flank of the storm and back toward space. “So what the hell happened to it? What hit it up there? I didn’t see any threat alert for weapons fire or a missile track.”

  “It was neither. The Harbinger had the great misfortune of intersecting the orbital track of a damaged satellite,” Sentinel replied.

  “A satellite—wait. I thought this planet was uninhabited,” Dash said.

  “That is how it is recorded in the available stores of data, yes.”

  “So why would there be a satellite orbiting it?”

  “Unknown. Perhaps it was a survey satellite deployed by some party as a means of examining the planet for future colonization,” Sentinel said.

  “Okay, I can buy that. And that Harbinger just happened to collide with it? What were the odds of that?”

  “Fifty-fifty,” Sentinel replied.

  Dash gaped. “Fifty-fifty. How do you figure that?”

  “It either collides with the satellite, or it doesn’t”

  “I really don’t think that’s how statistics work.” Dash narrowed his eyes. “Wait. Are you making a joke, Sentinel?”

  “Did you find it humorous?”

  “I—yeah, actually I did.” He laughed and shook his head. “Good one, Sentinel!”

  “I am glad you found it agreeable.”

  As he set course to return to the Forge, Dash was still pissed at losing the Harbinger like that—but Sentinel’s genuine, and actually pretty good attempt at a joke left him smiling anyway.

  2

  Dash kind of missed the War Room—a crew lounge in one of the habitat sections of the Forge that they’d repurposed into a command center. They’d made big decisions there—and hard ones, too. But it had also been familiar, and almost cozy. By comparison, this new Command Center was a vast, echoing space. Dash found it far more sterile and unwelcoming. However, it was far better equipped, being designed not just as a place to have conferences and make decisions, but to also put them into play.

  “Custodian,” Dash asked as he entered the new facility. “Is this the main command center for the Forge, or is there something even bigger somewhere aboard that we haven’t seen yet?”

  “This is the main strategic command, control, communications, and planning facility for the Forge. It can also be used to oversee the operations of the Forge itself, but that is intended as a redundancy and is not its primary purpose.”

  Dash nodded. He was glad that there wasn’t something even bigger and grander aboard. This Command Center, which would easily accommodate a couple hundred people, seemed to swallow his little group that made up the “Inner Circle” of the Cygnus Realm’s leadership. It was also festooned with screens and consoles, including a massive holographic chart that hovered nearly from wall-to-wall, as big as a cargo door on a large freighter.

  Dash stopped at the top of a flight of steps leading down into the depressed area that made up the bulk of the Command Center. To his left and right, a raised gallery extended, wrapping completely around the big room. It offered a good vantage point for anyone not actually involved in operating the Command Center, as well as a quick and easy way of circumnavigating it. Below sprawled enough command, control, and communications systems to allow for the oversight of multiple fleets conducting far-flung, simultaneous campaigns. It was gross overkill for the relatively few ships they possessed—but Dash expected that would change as the war intensified and they gathered new allies to their cause.

  Hopefully gathered new allies, anyway, because they needed them badly.

  Dash descended the steps. As he did, everyone assembled fell silent and turned to face him.

  It struck Dash with that sheer, bemused feeling of wonder—all of these people, waiting to hear what he had to say. Once again, the question thundered through his mind—

  How the hell did this happen? How did I, Newton Sawyer, space courier, end up here?

  To one side stood the original gang who’d been with Dash since the start of all this—Leira, Viktor, Conover, and Amy. Nearby, Ragsdale stood with Freya, representing Port Hannah on the planet Gulch, where a crashed Golden starship lay. Close to them were Kai and several monks of the Order of the Unseen, and beside them were Harolyn de Bruce, geologist and engineer, and Benzel and Wei-Ping, once privateers—really pirates—but now two of their most skilled tactical commanders.

  Apart from the rest, still not entirely comfortable as members of the group, stood their delegation from the co
met miners of the Aquarian Collective, led by Al’Bijea, their chief executive and overall leader. The Aquarians had offered some military aid to the effort against the Golden—aid that had proved pivotal in their last big battle against the Golden minions known as the Verity—but still kept themselves short of a formal alliance. Dash got it; they were a proud, independent group who balked at subordinating themselves to anyone. He hoped he could change that, and inviting Al’Bijea here to participate in their planning was intended as a show of trust to hopefully move things that way.

  So now Dash was engaged in diplomacy and politics, on top of trying to run a war.

  Again, exactly how the hell did I end up here?

  He reached the bottom of the stairs. “Custodian, run that clip we discussed, the one showing the last part of the fight against the Harbinger.”

  The giant screen lit up as the lights dimmed. Everyone watched from Dash’s point-of-view as the Archetype broke out of the top of the thunderstorm, swept through the elves and sprites and other strange, luminescent phenomena emanating from its upper reaches, and raced after the Harbinger. A few seconds later, the Golden mech was struck by the debris from the unexpected satellite then plunged back into the atmosphere and, eventually, the clouds, before Dash could intercept it.

  The recording ended and the lights came back up. Dash turned to those closest to him, Amy and Conover, and asked, “What did you see?”

  He saw Conover starting to formulate an answer, but it was actually Harolyn who answered. “A missed opportunity.”

  “What do you mean?” Viktor asked her.

  “That mech was clearly already badly damaged. If Dash had been able to catch it and take it intact, it would have been a major intelligence score, right?”

  Dash nodded. “Correct. And I don’t want it to happen again. That’s why our next project is going to be a little different. So far, we’ve been all about scavenging and salvage to feed the Forge. We still need to do that, but we also need to go beyond just salvaging stuff. We need more and better insight into our enemies. So we’re going into outright capture.”