The Messenger Box Set: Books 1-6

by J. N. Chaney

  “I like that,” Benzel said.

  “Me too,” Wei-Ping said. “After all, you are pretty offensive.”

  Benzel punched her arm and she grinned. Dash looked at her.

  “Wei-Ping, you’ll do the same for all our defensive operations. So you two guys will have to work pretty closely together to coordinate things.”

  “Got it,” Wei-Ping said.

  “Amy, I’d like you to take charge of our operational readiness. That means you’ll be a Captain, one level below our two Commanders. You’ll oversee our pilots, their readiness, and the readiness of our ships. You’ll also keep flying the Slipwing.” He smiled at her. “Makes me feel a lot better, knowing she’s in such good hands.”

  For once, Amy wasn’t flippant, she just nodded. “Thank you, Dash. I won’t let you down.”

  “I know you won’t. Viktor, Conover, you guys will have the rank of Captain, too. I want both of you to concentrate on our research, development, and production. Conover, you focus on evaluating new enemy tech as we capture it and bring it in, figure out what we can use and what we can improve. Viktor, you’ll concentrate on the production and installation of our new tech. Both of you are going to be working close with Custodian, obviously.”

  Dash turned to Conover. “I’m also tagging you to keep flying the Mako, as a secondary duty. If we think we need to deploy her, we’ll come to you.”

  Conover nodded. The nimble little atmospheric fighter known as the Mako held enormous potential, as it was designed to interface directly with its pilots’ thoughts. It also mounted a variant of the most potent weapon they currently possessed, the blast-cannon. Unfortunately, the Mako was also giving them no end of trouble, its interface with Conover’s optical implants still not working properly. Sometimes Conover lost the interface completely; other times, it overloaded his implants and locked them in safe mode until they reset their own interface with Conover’s nervous system. They’d kept plugging away at it and seemed to be on their way to a solution. For now, though, the Mako was only deployed when they really thought they’d need it.

  “Finally, Ragsdale is Captain in charge of our security—that’s a no-brainer—and Freya is Captain in charge of our logistics, specifically food production and medical services. Harolyn is going to take charge of our civilian contingent, with the equivalent rank of Captain, too. So there we go—we have a chain of command.”

  “So what’s this new chain of command going to do? What’s our next move?” Wei-Ping asked.

  “Good question. Custodian, show us all known and suspected locations of Golden activity to date,” Dash said.

  The big screen lit up with a star chart, depicting a multitude of icons scattered across the galactic arm.

  “Holy shit,” Amy said. “I mean—holy shit.”

  “There must be at least two hundred locations shown there,” Viktor said.

  “Two hundred and eleven,” Custodian said.

  “There are really that many?” Benzel asked. “I’m with Amy. Holy shit. How can there be so many?”

  “Custodian,” Dash said. “Remove all of these that are just suspected activity, inferred, unconfirmed, that sort of thing. Let’s just see the ones that we know are real, or we’re confident probably are.”

  “That’s still got to be almost a hundred,” Leira said. “There’s an awful damned lot of Golden activity in the arm.”

  “What’s this based on?” Viktor asked.

  “Known activity, and extrapolations based on particular trigger events,” Custodian said. “This would include Golden and Verity attacks and raids, our encounters with them, information that suggests they have attempted to recruit allies, and similar such criteria.”

  “There are a lot more Golden out there than I ever thought,” Leira said. “Golden, and their minions.”

  “Okay, Custodian,” Dash said. “Based on this, let’s plot a course that starts at the coordinates of the Forge and passes through the confirmed locations, or the ones where our confidence is high—say, better than eighty percent. Make sure it passes through them in an optimum way, and move the Forge if you have to.”

  A trajectory appeared on the star chart, weaving and wobbling its way roughly along the long axis of the galactic arm.

  “Okay, so there we go,” Dash said. “That’s our first cut at the progress of a campaign to wipe these bastards out.” He turned to the others. “And I do mean wipe them out. We’ll seize their tech and resources, but the Golden and all their lackeys—Verity, Bright, Clan Shirna, whoever—they are going to die, every single one of them.”

  Benzel gave a fierce nod. “Like eradicating a germ—you can’t leave even one alive, in case it eventually respawns and you have to deal with it all over again.”

  Dash looked at those assembled, the Cygnus Realm’s senior leaders. “Does anyone have a problem with that?”

  After a moment of silence, Leira pointed at the map. “When do we get started?”

  Dash powered the Archetype past the flotilla they’d organized to test the surge mines. He paid particular attention to the Horse Nebula, a squat, boxy thing that was essentially a square hull bolted onto a minelaying drone. It wasn’t pretty and would never do an atmospheric entry—not in one piece, anyway—but she wasn’t designed for any of that. She was functional, good at what she did, which was laying mines. And that was good enough.

  Dash had instructed Custodian to manufacture more of the Horse Nebula-class minelayers. They could be used, of course, to lay any sorts of mines, but the surge-variant were proving to be a powerful and efficient component of the Cygnus arsenal—easy to make with minimal resources, and deadly for what they cost in time and materials.

  He put the Archetype at the head of the flotilla. In company were the Swift, the Herald, and the Aquarian ship, the Comet, as their combat force, with the Snow Leopard and Horse Nebula as their auxiliaries. Amy flew the Slipwing as their reserve, sharing control with the Snow Leopard of a half dozen combat drones and a quartet of tug drones—essentially just grapples and thrusters strapped onto a translation drive, with a basic AI control unit. If their campaign to disable and capture enemy tech worked out, they needed a way to get it back to the Forge, and tying up ships like the Herald or the Snow Leopard didn’t make sense.

  “Okay, everyone, report green if you’re ready to launch,” Dash said.

  Dash waited as everyone checked in, then gave the go signal and translated into unSpace, the rest of the flotilla following.

  It didn’t take long to get to their destination, thanks to having moved the Forge from its remote location and closer to inhabited space. Two hours into unSpace, Sentinel gave a five-minute warning for their return to the normal galactic plane.

  “Okay, Benzel,” Dash said. “This is your show as our new Offensive Ops Commander.”

  “Right. Dash, you and I will pop in and take a look at what’s what in this target system. Everyone else stays in translation, in a holding pattern, until we’re ready to commit.”

  Acknowledgements came in. Dash had Sentinel handshake with the AI aboard the Herald, Benzel’s flagship, letting the Silent Fleet vessel take them both out of unSpace at the same time, using a lonely gas giant enclosed in a vast debris cloud of ice and rock, a so-called halo, as cover. Its primary, an enormous red giant, still filled much of the starfield with a dull, crimson glare, even this far out.

  Dash saw the comm laser link with the Herald, giving them secure comms with no leakage the Golden or their allies might detect.

  “Looks like the jackpot we were looking for,” Benzel said.

  Dash grunted his assent while studying what they’d found. There were two more rocky planets closer in, with a pair of asteroid belts between them. About seven hundred million klicks out from the primary, four ships were orbiting, their signatures matching Verity light cruisers. Something else orbited between the two asteroid belts, but between interference, and a design and composition not matched by anything in their databases, they couldn’t identi
fy just what it was.

  “Looks like—I don’t know, rings? Maybe it’s something like what the Aquarians built?” Benzel said.

  “Maybe,” Dash replied. “Whatever it is, it doesn’t seem very mobile. Okay, how do you want to do this?”

  “The Horse Nebula’s going to sow the new surge mines along the most likely route for Verity ships entering or leaving the system,” Benzel said. “I asked Leira to get Tybalt to work that out. Meantime, the rest of the fleet’s going to translate in on the far side of the primary. That big red giant ought to give us enough cover to do a pincer move, with you and the Comet coming at the Verity over the star’s north pole, and the Swift and the Herald over the south. That way, we catch from the top and bottom of the ecliptic plane. The Slipwing’s going to take over the gun and missile drones and hang back as our reserve. Then—this is critical—the Snow Leopard will take over the tug-drones and wait until the shooting’s done, all while ready to start towing whatever prizes we take back to the Forge.”

  Dash smiled. “Sounds like a good plan—almost like you’ve done this capturing ships thing before.”

  Benzel laughed. “Once or twice.”

  As they prepared to translate back into unSpace, Dash narrowed his eyes at the distant, unsuspecting Verity ships. In a short while, everyone aboard them would be dead.

  To his surprise, Dash felt—nothing.

  “And soon enough, you won’t feel anything either,” Dash said, but only the stars heard him, and they didn’t care at all.

  6

  They tried to time it so the two pincers of their attack would race around the red giant and start their attack runs at the same time the Horse Nebula began laying her mines. But no plan survives contact with the enemy, as Ragsdale was fond of saying, so the minelayer dropped out of unSpace a little too early. As the Archetype, in formation with the Comet, rose over the star’s north pole, Dash saw that two of the Verity ships had already accelerated hard to pursue the Horse Nebula. The other two kept station, apparently intent on covering whatever the Verity had orbiting between the two asteroid belts.

  That thing—whatever it was—worried Dash. Things that were mysterious often turned out to also be dangerous, so he’d had Benzel build an escape hatch into their plan, which was two words—scatter and translate at receipt of a coded command, but that was nice and simple, which was always good.

  Now, Dash’s attention was pulled away from the Horse Nebula—which would have no difficulty escaping the Verity ships—and onto the enigmatic rings.

  Dash dialed up the zoom on the heads-up to study it. And he did study it, intently, for a good minute. The effort left him grimacing, and even more unhappy.

  “Sentinel, what the hell is that?”

  “A large ship of unknown design.”

  “Well, thank you, awesome super-AI made by an unimaginably powerful alien civilization. I’m glad I have you and your keen insights.”

  “Your sarcasm doesn’t change the fact that I do not know. There is nothing in the available data that matches it. That suggests it was designed and built by the Verity, although it is possible, albeit less likely, that is of Golden origin.”

  “Still doesn’t tell me very much. What can you say about it?”

  “For its size, it contains surprisingly little Dark Metal. That immediately suggests it lacks significant installations of advanced weaponry. Moreover, its power emanations are unusual, with most of it being in the infrared.”

  “It’s hot.”

  “Relative to the surrounding space, yes. Assuming its outer structure is in thermal equilibrium with its interior, then you would likely consider it somewhat warm.”

  “It sure doesn’t sound like a fighting ship.”

  “I doubt that it is. It likely has another purpose entirely.”

  Dash narrowed his eyes at it, still deeply suspicious. “Okay, keep an eye on it, and sound the alarm if it starts doing anything but just sitting there.”

  Dash focused back on the Verity cruisers. The two that had kept station were now burning hard to intercept them; the other two were decelerating just as hard, obviously giving up on the Horse Nebula and anxious to get back to rejoin the other half of their flotilla. The Horse Nebula’s timing error had actually worked in their favor, pulling the enemy squadron apart.

  The two remaining Verity cruisers didn’t slow their rush, though. They launched a swarm of missiles then opened fire with pulse cannons at maximum range. The Cygnus ships weathered the fitful barrage of energy pulses handily, then the Archetype, the Swift, and the Herald began swatting missiles into debris.

  A trio of detonations rippled through the system, originating near the Horse Nebula. They threw off noticeable gravitational wave effects, which meant surge mines. Dash snapped his attention back that way and saw both of the Verity cruisers, having taken off after the minelayer, now drifting in space, their systems dead from the surge mine effects.

  “Well, those worked really damned well. Remind me to buy Conover a drink back at the Forge.”

  “You mean alcohol,” Sentinel said.

  “Yeah, why?”

  “You want to congratulate Conover for successful completion of the task you gave him, by providing him with a metabolic toxin to consume.”

  “Here’s something else you can remind me to do, Sentinel—make sure you monitor our next party. I need to teach you how to have a little fun.”

  Dash broke off as the threat indicator showed that the approaching Verity ships were now in range. He waited for Benzel to give the order to fire, since this was his show and he knew the former leader of the Gentle Friends liked fighting in close. Dash also saw the Horse Nebula closing on the Verity cruisers stricken by the surge mines. They must be intending to board their helpless foes. Dash opened his mouth to urge caution—but closed it again. If those Verity ships were eventually going to come back online, then they had a relatively limited window to deal with them. And dealing with them was just what the crew of the Horse Nebula was about to do.

  “Weapons free!” Benzel announced, and Dash fired the dark-lance, snapping out shots as the Verity ships closed head-on. Fire erupted from the Swift, Herald, and Comet as well. The Verity ships raced through the onslaught, their tactics a dramatic change from their usual stand-off, fight-at-a-distance style. As they closed, Dash saw why. About ten seconds before they crossed the trajectories of the Archetype and the Comet, they opened up with salvoes of fast, short-ranged missiles.

  The mech’s point-defense systems joined those of the Aquarian ship in responding, taking down most of them; still, the Archetype was hit three times, and the Comet twice. Dash registered minor damage from the hits, but the Comet staggered under an impact on her port side that blasted a gaping hole in her hull. Venting atmosphere, she accelerated away, wisely opening the distance from Verity ships that were intended to fight in close.

  So the Verity had changed their strategy pretty much a hundred-and-eighty degrees. If Dash and his people preferred turning space battles into knife fights, then they’d decided to try and bring bigger knives.

  “Nice try, guys,” he said, wheeling the Archetype around. “But you aren’t the only ones who can try something different.”

  For an instant, the Archetype faced away from the onrushing Verity ships. Another missile slammed into the mech’s backside, making Dash grunt against the shock of the hit—then smile at the idea he’d just managed to be shot in the ass during a space battle, and how many people could say that? But it left him facing the enemy ships as they flashed past. He opened up with the dark-lance, firing a continuous beam into the stern of one of them as it receded toward the red giant.

  “Let’s see how you like spanking, asshole,” he muttered, and was rewarded with a powerful explosion that left the Verity ship crippled and falling sunward. Ships with fusion drives, like the Slipwing, actually had heavily armored and reinforced sterns to protect them from the fierce heat and radiation of their own exhaust. The Verity ships, powered by more
advanced drives, didn’t need the extra protection and weight, so the dark-lance penetrated the open exhaust ports and ripped deep into the engineering section.

  The Verity still had some things to learn about knife fighting.

  The remaining enemy ship pivoted and accelerated hard, intent on coming back, it seemed, for another pass. But now Leira and the Herald had closed and threw their weight of fire against it. Even the Comet, still struggling away from the battle, fired a barrage of missiles. The Verity had reinforced the ship’s forward shields and armor, so it actually managed another attack run—but Leira got a clear shot at its stern and replicated Dash’s attack, gutting its engineering section and leaving it suddenly dark and dead.

  “Dash, reports in from the Horse Nebula. They’ve taken both those Verity ships,” Benzel said.

  His voice rang with pride, and understandably so. His people must have been outnumbered, but they’d made short work of any Verity defenders. Still, Dash held off a moment with the congratulations.

  “Any casualties?”

  “Two. One wounded, one dead. As for the Verity, nothing but casualties—all dead, just the way we want them.”

  “Shit. I mean, no, that’s great. I just hate losing anyone.”

  “Me too.”

  Dash looked at the heads-up and the threat indicator. No opposition remained, aside from the mysterious ring ship.

  “Anything left for me?” Amy’s voice cut in. She’d kept the Slipwing disengaged as their reserve, but now she eased her, and her accompanying drones, around the limb of the red giant.

  “Sorry, Amy,” Dash said. “Battle’s over.”

  “Already? Well, damn, that’s no fun.”

  “Well, you can help Benzel recover our prizes. Benzel, I’m going to leave it to you to organize that.”

  “Will do. I’ve already ordered the Snow Leopard to bring the tug drones forward.”

  “Perfect. Leira, what say you and I check out that ring ship thing?”

  “I’ve got nothing better to do.”