by J. N. Chaney
“It is a remote broadcasting unit. Had it been installed as the spy intended, it would have been able to transmit data collected from the data conduit to which it was attached.”
Dash frowned. “What sort of data moves through the conduit?”
“Primarily operating instructions for the fabrication systems in Bays three through six.”
“So they would have been able to see details about some of the things we’re building here,” Ragsdale said, arms firmly crossed. He’d only just made it back to the Forge, and Dash could tell he was both frustrated and furious at having been caught away.
“It couldn’t have very much range, though,” Leira said. “It’s not that big a device.”
“It is Golden technology,” Custodian replied. “It will take careful study to determine the details and its specific characteristics, but it does contain Dark Metal. I am presuming, therefore, that it could transmit its data through the Dark Between.”
“Which means the receiver could be virtually anywhere in the universe,” Dash said.
“That is not correct; even transmitted through the fringe zone of unSpace, there is a finite—”
“That’s okay, Custodian, it just makes the point.” Dash looked at the rest of them. “We have a more serious problem.”
Ragsdale nodded once. “We have spies on board.”
“Lots of them, it seems,” Leira said. “First Temo, then Sturdivan, and now this.”
“Okay,” Dash said, rubbing his eyes. “We can’t afford this sort of uncertainty. It’s going to eat away at our confidence in our people, and their confidence in each other. It’s also going to divert effort and attention from this war. So from now on, I want all incoming refugees assigned to a locked-down part of the Forge, some hab levels that are currently empty. I want them thoroughly searched and screened. Anyone we suspect at all will be shipped off the station.” He looked at Ragsdale. “Let’s start with every refugee we have on board right now.”
“On it.”
“And what if we find spies?” Benzel asked. “What do we do with them?”
“My instincts say to kill them, and to do it publicly,” Dash said. “But I’m not sure that’s an option for us—not as a realm, and not as a species. No matter how pissed I am right now, I can’t allow myself the luxury of cold-blooded revenge. That doesn’t mean they won’t pay, but it will be public, at least in part.” He sighed, feeling older than his years. “We’ll exile them, but first, I’m going to… well, I won’t ask any of you to take part, but I’m going to use force to make an example. Non-lethal, but still force, and it’s going to be ugly.”
Leira looked uncomfortable but nodded. Benzel and Wei-Ping obviously had no qualms. Viktor opened his mouth but closed it again.
“The cost of doing business,” Al’Bijea said in the heavy silence, nodding. “One way or another, it must always be paid.”
10
“The Golden have a working Shroud,” Custodian announced.
The news ripped through Dash’s Inner Circle like a tsunami. If it was a potentially war-winning technology for them, then it stood to be the same for the Golden. Dash’s reaction to that was simple and swift.
“We need to destroy it.”
“First we need to find it,” Benzel said. “Custodian, how can you be so sure the Golden have one of these things and its operating? I thought you said they never completely deciphered its schematics.”
“They did not. However, data now retrieved from other examples of Golden technology retrieved from the Burrow cache makes it clear that they are, indeed, able to manufacture power cores using a version of the Shroud.”
“They must have reverse engineered it from the partial plans they did have,” Viktor suggested, and Custodian agreed.
“That is a reasonable conclusion. They are as technologically advanced as the Creators.”
Huddled in the Command Center, they talked a long time and finally came to agree with the recommendation put forward by Custodian, Sentinel, and Tybalt—the Forge had to be their priority, taking precedence even over fighting the Verity. Custodian noted they could build their own Shroud from the complete schematics they possessed, but it would be a long process and would require enormous amounts of Dark Metal.
However, Dash realized, if they could find the Golden version of the Shroud and capture it, not only would they deny a critical capability to their enemies, but they’d take it for themselves. Even if, in the worst-case scenario, they were forced to destroy it, they could still harvest its Dark Metal and use it to construct their own Shroud.
“Custodian,” Dash said. “Let’s come up with a way to find that Golden Shroud. Conover, Viktor—hell, anyone without anything better to do, you’ll help. Finding that thing is now our absolute, top priority.”
They moved to get their burgeoning fleet organized. They added six new ships, another Silent Fleet retrieved from orbit around a distant pulsar. This gave them nine ships with similar capabilities to the Herald, Benzel’s flagship. They also now had a second minelayer like the Horse Nebula, called the Rickover, and another ship based on the same design that would act as a dedicated drone controller, called the Spider. Amy suggested the name, saying, “You know, because it sits in the middle of a web of drones, running them all?”
So the Spider it was. This freed up the Snow Leopard and the Slipwing from their drone-control tasks, allowing them to be further upgraded. Dash could only stare in wonder at the Slipwing squatting in the docking bay. Once a scruffy little courier vessel forever on the edge of falling apart or blowing up, she was now a slick, powerful fighting machine, armed and armored with Unseen tech. She still wasn’t quite up to going toe-to-toe with, say, a Harbinger, but she made up for it by being small, fast, and elusive. If Dash had had this version of the Slipwing while plugging along as a courier, he’d have had no trouble doing any job on the Needs-Slate, no matter how demanding or hazardous.
Hell, she probably was, ironically, now one of the powerful and dangerous ships in the whole freaking galactic arm—at least, one not actually built by either the Unseen or the Golden themselves.
Dash worked with Benzel and Wei-Ping to organize their growing fleet into squadrons, which would then begin to run simulations and exercises individually, and as part of the whole fleet. So far, their approach to war fighting had been relatively ad hoc—and, indeed, no plan survived contact with the enemy, so ad hoc was, ultimately, how most battles were fought anyway.
But there were definite advantages to having people and forces that were going to fight together, train together. They agreed that Benzel would remain in overall command of offensive operations, but Wei-Ping, in addition to her duties as defensive commander, would take over running the training. This would get their forces used to working in an integrated way with the Forge, which had become their single greatest source of firepower by a wide margin.
“But we don’t do any offensive ops against the Verity until we take care of that Shroud,” Dash said, walking through the docking bay with Benzel and Wei-Ping, checking out not just the Slipwing, but also the Rockhound, which had had some upgrades of her own. She was still very much a non-combatant vessel, but with improved control systems, better armor, and a trio of point-defense batteries, she could at least protect herself. A pair of pulse-cannons replaced her decrepit particle guns, giving her some teeth.
“Are you sure about that, Dash?” Benzel asked. “We’re basically surrendering the initiative to the Verity.” The man stopped, his hands on his hips. “I think we should keep the pressure on the Verity, now that we’ve pretty much got them on the run.”
“I agree,” Wei-Ping said, wincing slightly at the dregs of the leg wound she’d take from the spy’s slug-pistol. “It might take us a long time to find that Shroud thing belonging to the Golden. And the whole time, we’re just going to let the Verity regroup, recover—”
“I know,” Dash said, holding up a hand. “Believe me, I’ve thought all the same things. But if we j
ust keep fighting battles with the Verity, we’re trying to patch up a breached hull with our fingers and toes. Eventually, we’ll run out of fingers and toes. But they’ll just keep making good their losses, mainly because of that damned Shroud.”
Benzel scrubbed a hand through his hair. “I suppose. But I don’t like it.”
“I think it’s a mistake,” Wei-Ping said, but Dash cut her off.
“I know you do, and I trust you. But for this, I have to trust myself as Messenger.”
Wei-Ping shrugged. “Okay, but—”
“Look, I’m asking for something that’s hard to give—your trust,” Dash said. “I will always listen to what you have to say and give it careful thought. But since I’ve been tagged as the Messenger, it seems the decisions eventually come to me to make. And know that I make these decisions with two goals, always: protecting your lives and winning this war. No variation. No doubt. I will never treat your blood as if it’s cheap. You have my solemn word.”
Wei-Ping opened her mouth but closed it again and looked a little sheepish. “You’re—okay, boss.” She glanced at Benzel. “We’ve made our decision to help with this, and we’re sticking with it. Least we can do is the same for you.”
Benzel nodded. “Agreed. We still don’t have to like it, though.”
Dash nodded back. “If it makes you feel any better, I don’t like it either. This is what I might call a nuanced decision, and I see your side. I also see mine, and the picture beyond.”
After a moment of glum silence, Dash added, “And if that doesn’t make you feel better, maybe this will. The instant we’ve secured that Shroud, we’ll put together a strike package and go hunting ourselves some Verity.”
Benzel and Wei-Ping both offered smiles bordering on feral, and Benzel gave a thumbs-up.
“Okay, now that does make me feel better.”
Wei-Ping had been wrong, though. It hadn’t taken long for Custodian to work out the probable location of the Shroud. All the intelligence work they’d done to date had dramatically narrowed the possible options; Custodian had then worked with Conover to reconfigure the Dark Metal interferometer they’d deployed around the Forge. It now consisted of three detector platforms centered on the Forge and spanning a hundred million kilometers. Custodian had then reasoned the single strongest Dark Metal signature was likely to be the Shroud. Sure enough, thanks to the improved sensitivity and resolution of the interferometer system, they’d soon located an intense Dark Metal return from a system on the edge of a stellar nursery, a vast expanse of dust and gas that was giving birth to new stars.
“The sheer strength of the neutrino emissions from these new, very active and tightly packed stars tends to swamp the detectors,” Custodian explained. “That is a limitation, of course, since Dark Metal is impermeable to neutrinos, and we rely on the resulting neutrino shadows to detect it.”
Conover nodded. “This new detector setup makes it so we can detect subtle differences in the neutrino flux from points that are really far apart. When we combine them, we get this.”
This had been a deep, fuzzy shadow in the stellar nursery—which was where Dash and Leira were now, in the Archetype and the Swift.
“Okay,” Leira said. “This is incredible. I thought I’d seen pretty much everything space has to offer and then, pow, you run into something like this.”
Dash nodded and indulged himself in a moment of staring at the Archetype’s heads-up in wonder.
Enormous clouds of gas billowed across light-years of space shot through with fierce glare of thousands of intense, new stars. The youngest, Sentinel had said, was less than a million years old, making them newborns in the greater, stellar scheme of things. More stars, buried deeper in the sprawling cloudscape, weren’t directly visible; instead, they lit the dust and gas from within, making it glow. And superimposed on all of it were soaring towers of dust, colder and therefore darker than the starlit gas beyond it, giving the whole panorama a depth and texture that just drew the eye deeper and deeper, in search of finer and finer detail.
Leira was right. It was incredible—at least insofar as any word could describe such a scene. It humbled Dash to think that whole solar systems were being born right before his eyes—planets, asteroids, comets, and, on some of them, eventually life.
But they weren’t here just to sightsee, so Dash pulled his eyes away from the view and put them firmly on the threat indicator. It was still dark but, if Custodian was right, it would soon be fully lit up.
“It looks like we haven’t been detected,” he said. “And I make us a billion klicks from our target system. That about right, Sentinel?”
“It is reasonably close.”
He opened his mouth to talk to Leira again but closed it as something else occurred to him—something he’d wanted to ask about, ever since the battle on Burrow.
“Sentinel, back on Burrow, when you scooped me up in the Archetype’s hands, and that bomb hit—I heard you shout my name with some—emotion, I’d call it. What was up with that?”
“I reasoned that I was more likely to get your immediate attention by using your name in an urgent manner that sounded more—human.”
Dash narrowed his eyes. “I think you’re lying.”
“I am not capable of—”
“Lying? Oh, sure you are. If you’re truly self-aware, then you have to be able to lie. It’s kind of basic for the intelligence part of artificial intelligence.”
After a pause, Sentinel replied. “I am not sure I accept your premise—"
“Come on, Sentinel, you’ve helped me do deceptive things when we fight the Golden and their various lackeys. Deception is nothing but lying.”
Another pause. “Since we are about to engage in battle, I do not believe this is the correct time for this conversation.”
Dash smiled. “You’re probably right. Oh, but Sentinel?”
“Yes?”
“I like you, too.”
Sentinel said, “I am ready to initiate this action on your command. I will address your emotional outburst later, after we are victorious.”
Dash, still smiling, nodded. “That’s the spirit. Let’s go get ’em.”
“I have linked with Tybalt, and we are analyzing the Dark Metal data now,” Sentinel said.
Dash waited. He and Leira had moved the two mechs about twenty million klicks apart, and now they’d linked the Dark Metal detectors of both in a way that mimicked Conover’s interferometer. The resulting resolution wasn’t as good as that one, but they were far, far closer to their target, so they actually observed far more detail anyway.
A fuzzy image appeared on the heads-up. Dash was looking at something oblong and black, outlined by a diffuse halo of greyish light, the neutrino background glow from the stellar nursery. He recognized the shape of the Shroud silhouetted against it from its schematics right away. So that confirmed it, they were in the right place. However—
“What are those little black dots moving around the Shroud?” he asked.
“They appear to be drones—actually, the Dark Metal components of drones. They are moving in what is, to the best of our ability to determine their trajectories, a random pattern.”
“Drone pickets, huh? That’s new.”
“For something this important, I’d have expected a flotilla of Golden ships and Harbingers, not a bunch of drones,” Leira said.
“I think they’re counting on using stealth to protect this thing,” Dash said. “Hiding it here in this stellar nursery.”
“We should not underestimate the effectiveness of those drone defenses,” Tybalt said. “In sufficient numbers, drones can be very powerful.”
“Good point,” Dash replied. “And we won’t.” He narrowed his eyes at the imagery. “That whatever-it-is on top of the Shroud—that wasn’t on the schematic, was it? I don’t remember it.”
Sentinel overlaid the schematic on the shadow cast by the Shroud against the neutrino glare. Indeed, it matched almost exactly, except for what looked like som
e sort of antenna or sensor array mounted on it. “To the extent we can determine details at this resolution, it would appear that that array is pointed into deep space, at approximately the following coordinates.”
Dash looked at where that was on the star chart, but it was nothing more than a random direction leading into the deep black. He filed that thought away for later. “Okay, we need to do this with maximum speed and violence,” he said over the comm. “But we also need to use as much stealth as we can. I’m worried that there are surprises that might pop up while we’re doing this, and I want to be ready for them.”
Their encounter with the linked Verity fighters, that had almost succeeded in crippling or even destroying both mechs still burned fresh in his mind, had been a completely unexpected turn, too.
“So how do you want to do this?” Leira asked.
“I’m thinking we translate in as close as we can, each fire a salvo of missiles, then race in behind them to attack and punch holes through that drone screen. We design our course to take us back to the next nearest safe translation point, jump back into unSpace, then maneuver to come at them from an entirely different direction, and do it again. I’m willing to bet those drones aren’t translation-capable, so we should be able to change our attack vectors by a lot with each run. Anyway, we keep doing it until we’ve got the defenses down, and we can take the Shroud.
“Sounds good, although we might want to pay special attention to that comm array or whatever it is,” Leira replied. “Since it doesn’t seem to be part of the Shroud from the plans, then we should be okay taking it out. I’d rather not have them calling for reinforcements.”
“Yeah, good idea,” Dash said. “Sentinel, Tybalt, get the firing solutions ready for our missiles.”
The two AI’s acknowledged and, after a final check to make sure all their systems were green, both mechs translated into unSpace and started their first attack run.
