The Messenger Box Set: Books 1-6

by J. N. Chaney

  “Which means we had best end this war sooner rather than later, to keep all our losses as low as possible,” Al’Bijea replied.

  “Couldn’t agree more.”

  Al’Bijea touched a control on his side of the polished table, calling up a holo-image of a star chart. “At least those who died did not do so in vain. They were able to establish the detailed trajectories of the Verity force that was attempting to attack us, allowing us to reverse-track it.” He touched another control, and a line appeared, solid at the point where the battle had occurred in and near the nebula, then extending back toward the galactic core, broadening into a widening cone as it did so. “This is their projected course; it widens, of course, based on what we understand to be the maximum acceleration of their vessels. Even then, it is a supposition.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Dash replied. “Those are still damned good data.” He followed the widening line back until it vanished into complete uncertainty. He then turned to Leira, Benzel, and Wei-Ping, who were sitting on either side of him.

  “We need to take advantage of this,” he said. “We’re moving the Forge and all our efforts in the right direction, right up along the axis of the arm, toward the galactic core.” He pondered the chart for a moment, then turned to Benzel.

  “How badly damaged are our ships? Are there any that need to go back to the Forge for repairs? That can’t be repaired right here?”

  Benzel gave a thoughtful frown, then shook his head. “We really didn’t take much damage. I’d say anything we can’t repair here is minor. Except for that Verity cruiser we captured, of course. That had the shit kicked out of it. We can repair her and get her into our line, but not any time soon, and not here.”

  Dash nodded. “Okay, then. We’ll press on, right from here. We’ll push the fleet right along the axis Al’Bijea’s people have identified and take out whatever Verity we encounter.”

  Benzel and Wei-Ping exchanged a glance, then Benzel crossed his arms. “That’s pretty ballsy, Dash. Have to admit, I thought I was aggressive, but—”

  “It does seem risky, to launch right into another offensive,” Leira said, and even Al’Bijea nodded in agreement.

  It was Dash’s turn to frown in thought. He got the others’ wariness, but his felt right. The Verity probably figured they’d finally get a quick victory over the Aquarians, only to have the Cygnus fleet intervene and spoil their plans. They were probably frustrated, which meant they wouldn’t be making the best decisions and were likely now scrambling to regroup themselves.

  Dash stood. “I hear you guys. But think about this way. If none of our damage is significant, then the fleet’s ready for action, right? And if we were at the Forge, and I said we’re going to launch an attack, would any of you object then?”

  “You got us,” Benzel said. “No, probably not.”

  “Since when did you start making so much sense, anyway?” Leira asked.

  Dash shrugged. “Probably about the time I realized I was running a freakin’ war.”

  He smiled as he said it, meaning it to be funny.

  But it really wasn’t.

  Dash couldn’t deny he was proud of the fleet, and proud of the work Benzel and Wei-Ping had done in getting it trained and exercised. Each squadron ran like a smooth, well-lubricated machine, while also blending, as necessary, into a seamless whole. Benzel was running them through simulations and drills even as they progressed along the axis of what was apparently the main Verity activity, keeping them honed to a keen edge and ready for battle.

  Now, they just needed something to fight.

  Dash immediately eyed the threat indicator as they dropped back into real space in yet another system along the path Al’Bijea’s people had calculated. This one was a neutron star of a type known as a magnetar, a one-time giant star that had collapsed into something not much bigger than the Forge. It had been a colossal explosion, a supernova with debris in the form of dust and gas surrounding the stellar corpse in a tenuous nebula. The star’s gravity had then crushed its remaining matter to the point that protons and electrons were squashed into neutrons. Add to that an insanely powerful magnetic field—one that could rip the iron atoms right out their blood, if they strayed too close—and this was not a system very friendly to life. Not surprisingly, the threat indicator remained blank.

  “Holy crap,” Benzel said. “That magnetar is spinning…I’d say fast, but that doesn’t cut it. It’s rotating, like, ten times a second?”

  “Just let’s not get too close to it,” Wei-Ping replied. “These readings for radiation, magnetic flux and the like are crazy.”

  “We won’t be here long,” Dash said. “The Verity aren’t likely to use this system for anything. I mean, there aren’t even any planets.”

  “If there ever were, they were blown to vapor when this star blew up,” Leira said. “And to think I actually made a star go partway in that direction.”

  She was referring, of course, to their desperate gambit to avoid her plunging into the star around which the Forge had originally orbited, aboard an out-of-control Slipwing. Sentinel, though, cut in.

  “As I have noted before, Leira, that star was too small to have collapsed into a neutron star. A white dwarf would have been more likely.”

  “But still with a supernova explosion.”

  “Yes.”

  “Same outcome, as far we’d have been concerned,” Dash said. “Anyway, Sentinel, I gather we have no reason to stay here?”

  “As is to be expected, given the extreme conditions around the magnetar, there is no evidence of any activity in this system by the Verity or anyone else.”

  Dash nodded. They just waited for Tybalt, now; while Sentinel did a detailed scan of the system in which they’d just arrived, Tybalt updated their scans of destination systems ahead of them. Even moving a couple of light-years closer to them meant they were seeing them that much more recently in time—and that ignored the current data they could collect through unSpace. While they waited, Dash just stared at the distant point of light that was the magnetar. It looked so innocuous—hard to believe its magnetic pull would rip the Archetype apart if they got just a few hundred million klicks closer.

  “I have detected signals suggestive of Verity activity,” Tybalt finally said.

  Dash looked at the data that Sentinel painted on the heads-up. He winced a bit as the image of a globular cluster lit up the cockpit. This one comprised about ten thousand old, relatively small stars jammed into a volume of space less than twenty light-years across, and seemed to be an intergalactic visitor, originating from somewhere outside the Milky Way and just passing through. Like the magnetar system, stars in a globular cluster were unlikely to have planets, as the perturbations from so many stars so close together quickly knocked them out of orbit, if they were even able to form in the first place.

  But it was a great place to hide a fleet.

  “The Verity unwisely allowed comms traffic to give away their presence in the cluster,” Tybalt went on. “Otherwise, between the broad-spectrum EM emissions, radiation, and dense neutrino flux, there really would have been no way of detecting them.”

  “Looks like we have a target,” Benzel said.

  But Dash just frowned at the image. “Yeah, we do, don’t we?”

  Leira caught Dash’s tone. “What are you thinking, Dash?”

  “That we have a target. Except it’s one that we wouldn’t have had, like Tybalt says, if they hadn’t screwed up and let some comm traffic leak.”

  “You think it’s a trap,” Wei-Ping said.

  “I think it’s probably a trap, yeah. I mean, they might have gotten careless. We did just kick their butts back near the Aquarian Ring, so they might be in an uproar and got sloppy with their emotions running hot. That’s pretty flimsy, since I don’t even know if they have emotions, and I’m not sure I’d put credits on that.”

  Dash turned his attention back to the dazzling image of the globular cluster on the heads-up. “Sentinel, what’s th
e safest way for us to approach this? If we wanted to attack whatever force might be lurking in that cluster, what’s the surest way to go about it in terms of ingress?”

  “Translate our force into the peripheral zone of the cluster, just outside the collective gravitational influence of its stars, and then enter it based on the tactical data we have available at the time.”

  “Yeah, I figured it might be something like that. How about if we translated directly into the cluster, though?”

  “That would be inadvisable. The gravitation of each star impinges on those near it, making for complex, chaotic, and unpredictable effects on translation.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as considerable error in where or when the translating vessels re-enter real space. In extreme cases, it could result in the loss of the vessels in question.”

  “Right. In other words, all those good reasons we pilots are taught to not translate too far into a gravity well. But the Dark Between, that’s different, right?”

  “Gravitation has less effect on vessels that are capable of traveling in the boundary zone between unSpace and real space, yes. However, because the passage of time and distance is closer to what would be experienced in real space, such travel isn’t feasible. Traveling through the Dark Between from here to the cluster would still result in seventy-five years elapsing in real space, and several years of subjective time aboard the vessel—you are planning something unconventional, aren’t you?”

  Dash smiled. “You really are getting to know me, aren’t you?”

  “When you begin to ask questions in this manner, my experience is that you are up to something, as you would put it.”

  His smile grew brilliant. “You got me. What ships do we have that could translate fully into unSpace, make the trip to the cluster, but only come part way back out into the Dark Between?”

  “And then maneuver into a favorable tactical position, yes. An admittedly clever, albeit risky plan. The Archetype and Swift are both capable of it. The Herald and the other Silent Fleet ships would be as well, although they would require modification to their translation drives. Ironically, in this respect, the Slipwing is more capable than they are, thanks to the device that you have named the Fade.”

  That prompted a satisfied nod from Dash. “I wondered about that. Amy?”

  “Amy here, Dash. Go ahead.”

  “How’d you like to do something crazy and potentially dangerous?”

  “I’m in!”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know what it is?”

  Amy laughed. “Sure. Probably isn’t going to change my mind, though.”

  Dash couldn’t stop gritting his teeth. So much could go wrong with this. Had they bitten off more than they could chew?

  “Thirty seconds to transition,” Sentinel said.

  “How’s your link to the Slipwing?”

  “Still nearly optimal. However, I have bypassed the Slipwing’s navigation computer and am controlling the ship directly. It simply wasn’t capable of performing the necessary calculations fast enough.”

  “Yeah, well, when I had it installed, I hadn’t expected to fight an interstellar war with it, much less one in which we do crazy shit like this. Amy, you ready?”

  “Yeah. Kind of bored, actually. Sentinel’s doing all the work, I’m just a passenger.”

  “Fifteen seconds. Standby for transition.”

  If the plan worked, both the Archetype and the Slipwing would slide out of unSpace and into the nether region called the Dark Between, a zone that was both unSpace and real space, and yet neither of those things. From there, they should be able to maneuver into an advantageous position relative to the Verity fleet that Dash was certain awaited them.

  The rest of the Cygnus fleet, led by Benzel in the Herald and Leira in the Swift, would drop out of space the conventional way, in the safe approach to the globular cluster that the Verity would have expected when setting up their ambush. And that should fix the attention of the Verity long enough for Dash and Amy to get the drop on them.

  Dash gritted his teeth harder. So many ifs and shoulds and woulds.

  “Five seconds,” Sentinel said.

  The chrono ticked down; at zero, Sentinel transitioned both the mech and the Slipwing into the Dark Between.

  Very little changed. But they were still in one piece.

  “Amy, you still with me?”

  “Right here,” she said, then added, “Okay, that’s weird.”

  “What?”

  “I mean, it might just be all the radiation and stuff from all these stars around us, and the fact we’re in the spooky Dark Between zone—but I’m not seeing any Verity activity. Like, none.”

  Dash’s gaze swept across the heads-up and the threat indicator. Indeed, there was nothing.

  “Sentinel, are we in the right place?”

  “Without returning completely to real space, there is some uncertainty—but, yes, I can determine no significant deviation from our planned transition location.”

  “Huh. Maybe Tybalt was wrong and those signals weren’t from Verity ships at all. Some artifact of all these stars, possibly?”

  “It is possible. We would need to return to real space to be certain, however.”

  Dash nodded and scanned the heads-up for places where the overlapping gravitational fields of the stars were weak enough to allow a safe and complete translation. “Okay, that one, there, is closest. Let’s head for it and return to real space to see what’s what.”

  It would have taken many hours in real space, but in the Dark Between, only subjective minutes elapsed for Dash and Amy. They reached the translation point, and Dash began to translate back.

  “No! Dash! Don’t complete this translation!” Sentinel said. An instant later, she locked out the translation controls.

  “Sentinel, what the hell?”

  “I have just received a time beacon update from the Forge. They are transmitted at regular intervals through the Dark Between in order to keep the Archetype’s chrono synchronized with that of the Forge. This happens autonomously, as a routine background function.”

  “And?”

  “And, check the chrono now.”

  Dash did. “That’s wrong. That says its—what, two days from now?”

  “It does. And this is not incorrect.”

  Dash tapped his screen, a half smile on his face. “What, it’s two days from now?”

  “Yes.”

  The smile vanished. “Wait. It’s two days from now?”

  “I’m afraid that, no matter how many times you ask the question, the answer will be the same—yes.”

  “Dash, what the hell’s going on?” Amy asked. “The Slipwing’s chrono just flipped into the future by two days.”

  Dash just stared.

  Sentinel answered for him. “I just updated it, Amy. And it is correct. The Archetype and the Slipwing have emerged from unSpace two days in the future.”

  “Uh…Dash? What’s going on?” Amy asked.

  “I—” He blinked then tried again. “I don’t know. Sentinel, what the hell’s going on?”

  “As I described, it would appear that an unexpected interaction between the translation drive, the nature of unSpace and the Darkness between, and the complex gravitation of the stars in this cluster has resulted in a time displacement.”

  “When did you describe that?”

  “When you asked about translating directly into the cluster, I said there was a possibility of considerable error in where or when the translating vessels re-enter real space.”

  “Shit. You did say that, didn’t you.” Dash shook his head. They had just traveled through time. Just the idea was—

  “Wait, what happened to the fleet? Were the Verity here?”

  “Sensor returns from real space into the Dark Between are limited and incorporate considerable uncertainty. However, I do have some partial data that may answer that question.”

  An image appeared on the heads-up, grainy and out of focus.
It was still clear enough to be recognizable…and gut-wrenching.

  It was the shattered wreckage of the Swift.

  “Oh, no,” Dash breathed.

  “It would appear that the battle did not go in our favor.”

  “Dash, does this mean—shit, does this mean we’ve lost?” Amy asked, her voice quiet and tight and utterly out of character for her, which just made it that much more appalling.

  “This is why I prevented you from translating fully back to real space,” Sentinel said. “It is possible that the Archetype and the Slipwing, as well as you and Amy, continue to constitute mass in the universe—that you still exist, in some form. If that is the case, and we returned to it, we would violate fundamental conservation laws. The effects of that are literally impossible to predict.”

  “You mean that, even though we’re here, we might be out there, too?”

  “That is correct.”

  The idea was—it was mind-boggling. There could be another Archetype and Slipwing, another Dash and Amy, just the remains of a full translation away. And if they did finish that translation, they’d duplicate them, adding new mass to the universe, which wasn’t supposed to be able to happen.

  “I’m starting to think this might have been a really bad idea,” Dash said, his stomach wrenched down to a tight knot.

  He couldn’t tear his eyes away from the wreckage of the Swift. Had Leira escaped? What had he done?

  “Sentinel,” Amy asked, her voice suddenly cold and deliberate. “Can we undo this? Can we—I don’t know, go back in time? Return to where we should be?”

  “It is not possible to return to the precise moment we left, no. The universe has changed in ways that cannot be measured. The movement of bodies of which we are entirely unaware could have effects that we cannot even begin to account for.”

  “Okay, wait,” Dash said. “Just wait. Can we actually—rewind time to the same point, though?”

  “It is theoretically possible, yes. I can base a new translation on the data and calculations used for the one that brought us here, essentially calculating a back course through unSpace that should return us to the objective past in real space. But, as I said, it is not possible to do so with any degree of accuracy.”