The Messenger

by J. N. Chaney

  Leira cut him off. “Why didn’t you just tell him you’d already dropped us off, and had no idea where we are now?”

  “I…well…because…” Dash stopped and glared. “Where were you and your good ideas thirty seconds ago?”

  “You do realize,” Viktor said, “that they probably tracked the origin of your transmissions, and know exactly where we are now.”

  Conover nodded. “They were probably able to use the Needs Slate to track you to the Penumbra system, then did a general unSpace hail—”

  “That you answered,” Leira put in.

  “—and now,” Conover went on, “we should assume that they know our precise location—”

  “Which means,” Viktor said, “the next ship to drop out of unSpace here is probably going to be them.”

  Dash looked from one to the next as they spoke. He finally sat up and raised a hand. “Woah, there’s a lot of judgment going on right here. Tell you what,” he went on, glaring back at Leira, “how about next time you deal with the guy who wants to, you know, put you to death, and I’ll stand in the background and do a critique. Or better yet, I actually will hand you over, avoid that whole desecrator-sentenced-to-death thing and walk away with at least some of the credits this whole misadventure has so far failed to provide!”

  Leira had the good grace to look at least a little contrite. “Thank you for not trying to hand us over. All the other stuff remains true, though, which means—”

  “Yeah,” Dash said, “I know. We should get the hell out of here before neck-patches there shows up.” He turned back to the controls. “The question is, where to?”

  Conover frowned. “Aren’t we going to the Pasture?”

  “What? Like…right now?”

  “It probably is pretty much the last thing Nathis and Clan Shirna would expect.”

  Dash sighed and called up charts showing the clear unSpace lanes to the Shadow Nebula. “What the hell. If we’re going to do this, then let’s do it.” He started punching commands into the nav. As he did, he muttered, “I don’t get paid enough for this…I really don’t…”

  8

  The passage of the Shadow Nebula was a trying combination of tedious and nerve-wracking. The voluminous clouds of thick dust and gas made observation and detection difficult in real space, and carried over into unSpace as a gravitational echo effect that confused the scanners. It worked in their favor, of course, as the Slipwing was also harder to detect. But Dash worried about blundering into some massive Clan Shirna warship, not realizing it was even there until they were in range of its weapons. And although remaining in unSpace left them relatively safe from such harm, they still had to periodically drop out of it to let the nav confirm their course. And that was also a problem, as the stars the nav normally used for location-fixing were obscured by the Nebula, so they had to rely more heavily on inertial navigation…

  It all left Dash with a headache. The trip was boring, but still demanded almost his full attention. Fortunately, Leira could settle into the pilot’s seat and take the helm, giving him a break.

  During one such interlude, he wandered back to where Viktor and Conover were poring over an open panel in the engineering bay, flicking their attention back and forth between schematics on a dataslate and a tangle of exposed cables, conduits and other components.

  “How’s it going, guys?” Dash asked, polishing a spindle-apple against his shirt. The fruit was a delicacy, available only on the planet called Skydrop, and this was his next-to-last. Have to make a trip there to pick up some more, he’d thought, although that was immediately followed by, Yeah, sure, once you’ve not died in any of several dozen spectacular ways during this little foray into the Pasture…

  Conover looked up, in Dash’s general direction. His eyes had gone white again, which mean he was busy seeing schematics and diagrams and…similar things, or at least that’s how Dash understood his bizarre lenses worked. Viktor just shook his head.

  “We’re trying to tune your Fade, so its emissions match those of the various types of radiation Leira and I measured in the Globe of Suns, around the Pasture,” the old engineer said. “That way, we can keep a bigger footprint in real space and remain more aware of what’s going on, so we’re not flying quite so blind.”

  “But someone,” Conover said, “has heavily modified these systems—”

  “And by heavily modified,” Viktor said, shooting Dash a sharp glance, “he means haphazardly wired up in the same way a Grenobian water-ape might do it.”

  Dash paused with the spindle-apple near his mouth. “Hey, hey…out here, in space, it’s real…you do what you gotta do to keep things running. It’s not like I have a freakin’ engineering team on board to do this stuff.”

  “That’s for sure,” Viktor muttered, tugging at a cable. It popped out of a socket with a fat, blue spark. “Why would you ever cross-connect the Fade’s auxiliary control circuits to…is that the power tap to the galley?”

  Dash shrugged and bit into the apple. As he chewed through the mouthful of sweet, tart fruit, he smiled. “Oh, yeah…I remember doing that. See, I had this cute customs inspector on board at Tannhauser, and she was a big fan of hot spiced chai, but the induction heater in the galley was offline, so I—”

  “Never mind,” Viktor said, shaking his head. “You’re just lucky your Fade system never needed to switch to its backup controller at a crucial moment.”

  “Actually,” Conover said, “luck is correct. Based on how you’ve rewired and hacked these systems together, you had a 65% chance of losing primary control of your Fade, and then—”

  “Yeah, okay, I get it,” Dash said. “Don’t cobble shit together. Trouble is, sometimes that’s the only way out of trouble, isn’t it Mister Routing Anti-Deuterium Fuel into a Drive System in a Completely Weird and Dangerous Way?” The latter was aimed at Viktor, who gave a sheepish smile.

  “He’s right,” Viktor said to Conover. “Sometimes it’s the only way. But,” he went on, holding up a finger, “when you are finally out of trouble, you should put things back the way they should be.”

  Dash mimed a salute. “Yes, sir, message received, sir.”

  “Anyway,” Conover said, tracing a conduit and comparing it to a schematic, “once we’ve got this untangle and put back together, the Fade should not only work more efficiently and use less anti-deuterium to run, but it should be harder to detect.”

  Dash nodded. “Well, that’s good, because we’re only a shipboard day or so away from exiting the Shadow Nebula. Be nice to have everything up and running when we’re most likely to run into Clan Shirna, huh?”

  Viktor frowned. “That’s a problem. We’ve got at least a day’s work here, maybe two.”

  “Yeah, well, I’d rather not hang around this Nebula any longer than necessary. Our nav isn’t that great inside it, and much more than another day puts in serious danger of ending up kinda lost. I’m sure we can find ourselves again, but getting back on course will cost us fuel, and we need every gram of it for what’s ahead, so…”

  “We’ll do our best,” Viktor said, but his face was doubtful.

  Dash waved it off. “Eh, I know you engineering types always inflate the time it’s gonna take to do stuff, so you look like miracle workers when you get it done sooner.”

  Viktor shook his head. “No, we don’t do that. That would be irresponsible.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really.”

  “Oh. Well, then…do your best…”

  Dash trailed off as Viktor and Conover went back to work. He watched them for a moment, awkwardly, then quietly withdrew.

  They’d all jammed into the cockpit, despite there being repeaters back in the crew module that would let Viktor and Conover watch what was happening in some semblance of comfort. Everyone seemed to want to be together when they made their first translation back to real space after leaving the Shadow Nebula.

  Dash glanced at Leira, sitting in the copilot’s seat and ready to take control if n
eeded. “You ready?”

  She looked back at Dash, her eyes wide. “Wait,” she said, pointing at a panel, “is that the Fade control, or is that the power management system?”

  “What? No…that’s the nav…”

  Leira was grinning.

  “Very funny,” Dash said.

  She shrugged. “Lightening the mood. Anyway, as ready as I’ll ever be.”

  Dash glanced back at Conover and Viktor, who both just nodded. “Okay,” he said, “here we go…”

  Eyes glued to the scanners, Dash brought the Slipwing back into real space.

  He just stared at the scanner’s vid. “Holy…”

  “Yes,” Leira said, “holy whatever is right. Welcome to the Globe of Suns.”

  The vid depicted a sweeping starfield, dozens of stars wheeling in a stately orbit around a common gravitational center. The nearest was close enough to show an incandescent white disc, the corona glowing like a halo around it. The rest were hard, dazzling points of light, an array of them so closely packed that Dash couldn’t see how they just all spiraled into one another in a colossal orgy of stellar catastrophe. Sure, he was used to seeing stars, so much so that he didn’t really see them at all, anymore. But never had he seen so many, so close…

  “Yeah,” he said, “that’s incredible.”

  “And that,” Leira said, pointing at the vid, “is the Pasture.”

  It didn’t look like much, not at this distance—just a patch of empty space circumscribed by the slow procession of stars making up the Globe. He amped up the scan resolution, going as deep as he could…

  And the Pasture resolved itself into what it was—a cloud of objects swirling like…like…

  Once, Dash had seen a whirlwind tear through a settlement on…Owen’s World, he thought. The planet was plagued by powerful storms, and this one had pulverized an entire community, turning buildings, ramps, walkways, essentially everything not rooted in bedrock, into a whirling cloud of debris. There’d been hundreds of pieces, thousands, forming a spinning wall of shrapnel.

  It hadn’t even been close to…this.

  Not thousands of objects. Tens, maybe hundreds of thousands. And maybe millions, since the scanner’s resolution was limited at this range, even on its deepest setting.

  Silence, except for the sound of the Slipwing’s machinery.

  “So,” Dash finally said, “you flew into that, huh?”

  “We did,” Leira said.

  “Wow.”

  “If you aren’t comfortable you can do it—”

  “What? No…pfft. I told you, I can fly the Slipwing anywhere, and do it blind.”

  “You sure?”

  “Absolutely!”

  Leira nodded and Dash turned his attention back to the scanner. There were so very many objects, all of them hard chunks of silicate rock, iron-nickel metal and ice, or combinations thereof. And yet…the scanner revealed no evidence of collisions, of debris shed onto deviant trajectories by bigger objects impacting one another. Like the Globe of Suns around them, all of this vast multitude of comets and asteroids and planetesimals seemed to be in stable orbits, locked into a vastly complex gravitational dance around a common point. Dash knew enough astro-dynamics to know that shouldn’t be possible. Even the most minute, errant tug on one object by the gravitational attraction of another should eventually cascade into a calamitous series of collisions…

  Which was amazing, Dash thought, but sitting her marveling at it wasn’t getting them any closer to accomplishing what they’d come here to do. He reached for the Fade controls—

  —then heard Conover’s hissing intake of breath and paused. Glancing back at the kid and Viktor, he said, “Um…anything I should know?”

  Conover looked at Viktor, then both shook their heads. “No,” Viktor said, “we should be fine.”

  “Should be?”

  “Just…go ahead.”

  Dash sighed and punched in the command to engage the Fade—

  —then sighed again, this time in relief, as it kicked in and translated the Slipwing partway back into unSpace. The scan resolution immediately crashed, but Dash was able to maintain enough of coherent picture to start the Slipwing on a trajectory to the Pasture. By using the Fade, he didn’t need to engage the fusion drive, whose exhaust would be an immediate giveaway, the way it had been for Leira and Viktor when they’d tried to sneak out of here. It did, though, use up more anti-deuterium fuel, to power the translation drive…and they were now down to about two-thirds of the full load they’d picked up on Penumbra. It should be enough.

  More to point, Dash thought, it would have to be enough, because he doubted they’d find any friendly fuel vendors here, in what was essentially the territory of Clan Shirna.

  Even through the diminished scan resolution induced by the Fade, they could see the Pasture approaching. Dash had studied it as best he could, trying to discern a pattern to the gross movement of all of the objects making it. From that, he could start selecting trajectories, even simulating them, to see which worked best. But they’d eventually have to cut the Fade and fully return to real space to get a clear and true picture…and then, if he could, he hoped they could spend some hours, even a day, analyzing the Pasture before entering it.

  And now it was time. They had to deactivate the Fade.

  “Okay, folks,” Dash said, “we’re coming out of Fade…now.”

  He touched a control and the half-rumble, half-whine of the Fade died. Normal, Euclidian space returned to surround the Slipwing.

  “Okay,” he said, as the Pasture resolved into…a mess of conflicting signals. “And that…isn’t good.”

  “I told you,” Leira said, “between the radiation from all these stars, and whatever those emissions are from the Pasture itself, scanners aren’t reliable. It gets a lot worse once we enter the Pasture.”

  “Okay, okay,” Dash said. “No problem. I got this.” He applied gentle reverse thrust, slowing the Slipwing. “We’ll just hang out here for a while, gather as much data as we can, and then—”

  A harsh blast of noise cut him off. He glanced at the scanner’s vid. Three contacts had just entered the scanner’s diminished range, approaching on a fast intercept trajectory. They read as ships, but none like Dash had ever seen before.

  “Aw, for…” he snapped. “Who the hell are they?”

  “Out here,” Conover said, “I’d suggest Clan Shirna.”

  “Yeah, no shit. What I mean is, how did they…oh, never mind.”

  “They must have been waiting for us,” Leira said, shaking her head. “Didn’t somebody say coming here is the last thing they’d expect us to do?”

  The three of them looked at Conover, who shrugged. “It really wasn’t logical for us to come here, into the heart of their territory. I guess Clan Shirna’s just not…logical.”

  Dash rolled his eyes and turned back to the controls. “No shit. You didn’t pick that up from the whole, we’re going to find you and kill you filthy heathens thing?”

  “They called us desecrators, not heathens.”

  “What difference does it—?”

  A chime cut Dash off. An incoming transmission. The face of Nathis, or someone who looked exactly like him, appeared on the comms vid.

  “Desecrators are compelled to desecrate,” he said, his neck patches bright crimson. “Sin inevitably compounds itself. Surrender to us now, confess your transgressions and we will be merciful, your deaths almost entirely painless.”

  “Almost entirely painless?” Dash said. “The guy just doesn’t know how to win people over, does he?”

  “Um…Dash?” Leira said. “We’re not just going to keep sitting here, are we…?”

  “Those Echoes are closing fast,” Viktor put in, and Dash glanced at him.

  “Echoes?”

  “Small, fast attack ships,” Viktor said, “stealthy, elusive. We ended up calling them Echoes. No idea what Clan Shirna calls them.”

  “Don’t think their technically-correct name
really matters right now,” Dash said, his fingers dancing over the controls. “Not unless that name’s All A Big Misunderstanding, that is.” The Slipwing’s fusion drive lit with a dull rumble and an abrupt surge of acceleration, one too great for the dampers to entirely suppress. Dash set a trajectory for the nearest rim of the Pasture.

  “Um, Dash,” Leira said, “don’t you think this is a good time to just bug out of here?”

  “Come all this way, just to give up? I don’t think so. Besides, that Nathis just…pisses me off.”

  “Those Echoes are fast. I don’t think you’re going to outrun them.”

  “Don’t need to outrun them.” Dash made a minute adjustment to their heading. “Just need to outfly them.”

  “This is their territory—”

  “Yeah, but they don’t go into the Pasture, right? That’s that whole…Maelstrom thing we read about. So they’ll be no better at flying in there than we are.”

  “Dash,” Viktor said, “I agree with Leira here. The smartest thing for us to do is just cut our losses here, translate and run.”

  “No, we’re not going to do that,” Dash said, his eyes roaming across the various vids, taking in their rapidly-changing data. “First, like I said, we’ve come this far, and the Pasture is right there. We’ll probably never get another chance this good.”

  “This is a good chance?” Conover muttered, but Dash ignored him.

  “And second,” Dash went on, “even if we wanted to cut and run, we can’t.”

  “Why not?” Viktor asked.

  “Because,” Leira said, answering the question as she studied the same displays Dash did, “the radiation from the Globe of Suns, together with the ghost emissions from the Pasture itself, are making proper spatial scans impossible. There’s no way the nav could orient us properly when we translate to unSpace. We’d—”

  “Be flying blind,” Viktor said, a resigned tone in his voice.

  Dash tapped controls, his eyes locked on the onrushing Echoes. “Yeah, it’s one thing for me to fly more or less blind in real space. You really want to take off in some random direction in unSpace, though? Find ourselves light years away from…well, anything, without enough fuel to do anything about it?”