The Messenger

by J. N. Chaney

  No one answered. There was no need.

  And the Echoes continued to close.

  The minutes ticked by. Dash figured the Echoes would be in long firing range shortly before they entered what passed as the nearest edge of the Pasture. He turned to Leira and Viktor.

  “What do you know about these Echoes? They’re pretty small…can’t be too heavily armed, right?”

  “They seem to have no ability to translate,” Viktor replied. “That means they don’t have to worry about the weight and bulk of a translation drive or anti-matter fuel. What they saved in that…well, it seems like they used for weapons instead.”

  “They hit hard,” Leira went on. “Really hard. We had to translate to shake them.”

  “Great. Let’s just hope—”

  Another blare of warning. The Echoes had just fired, particle beams lancing out toward the Slipwing like reaching fingers. Dash winced at how close they came to hitting. Only the intense radiation and EM emissions bathing this region of space prevented it, degrading and diffusing the beams short of the Slipwing. Each Echo must carry an immensely powerful particle beam, with a far greater output than anything the Slipwing could muster.

  Well, shit. So fighting them wasn’t an option.

  “Viktor,” Dash said, “if I overcharge the fusion drive, can you fix it after?”

  “I…well…it depends on how much you stress it, and what kind of damage—”

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” Dash said, then dialed in new settings. The fusion drive flared into an incandescent exhaust plume extending tens of kilometers behind the Slipwing. She surged forward, stopping the steady approach of the Echoes, even reversing it a bit.

  That lasted only a moment, though, before their enemies put on extra speed and resumed closing. Dash glared at the vid. “Oh, come on—!”

  “Dash,” Leira said, cutting off his rant, “I think that did it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She gestured at the displays. “We’ll be entering the Pasture before they’ll be close enough to shoot again…see?”

  “Oh. Well…yeah. Of course. That was my plan all along.”

  Leira gave him a sidelong frown. Dash just offered her a smile back, but quickly returned his attention to the displays. As he did, something caught his eye. He did a quick mental calculation…then turned and said over his shoulder, “Viktor, you got the Fade working, right?”

  “Yes…at least, to about a ninety-five percent confidence. But you said yourself we can’t trust it, not with all of this interference…”

  “We can’t trust a full translation,” Dash replied, “but the Fade leaves us enough footprint in real space to at least do half-assed navigation.”

  “Well, yes—”

  Dash hammered at the controls, slewing the Slipwing hard and angling her sharply away from their original course.

  “Dash,” Leira said, “what the hell are you doing? They’re going to gain a lot of space on us now—!”

  “And,” Conover said, “you’re heading pretty much right for that star.”

  Dash nodded but stayed focused on the data. He was letting the Echoes effectively cut across the angle he’d made to their original trajectory, and they were now heading toward the nearest star in the Globe of Suns.

  “Okay, Viktor…in about thirty seconds, I want you to engage the Fade.”

  “But—”

  “Trust me on this.”

  Silence, like the aftermath of a heated argument. The seconds ticked by. The Echoes closed…fired.

  Particle beams tore apart the space surrounding the Slipwing. One raked across her aft quarter, but the interference from the environment and her own fusion exhaust plume blunted the worst of it, leaving just a shallow scar on her armor. But the Echoes streaked in. Their next shots would be far deadlier. And so would the corona of the approaching star…the hull temperature and radiation count were already rising.

  “Viktor, the Fade, now!”

  A moment of…nothing, and Dash thought, shit, that’s it then…but then the Fade kicked in, shoving reality aside and letting the Slipwing through the crack.

  They raced into the unnamed star’s corona and plunged toward the chromosphere. Even the Fade couldn’t protect them from that sort of heat, but it didn’t have to. His navigation was crude—it was like trying to watch where they were going through a drinking straw—but Dash slewed the Slipwing anyway, hoping it really was an outbound trajectory from the star, and he wasn’t taking them closer to incandescent disaster. And if the Fade failed, well, they wouldn’t have time to feel much of anything…

  “Dash,” Viktor said, “the Fade is getting unstable—”

  “There’s a harmonic in the field generator,” Conover put in. “I give it maybe a minute to failure.”

  “Like I was saying,” Viktor said, “unstable.”

  “You should probably get us out of this star’s corona,” Leira said, her eyes glued to what little scanner data came through the Fade. “Like…soon, Dash.”

  “That’s the plan,” Dash said.

  The Fade controls sounded a warning, warning of an impending automatic cut-off to avoid damaging the system. Dash overrode it.

  “Dash—!” Viktor snapped, but Dash held up a hand. “I said trust me, remember?”

  Dash gave it another thirty seconds, then cut the Fade, snapping the Slipwing back into real space. They emerged in time to see that the Echoes had followed them shockingly deep in the corona…and that one was now just an expanding cloud of debris, apparently hit by twisting loop of stellar plasma.

  “Those guys are dedicated,” Dash said, “I’ll give ‘em that.”

  “Maybe it was Nathis,” Leira said, but the comm picked that moment to crackle with his voice. There was no vid, either because Nathis hadn’t transmitted it, or the interference was too severe.

  “The martyrdom of one is as nothing to the monstrosity of your sins,” Nathis said, the message shot through with static. “Despite your animal cunning, you cannot prevail here.”

  “I’ll bet his neck spots are super red right now,” Dash said, then angled the Slipwing back onto a fast trajectory into the Pasture.

  “There’s still two of them,” Conover said. “And they still have enough firepower—”

  “Telling us the obvious, kid,” Dash said. “How about you help Viktor make sure the Fade’s okay for when we next need it…which might be pretty soon.”

  The Echoes opened fire as the Slipwing passed among the first outliers of the Pasture, a series of comets—dark chunks of rock and ice. The star through whose corona they’d passed was close enough to provoke tenuous streams of gas into wafting off the comets, offering something else to interfere with scanners. Dash backed off the fusion drive, skidded the Slipwing toward them, then returned the drive to overpower. A particle beam passed through her plasma wake, but the second slammed into her, boiling a gouge into her armor. On a whim, Dash killed the fusion drive altogether, then rotated the Slipwing to bring her own particle cannons to bear. The targeting reticle locked onto one of the Echoes and he fired—a long-range shot, but he was gratified to see glowing chunks of armor spall off her. He then spun the Slipwing back and firewalled the fusion drive again.

  “Fancy flying,” Leira said, obviously impressed despite herself. “A few more hits like that and we—”

  The Slipwing shuddered as she was hit again. Dash shook his head. “A firefight is not going to end well,” he said, slewing them around a comet, then rotating hard to pass behind another—

  Just as a particle beam slammed into it, smashing huge chunks of water vapor and ice free. Ice slammed into the Slipwing with a heavy succession of thuds. Dash glanced at the display as he rotated them again, trying to dodge behind a bigger, rockier chunk just ahead. He saw—

  —that one of the Echoes had suddenly surged forward, its pilot obviously driving her engines to destruction. An instant later, a collision alarm blared.

  The Echo’s pilot was trying
to ram them.’

  Dash had time to say, “Shit!”, before spinning the Slipwing through a half-turn so fast they were all flung to one side against their restraints, hard. The Slipwing shuddered and groaned deep in her alloy bones.

  The sudden deceleration threw off the Echo pilot’s trajectory. He burned, hard, to try and correct, but it was too late. His ship flashed past the Slipwing and slammed into the same comet that had taken the particle beam hit, vanishing into a brilliant flash that faded into an expanding, darkening cloud.

  “Everyone okay?”

  “Whiplash, maybe,” Leira said, “but, yeah.” Viktor and Conover just nodded, their eyes wide.

  Dash looked for the third Echo, expecting it to be closing, ready to shoot. But it had decelerated instead, and now fell far behind them.

  “He won’t enter the Pasture,” Conover said.

  As if to confirm, Nathis’s voice once more crackled over the comms. “Look to the martyrdom of my brother,” he said. “Such is our dedication to our sacred mission. He damaged a sacred object, and knew the price he must pay.”

  Dash thumbed the channel open. “What? You mean, he shot that comet, so he killed himself for it? That’s insane.”

  “We call it devotion.”

  “Look—”

  “That is what you, as desecrators, must face. Should you survive the Maelstrom, as unlikely as that is, we will be waiting.”

  Dash looked at the others, then forced a shrug.

  “Hey,” he said, “gives us something to look forward to, am I right?”

  No one else as much as cracked a smile.

  9

  Seen from up close, the Pasture had been amazing. Seen from inside, it was absolutely stunning.

  The stew of radiation and emissions made scanning difficult, but proximity at least added to the resolution. Indeed, there probably were hundreds of thousands of bodies of nearly every shape and size, from comets barely larger than the Slipwing, to massive asteroids the size of a small moon. What there was not was a debris field typical of Oort Clouds—particles and fragments whizzing about in all directions, the products of collisions, themselves colliding and veering off on new courses. Oort Clouds were typically chaos embodied. The Pasture, however, was nothing like that. It was a ponderous, stately dance, every object following a specific path, never intersecting another.

  Staring at the scans, Dash didn’t see how it was possible. Even the slightest perturbation of even a single object should be the beginning of a cataclysm. It might take centuries, even millennia, but there was no way such a place as this should be stable. And yet, here it was.

  “I think,” Conover eventually said, as they stared at repeater in the crew module, “I know why it’s so stable.” He pointed at the display, which he’d wound back to an earlier time index. “See this?” He indicated a particular object. “That’s the one that the Echo pilot shot, and then crashed into. That input of kinetic energy should have been enough to start a cascading failure. But watch.”

  They did. The data displayed beside the comet showed its trajectory and velocity…which were slowly changing.

  Dash glanced at Leira. “What the…?”

  She shook her head.

  In just moments, the object had settled back into what was undoubtedly its original path and speed.

  Viktor rubbed his chin. “No exhaust…no reaction mass of any kind.”

  “So this place…corrects itself,” Conover said. “All of these objects somehow adjust their trajectories, to keep everything where it should be.”

  Nods all around, followed by stunned silence at the implications. The technology to quickly and efficiently move an entire comet existed; a sufficiently powerful fusion drive could do it. But they would have detected an exhaust plume. In this case, there’d been…nothing. Somehow, something, located somewhere, had quietly nudged the comet back into its place in the vast formation, and done it in literally minutes.

  Dash finally let out a soft whistle. “Well…holy shit.”

  “There’s more,” Conover said. “The Pasture covers an area about half a light-year across. From the inside, it looks like…well, chaos, though we know it’s not. But it looks that way. But while we’ve been taking time to fix things—”

  “Like the Fade,” Viktor said, “and I could use your help with that again, Conover.”

  The kid nodded. “Yeah. No problem. Anyway, I used what we’ve been able to scan, and projected that out to encompass the whole Pasture.” He tapped at the screen, bringing up a new display. “Using only the largest objects, it looks like this.”

  The vid filled with a multitude of curved lines, depicting trajectories of the comets and asteroids and other bodies. It was immediately clear that it was far from a random clustering of paths. There was a pattern to it. Various patterns, in fact. The objects moved in groups, which themselves moved around one another, creating nodes, and arms, and even sections that resembled spiral galaxies. There were emptier regions, and others more densely packed…but it was, at the largest scale, symmetrical. An incredibly complicated symmetry, but a symmetry nonetheless.

  Dash finally said, “Huh. That’s…pretty amazing.”

  “Kind of an understatement,” Viktor said, and Dash shrugged.

  “I could go on and on, but…I think we’re all suitably impressed.”

  “It’s a mandala,” Conover said.

  They looked at him.

  “A mandala,” he went on, “is an ancient religious symbol, from the days of Old Earth…from the part called India. It’s a symbol that metaphorically represents the universe.”

  “So this is…what?” Dash asked. “You’re not saying this is a map…of the universe?”

  “No,” Conover said, “I’m not saying that. I’m saying it’s a mandala, or something very much like one. I don’t know what it represents, or if it represents anything but itself.”

  “But it obviously is artificial, a construct,” Leira said.

  Viktor puffed out a breath and crossed his arms. “That, I think, is a pretty safe bet.” He looked at Leira. “We missed this when we were here before.”

  “We weren’t looking for it. And then we had other things to occupy us, like not being killed by Clan Shirna.”

  “Okay,” Dash said, determined to bring the conversation back to more practical matters. “It’s huge, and awesome, and artificial. Great. Now what? Where do we go from here?”

  “Does it matter?” Conover asked.

  Dash nodded. “Yeah, it matters. We can’t use any sort of real space drive to travel any meaningful distance through it…it’s half a light to the other side. That would take us years, decades, even. That means we have to translate…which we can’t reliably do, because of all this damned interference. So that leaves the Fade.”

  “And when we use it, we burn anti-deuterium.”

  “Yeah, we do. So, before we start bumbling around this Pasture—”

  “Technically,” Conover said, “when we’re inside it, it’s the Maelstrom. At least, that’s what Clan Shirna says.”

  “Yeah, I’m not too worried about what Clan Shirna says or wants. Besides, the Pasture sounds…friendlier, so I’ll stick with that.”

  Conover shrugged.

  “Anyway,” Dash went on, “we need to pick and choose where we’re going, not just fly around hoping to stumble on interesting things.”

  “Well,” Viktor said, “I’d strongly recommend not using the Fade for another few hours…a day would be better. In the meantime, we could deep-scan as much of the…the Pasture…as we can.”

  Leira nodded. “We could generate some likely targets that way, then figure out which ones to investigate, and the optimum route to get to and between them.”

  “Okay,” Dash said. “Sounds like a plan. And maybe we can start with wherever you found the Lens, if you can remember—”

  A chime from the comms repeater interrupted him. Dash glanced at the others, said, “Probably more ominous warnings from our frien
d Nathis,” and opened the channel.

  A low, mournful wail erupted from the comms. It stopped…silence…then a more piercing, higher tone sounded, falling steadily in pitch, until it was a base rumble.

  “What the hell is that?” Viktor said.

  Dash looked from him to Leira. “You guys didn’t encounter this before, I take it.”

  The both shook their heads.

  The strange, almost sorrowful tones continued to waft from the comms. They listened, and even tried to get the comms to analyze and possibly translate, but there was no discernible pattern.

  “It might just be another form of interference,” Leira said, then frowned and looked down.

  “What’s wrong?” Dash asked.

  In reply, Leira extracted the Lens.

  It was glowing.

  Dash stared at it. “Okay…has it done that before?”

  Leira shook her head. “No.”

  “So this could be its make a star explode setting, then.”

  “It…” She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  Dash’s mind raced. “Shit. If one of those nearest stars in the Globe of Suns blows up, we’re…well, not in a good situation.” He couldn’t remember the distance to the nearest star, and was by no means an expert on what happened when they exploded—except that they more or less vaporized everything for a very long distance around. If they could translate into unSpace, that shouldn’t be a problem…but they couldn’t. And they definitely were not going to outrun the shock wave and radiation from an exploding star in real space.

  Shit.

  “There’s something…inside it,” Conover said.

  “What?”

  “Inside the Lens. I see…circuits, maybe?”

  Viktor frowned at it. “They look more like…veins? Or nerves?”

  “Maybe both,” Leira said.

  Dash scowled. “Does anyone care I’ve just discovered a deep distrust for alien tech? Especially when it’s on board my ship?”