The Messenger

by J. N. Chaney

  Which meant, Dash thought, that it was time to change this from an ultimately futile chase into…something else.

  He picked up the Lens and moved to the cargo bay where they’d kept the Ribbon. While Viktor and Conover remained discreetly outside the bay, Dash activated a portable comms repeater, took a breath, and hit transmit.

  “Hello, Nathis. Just wanted to, you know, say hi, and…oh right, to show you this.” He lifted the Lens into view. “See, we have things you can’t even begin to imagine here. Like this.” He gestured at the Ribbon. “The things we’ve acquired and learned, it’s pretty amazing. And when we get to the other side of the Shadow Nebula—because we will, and you won’t be able to stop us—we’ll be entirely free of your reach. And then, I’m going to sell all this remarkable shit to the biggest navy I can find, and point them right back at you. Probably provoke a rush to explore and exploit your precious Pasture, too. Ain’t no way you’re going to be able to stop that. Anyway, all this means that your glory ends here. Just wanted you to hear that.”

  Dash flicked off the comms and took another deep breath. He glanced at Viktor and Conover, who’d remained well off-screen. “Well, that should rile him up.”

  As soon as Dash said it, the comms lit up with an incoming signal. He smirked and said, “And now he probably wants to talk about it.”

  “I suspect,” Conover said, “he’s just going to make a series of threats.”

  “Gee, you think?”

  Viktor rubbed his chin. “Well, if we ever had a chance of negotiating an end to this, we don’t anymore.”

  Dash curled his lip. “Do you really think we ever did?”

  “Uh, no.”

  Dash looked at the Lens and said, “Okay, so, time for the next part.”

  “Dash,” Conover said, “you do realize your chances of actually pulling this off—”

  “Are something I don’t need to know.” He flashed his best grin at the kid. “Unwarranted confidence is what’s got me this far. Don’t try to get me started on being realistic about things.” He looked at Viktor. “Is the escape pod ready?”

  “As it will ever be.”

  Dash put the Lens into his pocket. “Okay, let’s go before I actually do start considering my chances.”

  The Slipwing’s escape pod, which Dash had nicknamed the Halfwing, wasn’t much—a small crew hab; minimal systems for navigation, comms, and scanning; a powerful fusion engine; and an abbreviated unSpace drive. Her austere interior wasn’t meant for comfort; it was meant for survival. And as for her ability to maneuver—again, she wasn’t a fighting ship. He could expect only a brief bit of unSpace travel—intended to be just enough to get close enough to an inhabited planet, shipping route, or other bit of civilization that rescue might actually be possible—and not much more fusion burn time. On the plus side, she was small, maneuverable, and fast.

  Dash clambered into the Halfwing and looked at Viktor and Conover, who were framed in the hatchway. “You guys take good care of my ship.” He raised his voice a bit. “That goes for you, too, Leira.”

  “Don’t worry, Dash,” she said. “You just come back as soon as you can.”

  “That’s the plan.”

  He waved at Viktor and Conover, then closed and sealed the hatch. He levered himself into the pilot’s couch, a chore made more awkward by the bulk of the vac suit he was wearing, minus helmet, which he kept nearby. The Halfwing had no armor to speak of, so even minor damage could open her to space. Her systems were already powered and everything glowed green, including the airlock indicator.

  “Okay, Leira, give me a countdown.”

  “Okay, coming out of Fade in three…two…one…”

  The sound of the Fade system faded.

  “And,” Leira went on, decelerating in—”

  “No!” Dash called. “Don’t slow down! If you do, Nathis will be on top of you in no time.”

  “We can’t eject you at this velocity, Dash.”

  “Sure you can. Just make sure I’m not going to be instantly slammed into a big rock.”

  He heard Leira’s sigh over the comms. “Fine, give me a second.”

  Dash waited, staring at the comms. Come on, Leira, our window of time here is pretty tight.

  “Okay, Dash, hang on.”

  “Hanging on.”

  The world suddenly turned sideways, then upside down, yanking Dash’s stomach along with it. He gasped, blinked away starbursts behind his eyes from the sudden, wrenching accelerations, then frantically poked at the controls. First, he activated the dispersion field, a jury-rigged EM emitter Viktor had installed to obscure his life-signs from any of Clan Shirna’s scans. Then he activated the thrusters, getting control of the Halfwing and aiming her on a trajectory away from the departing Slipwing and back toward a searing blue star in the Globe of Suns. As he did, a prerecorded message transmitted from the Slipwing.

  “Hey, Nathis,” his voice said, “I really don’t want you to get your hands on this Lens, so it’s going into a blue star to be puffed away to vapor. We’ll hang onto the other stuff, though. So, guess you have a decision to make about what you want more—us, or the Lens. Better think fast.”

  Dash engaged the fusion drive, pushing the Halfwing back toward the star. Now Nathis had two targets, but only one ship to chase after them. Sure enough, the big capital suddenly began to decelerate, intending to come after the Halfwing.

  Barring anything unforeseen, the Slipwing was in the clear. Now, if he could only shake Nathis, then use an unSpace trajectory back toward civilization, and then rendezvous back with the Slipwing, things would be okay.

  There was a whole lot of if involved, and myriad things that could wrong.

  Dash sighed and focused on the Halfwing’s scanners and controls.

  At least it kept life interesting.

  12

  Dash wove the Halfwing among tumbling chunks of ice and rock, one eye glued to the scanners ahead, the other watching the rearview screen. The big capital ship had taken a long time to come about and make chase, but there she was, burning fuel like she was made of the stuff. The edge of the Shadow Nebula was rapidly approaching, and Dash’s apprehension was growing. He needed to shake Nathis entirely, then take advantage of the Halfwing’s miniscule size and extreme maneuverability—as long as she had fuel, of course—to get away. He wondered if Nathis might try something extreme like an unSpace translation to close the distance. That wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, because it would be more likely to put his ship somewhere far removed from the Halfwing. It just wasn’t easy to maneuver after small, specific targets through unSpace, but if he got desperate enough, it might come to that.

  A chime sounded. Not long to the boundary of the Nebula, now.

  Dash hated this part. It combined all the stress and uncertainty of being in ever-increasing danger, with the tedium of flying a long journey. He tried reading, sleeping, listening to music, and even watching a vid, but Nathis’s ship loomed a little closer every time he checked, so it was hard to stay focused on anything but worrying.

  A long while passed, then a second chime sounded. The Halfwing’s scanners were reporting clear space not far ahead.

  Dash sat up, shook his head to clear it, and focused. Okay. He’d be in clear space for, well, quite a long time—since before Nathis had even emerged from the Shadowed Nebula. Interference from the Nebula and the Halfwing’s tiny size should be enough to let him break away and find somewhere to hide. Then, once he’d thoroughly lost Nathis, he’d set a course toward the prearranged rendezvous with the Slipwing and, hopefully, they’d be entirely in the clear.

  Another sound came from the scanner. Not a chime, though. An alarm. As the Halfwing brushed through the last, tenuous clouds of dust and gas that marked the utter boundary of the Nebula, she detected something that was a threat, and not all that far away.

  Dash studied the scanner output. “What the…”

  The scanner pondered the fuzzy datapoint, then clarified it.

>   “Shit!”

  It was an Echo, and it was far closer than Dash had expected any Clan Shirna ship to be.

  Dash rotated the Halfwing, hard. A particle beam blast blew through space close enough to cause a minor electrical surge in some of her less shielded systems. There was no damage, and even if there had been, the systems weren’t critical—although listening to music or watching vids might soon be out of the question.

  The two Echoes chasing him wove back and forth, trying to lay down a pattern of fire that would hem the Halfwing in, and eventually converge in an unavoidable barrage. Only Dash’s frantic flying, and the fact that the Echoes were probably still under strict orders to just disable and not destroy him, had prevented disaster so far.

  Dash scowled at the Echoes racing after him. The plan had been sound, even a good one, but it hadn’t accounted for the Echoes that had chased them into the Nebula getting damaged, then withdrawing back into clear space to wait for help. Unfortunately, damaged wasn’t disabled, so the Echo pilots had decided to brave the risk of piloting their wounded craft after him. Not that it had likely been a choice; Dash was pretty sure Nathis would happily send a couple of his pilots to their deaths, if it means a shot at getting the Lens. And, given the insane devotion of Clan Shirna to their cause, he also didn’t doubt the pilots would do just that.

  Another salvo of particle beam fire tried to converge on the Halfwing. Again, Dash was able to weave his way out of it through desperate, wrenching maneuvers. If there’d been a third Echo, they would have been able to make dodging their fire impossible and he’d have been disabled and captured long ago. The trouble was the Halfwing’s fuel was already down to worrying levels, so he only had a limited amount of time left.

  He needed to get somewhere safe. The only place he could envision that even remotely qualified was back inside the Pasture.

  The nearest of the engineered comets was now visible, a point of light illuminated, ironically, by the same blue star from the Globe of Suns he’d told Nathis he’d used to destroy the Lens. He could only hope the Clan Shirna edict against entering the Pasture would make the Echo pilots break off their chase rather than follow him in, because, frankly, after that, Dash was pretty much out of ideas.

  The Echoes put on a burst of power to close. At least one of them did. The other one lagged behind, either being strategic in some elusive way Dash just didn’t get, or because of damage. Probably the latter. Dash considered the Halfwing’s fuel supply. She had enough for her fusion drive to keep accelerating into the Pasture, but it would be touch-and-go how much decelerating she’d be able to do once inside. And if he couldn’t decelerate, then he wouldn’t be able to do anything but keep sailing along through the Pasture, eventually emerging on the other side, months from now. Not that that mattered, because he’d be a freeze-dried corpse long before then. The Halfwing could only sustain him for a few weeks.

  He tried to imagine sitting buckled into this acceleration couch that long, but he soon gave up.

  I wonder if it was something like this that happened to the crashed Sooner ship we found. Did they run out of fuel, or lose control, or—

  Another alarm made him jump. He looked at the scanner.

  Missile launch. No, two of them. Both from the further back of the two Echoes. He wasn’t sure why the nearer didn’t fire missiles as well. Maybe she couldn’t. Small miracles…

  “Oh, well now, aren’t you guys clever.”

  The obvious intent of the two Echoes was clear. Again, since there were only two, they couldn’t box him irrevocably in with their particle cannons. The geometry of things was such that he would always have an escape route from their firing solution. But the two missiles would effectively act as a third Echo, meaning Dash would have to pretty much accept being hit by at least one of them, or being hit by the Echoes’ particle cannons.

  It actually was clever. Very clever. Too clever.

  Because, being unarmed, the Halfwing had no hard countermeasures against missiles. She did have some EM jamming capability, but that was more an afterthought. She really wasn’t made for bailing out in the middle of space battles—not unless you had friends nearby who could protect you and pick you up. Alone, against two dedicated attack ships, all the escape pod was really good for was getting you to the scene of your death.

  Shit.

  Dash furiously pondered the options. A single particle beam hit would cripple the Halfwing, if not outright destroy her. There was little doubt Nathis had specifically ordered that not to happen, but if it did, the instant of satisfaction that some Echo pilot was going to be on the receiving end of Nathis’s wrath wasn’t going to give much consolation. The detonation of a missile warhead, on the other hand, might offer some hope, because the danger zone of the blast effect was actually quite small—inverse square law and all that. So, if he could maneuver and time things just right, he might have a chance.

  “This is going to be cutting things close,” Dash muttered, focusing on the scanners and the Halfwing’s controls. “As in, I wouldn’t shave myself that close.”

  He began nudging the controls, puffing small reactions from the thrusters. He had to think far, far ahead of the respective trajectories of the Halfwing, the Echoes, and their missiles. Think about not where they were, but where they were going to be, and when they were going to be there. He could do it all with math, or, correction, Conover could probably do it all with math. Dash had to rely on judgement, and experience, and luck.

  Yeah. Luck. Lots of that.

  The missiles closed. Dash saw the Echoes lining themselves up, arranging their trap. He watched them carefully, looking for any hint that they were playing a fast one and would try a double-bluff. It would be a hell of a letdown to fly right into one of their particle beams, after all.

  “Here we go,” Dash said to the Halfwing. “Let’s do this, sweetheart, and then we can take a rest.”

  Dash paused and then broke hard, right into the path of the oncoming missiles. At the same time, he ramped the Halfwing’s fusion thrust to override power, filling the space in her wake with hot, electrically-charged gas.

  But the missiles weren’t dumb. One immediately swerved out of his exhaust plume, sacrificing its chance to hit him to feed telemetry to its companion—a trick not unlike the one the Slipwing’s missiles had used against the Clan Shirna frigate during their escape from the Pasture. Dash snapped, “Shit!” and swung the Halfwing sideways, making her thrust perpendicular to her course. She rapidly slewed away from the missile still chasing her; it burned, making it hard to follow, and then it detonated.

  There was a dazzling flash, then a hard crash of static over the comms. For a moment, Dash thought that maybe he’d pulled it off, that the missile had reached the limit of its range and detonated as close as it could, which wasn’t close enough. But then a tsunami of incandescent plasma, stellar-hot, washed over the Halfwing and vaporized chunks of her hull.

  A thunderous roar and the cabin filled with fog, which was instantly swept into space by the explosive decompression. Dash had the presence of mind to jam his helmet on; by the time it sealed, the Halfwing’s atmosphere was gone. He scanned the controls, but most of them were dark. Ahead loomed the alternating midnight black and dazzling silver white of a comet. The Halfwing would shoot past it, but, acting on raw instinct, Dash used what control he still had to point the burning fusion drive right at it. As the crippled Halfwing decelerated relative to the comet, he braced himself, counted to five, because five seemed about right, then switched all power left to the little ship into the inertial dampers. A sudden surge of artificial gravity shoved him down in his seat, then more systems failed, and something groaned behind him, like tearing metal.

  13

  There was darkness, a long tunnel of it, enormously far away, and at its end, a faint point of light.

  He started clawing his way toward it, climbing the tunnel as though scaling a vertical shaft. That light, he had to reach that light. Otherwise, he’d fall backward
, deeper into the tunnel. He’d lose sight of the light, and that would be it. There would be no more light.

  The faint glow suddenly swelled, enveloping him.

  Dash opened his eyes.

  There was silence. Darkness.

  His breath rumbled in his ears. Something enclosed him, tightly. What?

  Wait. He’d been aboard the Slipwing, with Leira and Viktor and Conover—

  No.

  There’d been more. The Halfwing. A chase. By Echoes. Then there was a missile.

  After a thunderous roar, the cabin filled with fog, which was instantly swept into space by the explosive decompression, the alternating midnight black and dazzling silver white of a comet.

  He’d hit the comet. Crashed into it.

  How was he still even alive?

  Dash considered his body, his limbs. Everything still seemed to be there. And although there was pain, there wasn’t too much pain. Mostly some specific, bright spots of hurt, and an ache that seemed to involve his whole body, like he was one, continuous bruise.

  But why was everything so dark?

  It took Dash a moment to realize that it was literally dark, as in, no light. He switched on his vac suit lamp and the world erupted into control panels, components, and structural members, but everything was lifeless and tilted askew. He lifted a hand and poked experimentally at some controls. But there was nothing. Not even a spark. He glanced at the master power panel, but it was as dead as anything else.

  The Halfwing was dead. And, judging from the distortion of her hull, no longer even a spacecraft. She was just wreckage now.

  That realization kickstarted a whole, new line of thinking. He had to evacuate. To where, well, that was something to worry about later. He reached under the seat and yanked out the crash bag, a kit containing things of immediate usefulness—suit patches, extra power cells, a distress beacon—before he levered himself out of his harness, wincing, groaning, and clambering to his feet. Then he floated up and banged his helmet on an overhead. Right. There was no gravity to speak of. He’d have to be careful.