The Messenger

by J. N. Chaney

  A sudden rush of alarm slammed through him, washing away the last of the fuzz clouding his brain. If the fusion core was breached, there could be radiation, and a lot of it.

  But the rad counter in his suit just showed a little above normal background. And the anti-deuterium storage had obviously stayed intact, too, or he wouldn’t even be here to wonder about it…he’d just be an expanding cloud of ionized gas mixed in with the rest of the Halfwing, and probably most of the comet, too.

  It took Dash a while to exit the remains of the Halfwing. When he finally had, and was standing on what had been her prow, he looked around, his suit lamp revealing his new surroundings.

  The Halfwing had obviously impacted on a portion of the comet that was just unconsolidated ice, shot through with flecks of gravel. That, plus the fact that she’d come in backward, her fusion drive burning, decelerating with respect to the comet, had prevented total disaster. She’d ploughed a tunnel deep into the ice, her fusion exhaust vaporizing material as she crashed, until the drive finally failed. The catastrophic crushing of her rearmost two-thirds absorbed the rest of the impact. The tunnel she’d driven in her death-dive was still open, the walls obviously melted by the energy of it all and then refrozen. And the only reason he’d survived was because the inertial damper had cushioned him during the crash, at least until it finally failed.

  But the Halfwing’s impromptu excavations weren’t stable and would probably soon collapse. That meant Dash should be in a hurry. But he found it a little hard to get too worked up about it. He was alone, with maybe a day or two of oxygen, almost no other resources, and far, far away from anyone except Clan Shirna, who probably wouldn’t enter the Pasture to come after him anyway. And that assumed the fusion core didn’t breach or the anti-deuterium containment didn’t fail.

  “Yup, things are definitely looking bad for our hero,” he said, his own voice echoing loudly in his head.

  But he wasn’t dead yet.

  Eventually, though, Dash began to wonder if just having his lights put out in the crash might not have been better. His suit was leaking air, and doing it in a place he couldn’t reach with a patch. It was supposed to be self-sealing, but that was obviously a bit of overhyped marketing by the manufacturer. So, instead of a couple of days, he probably had only hours. Days would have given him a least a chance to contact the Slipwing and try to set up some sort of rescue. Hours? Not so much.

  Keenly aware of the oxygen pressure indicator in his heads-up display, and its slow-but-steady crawl toward zero, he pushed his way around the Halfwing’s crumpled hull. Maybe he could salvage something from her engineering module. The rads climbed as he approached, but that didn’t seem all that important right now. And an anti-deuterium release would end things before he could even register it. So, all things considered, it was worth nothing. It was a complete waste of time. The Halfwing’s engineering bay, or what was left of it, was buried in solid, glassy-smooth ice. The residual heat had probably done that, melting the ice, which froze again and encased everything in a frozen tomb. It would take Dash days to hack his way through it with what he had on hand, which meant it might as well take forever.

  He let out a sigh. “Well, shit.”

  So this was it. This was how it would all end. All things considered, it was actually surprising he’d made it this long. His only real regret was that he wasn’t going out in an actual blaze of glory, something he’d always just assumed would happen. The battle against the Echoes, and the subsequent crash—well, that had probably been spectacular, but there’d been no one to see it. Blazes of glory weren’t of much use if they went unnoticed.

  But he wasn’t even getting that. He’d survived the awesome crash only to face a much more unpleasant death from anoxia. His best bet was probably just to get it over with—open up his faceplate and just let it happen, rather than dragging it out.

  He sighed again. “Well, goodnight, universe,” he said, reaching for the latches. “It’s been fun, but now it’s time…time to…”

  He frowned. What was that?

  Dash pushed himself deeper into the narrowing gap between ice walls and wrecked Halfwing. There was a crack in the ice. No, a gap. An opening.

  And he could see light glowing through it.

  Aboard the Slipwing, they’d already established that these comets had alien stuff, for lack of a better term—technology, items, artifacts, whatever—buried in them. He hadn’t really forgotten that, it just hadn’t seemed really that relevant. But, looking back along the tunnel the Halfwing had drilled into the comet, he realized she’d gone pretty deep. That put her—and him—closer to whatever the Unseen had buried in this comet.

  He had to hack away some ice to make an opening big enough to push through, but once he had, Dash found himself in another tunnel. This one, though, was perfectly cylindrical, its ice walls as smooth and crystalline as polished glass. Now he drifted along it, pushing himself off the wall periodically, letting it take him…wherever it was taking him. Probably face-to-face with some bizarre, incomprehensible machinery, which would make a really interesting backdrop to his corpse.

  An alarm sounded. It was the low oxygen alert.

  Huh, okay. Not so much hours left, as minutes.

  Dash shrugged inside his suit and kept nudging himself along, his light flung far ahead of him, turning the tunnel walls to glowing crystal. Behind him, there was nothing but midnight darkness. But he’d seen light.

  On a whim, he switched his suit lamp off. Sure enough, the ice glowed with a faint, bluish radiance. He decided to leave the lamp off and just try to navigate by the soft glow. He might miss something subtle otherwise, and right now, subtle things could be the difference between life and death.

  Another alarm sounded. It was the oxygen critical alert.

  The tunnel went on, and he had a few minutes of exploration left, so he might as well use it. He continued, pushing along and drifting.

  Then a final alert sounded. Oxygen depleted. So all he had now was whatever was left inside the suit.

  “It’ll get me to the scene of my death,” he said, then giggled, because he’d thought the same thing about the Halfwing’s drive just a few hours ago.

  He giggled again, but it trailed off into a soft groan. Everything was slowing down. His head hurt. Carbon dioxide poisoning. Huh. Dash was proud that he recognized that.

  The tunnel was gone. Darkness was around, above, and below. Well, this must be the dying part. Except, what was that enormous face?

  Indeed, Dash found himself hanging in front of a face—angular, stylized, metallic, and dull grey metal rimmed with something that gleamed like gold. It seemed to be lit from all around by a soft, blue glow that now seemed to come from all around him, but very far away. He had the vague sense of being in a vast cavern

  So he was going to share his tomb with some enormous, metallic guy.

  Weird.

  The face loomed closer as he drifted toward it. Now it filled his faceplate. A blue circle suddenly illuminated, looking like a large button. He pushed it, and there was movement—metallic things sliding and rotating around. Now he saw…a chair?

  Dash shrugged again. The movement made grey stars blossom behind his eyes. More soft, wooly greyness pushed in from all around, consuming the world. Now, it was just a narrow tunnel of grey.

  Then there were more tunnels, so many tunnels.

  Dash settled in the chair, making himself comfortable for the afterlife. That went on forever, right? Might as well be sitting down comfortably for it, then.

  “Power Core initializing. Establishing connection.”

  Wait, did I say that?

  That was Dash’s next-to-last experience. The last was an explosion of pain that blew everything away—

  —and then it all came thundering back in, a rush as the world slammed back into focus. A tidal wave of agony came with it. It seemed to emanate in waves from his back, and almost washed away words spoken by a deep, resonant voice.

  “Link
established. Welcome, Messenger. I have been waiting for you.”

  14

  Pain.

  There was a tsunami of sensation, experience, and information.

  His consciousness was expanding, snaking along shimmering pathways, splintering into new awareness, then continuing along new strands of glimmering light.

  He felt a sense of growing. Of expanding, both physically and mentally. Of becoming…more.

  This went on and on, for what felt like an eternity, and then it began to subside, the rush of change and growth slowing. More and more of…Dash, that was his name, of Dash began to reemerge. Eventually, it was mostly Dash, and he could begin to think about just what was going on.

  He found himself slung in a cradle that had seemed to shape and conform itself to him. It was, well, comfortable failed to describe it. More to point, the Oxygen Depleted alert in his heads-up seemed suddenly redundant. He had no problem breathing. Mind you, what he was breathing in and out was stale and sluggish and spent, probably more carbon dioxide and sweat than anything else, but it didn’t seem to matter. Dash finally unlatched his helmet and pulled it free with a hiss that made his ears pop. Fresh, cool air washed over his face and he took a moment just to feel and taste it.

  Where am I?

  “You are safe, Messenger.”

  Dash blinked. He hadn’t said anything, but got an answer anyway. Well, huh.

  “I…” he started, but had to stop and dig his voice out of wherever it had gone deep in his throat. He coughed, cleared his throat, and said, “I’m safe? Okay. That’s good. Safe is good.”

  “Your physiology and biochemistry were unexpected. Primitive. The connection took longer than anticipated to establish and stabilize, but it is now within acceptable parameters,” the voice in his head said. It had a quality that was inhuman, crisp, yet warm.

  “The connection?” He looked around. He seemed to be in roughly spherical chamber, featureless except for the cradle holding him, which was itself suspended from a pair of metallic columns to his left and right. “Wait.”

  Dash shook his head. Between near death from anoxia, and whatever the fuck had happened since, his head rang, while intelligent thought swam in and out of reach.

  Dash took a deep breath. “Okay. Let’s go, right back to basics. Where am I?”

  “You are currently co-located with object 2763548263, approximately 1.5 kilometers below the closest point of its surface.”

  “I…okay, hang on.”

  Somehow, it seemed to Dash that the voice he was hearing, and understanding perfectly well, wasn’t really a comprehensible language—at least, not to him. It also seemed that the distance in kilometers to the comet’s surface hadn’t been measured in those units at all. Some sort of sophisticated, real-time translation was taking place, allowing him to both hear the language as it really was, but understand it anyway.

  “Alright,” Dash finally said. “Let’s try this again. Where am I right now? As in, what is this room, or compartment, or whatever it is?”

  “You are in the interface. Given your physiology, it is the only way you can properly interact with the Archetype.”

  “Wait wait wait. What’s a…”

  But Dash trailed off. The question wasn’t really necessary. As soon as the word Archetype entered his conscious thoughts, a flood of memory surged through him. Trouble was, they weren’t his memories. Or, rather, they were, but they were memories of his things he hadn’t really experienced.

  “Let me see,” he said. “Let me see this Archetype.”

  “As you wish, Messenger.”

  The sphere around him vanished and was replaced by a vast cavern of ice. The transition wrenched at Dash, making him momentarily dizzy. Strangely, though, it wasn’t as though he was inside a giant metallic face, which is what his still wobbly memories seemed to recall, but rather looking through his own eyes.

  Oh.

  Shit.

  “Can you let me see myself? Or, what I mean is, the Archetype?”

  Even somehow knowing what was coming, Dash was utterly astounded.

  He was inside a massive, metallic construct, shaped like a huge humanoid. It was both vastly imposing, but also supremely elegant. Its huge torso was a complex arrangement of triangular facets, its limbs a series of long, enmeshed prisms, fully articulated at shoulders, elbows, and wrists, as well as at hips, knees, and ankles. Its head—upon which was the face he had seen when he entered this vast chamber—was sleek, tapering to a pointed chin. Titanic, wing-like devices were folded upon its back.

  It was stunning. Terrifying. And utterly beautiful.

  And it was Dash. Or Dash was it. Or would be. Or partly was.

  “The connection is currently muted, Messenger. Now that you have fully interfaced and there is no risk of self-damage, do you wish for it to be fully implemented?”

  Dash almost asked, What does that mean? But he knew what it meant, somehow. Right now, his connection with the Archetype was passive, feeding experience into his brain but allowing nothing to travel from him to it.

  “Uh…” he started, but had to shake his head, like he was trying to clear away the last fog of a hangover. This was like a fucking dream. Or being dead, maybe? Maybe he’d died, and this is what came afterward—an afterlife of living inside a giant, humanoid mech.

  Dash smirked. As far as he knew, no religion had ever suggested that.

  He finally nodded. “Yeah. Let’s do it. Go ahead, turn the connection up to full.

  Between one heartbeat and the next, Dash ceased to be merely part of the Archetype, and became the Archetype.

  He lifted a hand, but his own, fleshy hand didn’t move. Instead, a colossal hand with segmented, metallic fingers rose into view. And yet, it was still his hand. He moved it, rotated it at the wrist, and flexed the fingers, the way he always had. But it was the Archetype’s hand that did those things. It was entirely seamless. From Dash’s point of view, nothing had changed; he was still Dash.

  Except Dash was now an enormous alien construct.

  “There are no anomalies in the connection, Messenger. All is normal.”

  “Oh. Well, that’s good I guess.” He frowned. “Why do you keep calling me Messenger.”

  “That is your identity.”

  “Um, no, it’s not. I’m Dash.”

  “Do you wish for that to be your new identity?”

  “I…I do, yeah.”

  “Very well, Dash."

  Dash took a deep breath and…and then took another one. The Archetype’s chest didn’t rise and fall. But when he moved his leg, a titanic leg moved beneath him.

  Yeah, this was going to take some getting used to.

  “Okay, Archetype? Is that what I call you?”

  “If you wish, but it is unnecessary. My only connection is with you, though this specific unit has a designation of its own. That name is Sentinel.”

  “Ah. Okay, Sentinel, what exactly are you? Like, I guess you’re a machine? A computer? A really, really powerful computer?”

  “My nature is problematic to render in a way that you would comprehend. For your purposes, though, computer is sufficient.”

  “Well, that’s sounds just a little condescending, but okay. And how long have you been here?”

  “I was placed here, awaiting the arrival of the Messenger, approximately two hundred thousand solar years ago,” Sentinel said.

  “Two hundred?” He breathed, “Holy shit.” So, when this Archetype had been placed here, humans were primordial ooze, or apes, or something primitive anyway, back on Old Earth.

  “Hang on. You’re not saying you’ve been waiting here for two hundred thousand years for me, are you?”

  “Based on the best information available, you are the Messenger, so yes, I have been waiting here for you.”

  “Oh. Well, sorry I took so long to get here.” He considered all the things he somehow knew about this. The Sentinel was not only a massive, walking avatar resembling a colossal person, it was also capable
of flight through space—both subluminal, and through unSpace. The details of the technology involved in all this were both intimately familiar and utterly alien to him, but Viktor or Conover might be able to make better sense of it all.

  Viktor. Conover. Leira. Right. They were out there.

  What would they make of this?

  “They would shit themselves,” he said, then considered the Archetype further. It was fundamentally powered by what seemed to be a microscopic singularity—a tiny black hole. The physics of it were such that the smaller a black hole, the more energy it radiated; it was an elusive concept Dash had heard called a kugelblitz. Essentially a limitless source of energy, a kugelblitz would render concepts like fuel obsolete. Trouble was, creating a kugelblitz entailed harnessing incomprehensible amounts of energy, far beyond anything all of the Galactic Arm could even muster. So, it remained an idea only, a fanciful dream that might work in stories, but never in reality.

  But there was one right here, and it was powering the thing that Dash had become.

  “Okay,” he said. “We…er, I can leave here, right? This is as much a ship as a…”

  He struggled to find a word to describe the Sentinel. The one that finally came to him was from an ancient vid he’d watched, something from the days of Old Earth. The word was mech.

  “As much a ship as a mech, right?” he asked Sentinel.

  “It would serve little purpose to prevent the Messenger from leaving this place.”

  “So that’s a yes?”

  “It is intended to move to the places it is needed, no matter where those may be,” Sentinel said.

  “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  Dash took a long, slow breath. He’d gone from a desperate plan to thwart Nathis and Clan Shirna, to being plunged into a hopeless ordeal that would inevitably end in his death, to being merged with a vast alien mech representing technologies undreamed of.

  What a day.