The Messenger

by J. N. Chaney

  Crouching, he stepped on the bridge.

  It was chaos. Although the bridge hadn’t been impacted directly by the Archetype, there’d been enough collateral damage to take most of it out of action. Consoles shone error messages, sparked and sputtered, or just sat there dark and dead. Dash could see at least a half-dozen Shirna scattered about, some injured, some dead. The shock of the Archetype crashing into the ship must have been horrific. Thanks to its super advanced tech in the cradle, Dash had only felt a hard deceleration.

  But a few figures were still up. Dash recognized one of them.

  Nathis.

  Before he could react, a plasma blast smacked into the bulkhead beside him. Dash took cover behind a dead console and returned fire.

  No. There was no way he was going to get this far and fail to get Nathis. Leaping out of cover, Dash blazed away with both plasma pistols, dropping all but one of the remaining Shirna—and Nathis, who simply stood, glaring, his neck patches the angriest crimson Dash had ever seen.

  “Nathis!” he shouted, his voice echoing out of the vac suit’s amp. “I’m here for you! Why don’t you come and get me?”

  In answer, Nathis charged, racing across the bridge at Dash, snapping out shot after shot from his own plasma gun.

  Dash ducked back into cover and fiddled with one of the plasma pistols. “Oh shit, he is coming to get me!”

  He lunged the other way in time to see the second Shirna trying to flank him. A plasma shot hit the deck in front of Dash, showering his vac suit with sparks and droplets of molten metal. A warning flashed in his heads up-display, alongside a ticking timer:

  SUIT INTEGRITY COMPROMISED

  SELF-SEALING FUNCTION UNAVAILABLE

  Either the Archetype couldn’t fix and recharge his vac suit, or just hadn’t bothered and had put the power to other uses. Dash ignored it, firing his own pistol once, hitting the Shirna, and making him cry out…twice as the man fell.

  Dash immediately turned back the other way to find Nathis looming over him. The muzzle of his plasma pistol, aimed at Dash’s face, was a black hole leading to oblivion.

  “So,” Nathis snarled, “in the end, the Blasphemer fails, as Blasphemers always have, and always will.”

  “You know,” Dash snapped, cutting him off, “you can spare me all this self-righteous, holier-than-thou mumbo-jumbo. I know all about the Golden and your deal with them.”

  Dash was immensely satisfied to see a look of surprise, and then shock, wash over Nathis’s face. His neck patches faded from red to purple.

  Dash dropped his plasma pistol then reached up and unsnapped the fastener on his helmet, before pulling it off and dropping it with a clunk. If the repulsor field failed now and vented all this atmosphere, it wouldn’t matter, Dash’s suit was no longer sealed against vacuum anyway. By the time he had, Nathis had recovered enough to have his neck patches go red again.

  “What you think you know is irrelevant.”

  Dash tried keeping a count in his head, but cut Nathis off anyway, saying, “Yeah, I don’t think it is, actually. See, the Golden…they’re not what you think they are. They’re not going to set you up as some sort of governor, or whatever you think it is they’re going to do. If they aren’t stopped, they’ll destroy every living thing in this galactic arm. I might point out that every living thing includes you.”

  Nathis gave a dismissive sniff. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. That alien machine has clouded your mind. They—the Unseen—are the dangerous ones. They are the ones bent on extermination.”

  “Sounds like something the Golden would say.”

  “Enough!” Nathis raised the plasma pistol. “It makes no difference to you in any case, because you are now dead.”

  Dash counted…four…three…

  “Actually,” Dash said, suddenly grinning, “we both are.”

  Nathis’s eyes widened at his grin, making him hesitate long enough for Dash to throw himself backward—

  And for the world to turn white.

  The plasma pistol Dash had previously rigged for a timed detonation released its energy in a single, dazzling flash of heat and radiation. Nathis, apparently sensing danger in Dash’s attitude, had dropped at the last second. The console shadowed most of his body from the stellar flash, as it did for Dash; it still caught Dash up his right leg, causing a searing flare of pain, then numbness. The blast hit almost at the same time a shockwave propagated through the air still filling the bridge, slamming Dash against the base of a console and leaving his head ringing.

  For a while, Dash just lay there. Grey fuzz rolled in from the edges of his vision, similar to the effect of the hard deceleration when the Archetype had crashed into the cruiser, but more sustained. His last lucid thought was a desperate hope that Nathis was just as bad off, if not worse, because Dash was definitely about to pass out.

  He blinked. His ears rang…his head swam…lightning bolts of pain arced up and down his leg. He levered himself up to his elbows and saw that his vac suit was scorched black along his leg, from hip to foot. Its insulation seemed to have been just enough to prevent his leg from actually being incinerated, so that was something at least.

  How long had he been out?

  Dash looked around, blinking, trying to force away the greyness that kept trying to crawl back in and wipe away his tenuous consciousness. The bridge, already badly damaged, was now a shambles, the fusion blast having smashed and burned consoles and scorched bulkheads.

  Dash heard movement and turned toward it.

  Nathis was dragging himself upright. The whole left side of his body looked blistered and, in places, charred; the left side of his face was a crimson ruin. But he turned, facing Dash, a cosmic level of hatred burning in his one good eye.

  His mouth worked. What it said was, “You…die…now.”

  He flung himself at Dash.

  Dash tried to throw himself aside, but Nathis landed partly on top of him, pinning him. He tried to lever himself free, but his arms felt like wet Thalarian spice-noodles. Nathis raised a fist, wobbled, then swung it down at Dash’s face, apparently intent on simply beating him to death.

  Dash put everything he could summon into one, desperate heave. He threw Nathis aside and back, sending him crashing into the bridge’s outer bulkhead, right beneath a vision port.

  Clambering to his feet, Dash looked wildly around for the plasma pistol he’d dropped. It was nowhere to be seen. He now realized some of the grey fuzz obscuring his vision was actually smoke, from whatever the plasma blast had incinerated. A heavy stink of hot metal and burning hung in the air. He turned back to Nathis, just in time for the big—because he was big—Shirna to lunge at him, awkwardly, but still driving Dash back against a console, slamming the air from his lungs.

  Okay, this wasn’t going to work. Even as injured has he was, Nathis was still much bigger and stronger than Dash, who had himself suffered more than a few bruising pummelings of various sorts over the past…hours? Days? He couldn’t even remember anymore. He had to end this fight fast.

  Dash slammed a free fist against the burned side of Nathis’s face. He loosed a howl of pain and, grossly, charred flesh pulled away, stuck to Dash’s hand. He grimaced, but ignored it, and struck again. Nathis recoiled back, giving Dash a chance to get upright again and suck breath into his lungs.

  Until Nathis’s own fist caught him in the chest. The impact drove him back against the console again; fortunately, his trusty vac suit was thick enough to dissipate much of the blow. Without it, Dash knew Nathis’s punch would have broken ribs. He slid sideways, toward Nathis’s burned side, kicking out as he did. Pain flashed up his own leg, but his foot caught Nathis’s knee, buckling it. Nathis howled and staggered back.

  If Dash was going to win this fight, it had to be now.

  He closed in, crowding into Nathis, grabbing him and flinging himself one way, forcing Nathis the other. As he did, he grabbed the big reptilian arm and twisted it behind him, then kept twisting it, putting wh
at remained of his strength into the effort, bending it until it snapped.

  Nathis screamed and flailed back with his free arm. It caught Dash with a heavy slap against his face that staggered him. Lifting his foot and planting his boot on the edge of the console, Dash drove himself into Nathis, meaning to slam him against the nearby bulkhead and, hopefully, end the fight. Nathis crashed into the viewport instead.

  With a loud crack, the viewport partly shattered. Nathis screamed again, but it was sucked away by the sudden rush of air through the fractured crystal. The fusion explosion must have weakened it, Dash thought, and now it held Nathis tightly, his head wedged through the jagged hole, air howling around it, the pressure not only holding him in place but starting to push him through it.

  Dash stumbled back, wind roaring around him, vapor condensing to mist as the pressure dropped. It wasn’t an explosive decompression—Nathis’s head and shoulders were preventing that—but the atmosphere would keep venting. Fortunately, there was enough that it should take several minutes, giving Dash time to get out of here.

  Nathis wasn’t so fortunate. Exposed to the hard, cold vacuum of space, Dash saw ice forming on Nathis’s head and face as moisture in the venting air froze against his skin. Worse, the air pressure kept pushing Nathis further and further through the shattered port, like a cork slowly being expelled from a shaken bottle of something carbonated. Now his head and shoulders had been forced through, protruding into space.

  Dash turned away. He really didn’t need to—or want to—watch this.

  He saw his helmet sitting a few meters away. He grabbed it and snapped it back into place. Even compromised, his suit might give him another minute or two of breathable air. That should be enough to get back to the Archetype.

  Another ship has arrived in this system.

  Dash sucked in a breath of thinning air. “Who is it?”

  It is another Clan Shirna vessel.

  Dash imagined another corvette or frigate—probably a straggler, late to the fight. It was unlikely Clan Shirna even had a much larger ship in its roster; behemoths like this cruiser were exceedingly rare. “Great,” he said, heading for the exit. “Well, one thing at a time—”

  No, this vessel poses a considerably greater threat.

  “Why?”

  But Dash knew why.

  This new ship was vast. It made the massive cruiser he stood aboard look like a corvette by comparison. Dash didn’t even realize ships that large existed.

  And it was headed straight toward the gas giant.

  Dash took a deep breath—it took him a moment, the atmosphere now passing from thin to tenuous—then let it out.

  “Okay, you know what? That is just totally not fair.”

  20

  But life wasn’t fair, was it? Standing here in the steadily vanishing atmosphere of Nathis’s ship and feeling bitter about it wasn’t going to change the fact that Clan Shirna suddenly had a decisive advantage over him. Even if he could get the Archetype as powered up as it could be, it wouldn’t be sufficient to take on this monstrous battlecruiser. Which was too bad, because that battlecruiser also gave them a tremendous advantage over…anyone else, really. And if they had more than one of them…

  “Are you—or, should I say, is the Archetype ready to fly? Like, can you get free of this ship?”

  “Yes, Dash, it should be possible to break free with relative ease. While you have been away, the Archetype has been regenerating its systems. It is still far from battle-ready, however.”

  Dash started for the door leading from the bridge, the one he’d used to enter. “Yeah, I don’t think we’re going to be fighting that thing. I think we’re just going to be running.”

  Dash stopped just short of the door as a thought slammed into him like one of Nathis’s fists. “Oh, shit. Wait. Where’s the Slipwing? Have you seen it leave the gas giant’s atmosphere?”

  “No. There is no indication that it has done so. However, it is difficult to determine anything with certainty, given the Archetype’s present status,” Sentinel said.

  You mean half-buried in a ship, with only its ass and legs hanging out. Dash didn’t say it, but—despite the horrific situation—he still couldn’t resist a smirk at the image. But that faded as fast as it appeared. “So Leira and the others—they’re still down there? Inside that planet’s atmosphere?”

  “In the absence of any conclusive data, that is a definite possibility.”

  Dash took a step for the door. “Yeah, worst case scenario, I know. But we have to assume—”

  He stopped again. This time, because something had caught his eye. A device on Nathis’s wrist was flashing.

  It could be anything. It could be a reminder to take some sort of med, or take something out of the oven. But it hadn’t been flashing a second ago. Dash was sure of that.

  On instinct, Dash turned and crossed back to Nathis’s corpse. It had been shoved almost halfway out of the broken port by air pressure, but now sat jammed in place, partly because of this arm, still stuck inside and pressed against the port. The body blocked all but a few small gaps now, too, meaning that while air was still venting, it was more of a middling leak than a catastrophic loss of atmosphere.

  Dash looked at the device on Nathis’s wrist. He recognized it, or thought he did. It was a personal comm, or something much like it. It indicated an incoming message.

  He couldn’t read the glowing script. But, again presumably thanks to his connection with the Archetype, that didn’t matter. He just knew what it said. It was an incoming message from someone or something called the Prelate—or, at least, that was the closest word his brain could provide for the term.

  “A high-ranking religious authority,” Sentinel said, anticipating my next question.

  “Oh, okay. Thanks.” So this must be Nathis’s boss.

  Dash had assumed Nathis was the one in charge of Clan Shirna. It had never even occurred to him that Nathis might himself be an underling, with higher authorities to whom he reported. It made sense, though, that the guy with the far bigger ship would also have a higher rank.

  Again, on impulse, Dash tapped the receive icon on Nathis’s comm.

  “—again, Brother Nathis, what is your status? We are scanning significant damage to the forward portion of your ship. Advise of your status at once.”

  Once more, Dash didn’t actually understand the language; all that he heard was a sonorous jumble of syllables and sounds. And yet, he understood it.

  He glanced around at the smashed and seared remains of the bridge. The ship didn’t seem to be out of control, so either it was being operated by automated systems, or crew in other parts of the vessel were still controlling it. In fact, given a ship this large, it was pretty unlikely the only crew were the ones he’d encountered here, on and near the bridge. Which meant, of course, said surviving crew could arrive at any minute, intent on reclaiming the bridge of their ship. Dash suspected the only reason they hadn’t already was the damage done by impact of the Archetype—smashed, torn, and twisted structural components simply blocking the way forward from the rest of the ship.

  So he had. . .unknown time against a lethal enemy, who might come boiling through space with vengeance on their minds. He had a punctured viewport at risk of causing catastrophic decompression, leaving Dash with a rapidly deflating suit and no options other than a horrible death. That assumed he wasn’t blown into space along with it, to tumble among the stars for eternity as a frozen corpse.

  Or would something else disastrous happen, like the hull buckling, or the fusion drive breaching, or even a failure of the translation drive’s anti-deuterium containment?

  “You know, there are a whole lot of ways I could die here,” Dash said to the air. The air did not answer, but Sentinel did.

  “Which is why I strongly recommend that you evacuate now,” Sentinel said. “Return to the Archetype and make your escape before this ship suffers a critical failure, or the Clan Shirna battlecruiser enters firing range.”
>
  “I doubt that the Prelate over there, whoever he is, would fire on one of his own ships,”

  “Religious zealots such as those of Clan Shirna are not known for their thoughtful restraint.”

  “Ah, yeah, good point.” The AI was right. He had no reason to stick around here. Not only was he needlessly endangering himself, but he also needed to do something about the Slipwing, if she hadn’t managed to get free of the gas giant.

  So why was he still lingering here, staring at the comm on Nathis’s wrist?

  Because I’m on the verge of realizing something important, something I might be able to use to make this whole situation way less shitty.

  Dash bit his lip. If whatever it was didn’t stop flying around inside his brain like a skittish bird and just land already, and soon, he’d have to jump ship, literally. A solution stalked him from the edge of awareness, like a forgotten memory fighting to resurface in a lifetime of images and experience.

  A tremor shuddered through the deck under Dash’s feet. He didn’t feel any acceleration, although the dampers might be preventing it. If anything, it felt like the impact of a high-density weapon.

  “What’s going on, Sentinel?”

  “It appears to be a structural instability in the forward part of this ship’s hull.”

  “A structural…? Shit. You mean it’s starting to come apart.”

  “In the most essential sense, yes.”

  Dash lifted his eyes in disgust, then exhaled slowly. The bird fluttered as much as ever, so he turned toward the exit.

  Wait.

  He looked back at Nathis.

  He has a Lens. The Ribbon had showed them that.

  Where was it?

  And just like that, the bird landed.

  Dash hurried back to Nathis’s corpse. He’d probably kept the Lens on him. Dash hoped, anyway. If he’d locked it away in some secure part of the ship, then so much for that. But if he had it on him, or it was at least nearby, then Dash had a chance to retrieve it. Which he had to, because he could not leave Clan Shirna in possession of one of the damned things. Besides, it might give Dash the edge he needed.