by J. N. Chaney
Dash blinked at Spratley’s mention of the Pasture. The vast, complex array of whirling comets and asteroids was where he’d discovered the Archetype, buried in a nondescript mass of ice and rock. What were the chances of that?
Again, literally astronomical, which was why sudden suspicion began gnawing at Dash. If someone had wanted to try and immediately ingratiate themselves to him, appearing as someone he knew and talking about key places from Dash’s past would be a good way of doing it.
Too good, in fact. As soon as he thought it, Dash realized that this would only provoke his skepticism. And that only made it more likely this was all on the level.
Didn’t it?
Dash scowled. His thoughts had started chasing themselves around and around, like a dog after its own tail. He jammed his attention back on the other man.
“Okay, Spratley. I have to go back to my original question. What the hell are you doing here?”
“Looking for the Cygnus Empire. Word back in the galaxy—and I’ll be damned if that doesn’t sound totally insane—anyway, word back there is that it’s out here somewhere. Apparently they’re the only ones who can deal with these alien bastards.”
“The Cygnus Realm, actually. And you’ve found it.”
“So it’s real. Okay. Damn. I thought we were on a fool’s run out here, but when you’re desperate—” He stopped and shook his head. “Look, Dash, if you’re out here too, you must know these people. Can you set up a meeting with them? Maybe even whoever leads them?”
“Again, you’ve found him.”
“Found who?”
“The leader of the Cygnus Realm. That would be me.”
A long moment of silence. Dash just let it linger. He could well imagine what must be running through Spratley’s mind right now. His last memory of Dash would be a scruffy courier skipping out on a debt, running away in the creaky old Slipwing. That was why Spratley’s eventual reply didn’t surprise him, because if their roles were reversed, it’s exactly what his would have been.
“Yeah, nice try, but I’m calling bullshit on that.”
“Call it however you want. Doesn’t change the fact that I’m the Messenger, the leader of the Cygnus Realm. And if you don’t believe me, well—can you see my ship?”
“Not clearly, no. Our sensors are in pretty bad shape.”
Dash accelerated the Archetype, closing on the Runaway. He halted it less than a hundred klicks from Spratley’s ship.
“Can you see me now?” he asked.
Again, it took a moment for Spratley to answer. Finally, his voice came over the comm, soft with awe.
“What the hell is that?”
“It’s called the Archetype. It’s an alien construct called a mech, and it’s probably the single most powerful war machine ever built.”
“And you’re flying it. You. Dash Newton.”
“Roger that. Now, before you hit me with the bazillion other questions you have, how about you follow me back to the Kingsport, which is where you were headed. You can get your crew cleaned up and have a decent meal. Hell, we’ll even repair your ship.”
“I—”
Another pause before Spratley finally found his voice again.
“Dash, about that thousand credits you owe me?”
“Uh-huh?”
“Let’s call it even.”
Spratley stood, hands on his hips, staring out of the big viewports at the sprawling collection of ships.
“So this is—” He stopped and shook his head. “This is your fleet?”
Dash shrugged. “It’s the Cygnus Realm’s fleet, actually. I just happen to be its current leader.”
“The—what did you call it? The Messenger?”
“Yeah.”
“Un-freakin’-believable. And this isn’t even your whole fleet, you said.”
“Nope. This is about a third of it. We’ve got another task force at a place called Jackpot, where we’re busy mining stuff called Dark Metal, and another back in the Sagittarius Arm, with the Forge, which is still our main base of operations. And we’ve got third deployed about a hundred and sixty thousand light years, uh—” Dash looked for the smudge of the Large Magellanic Cloud and pointed at it. “That way. We call that place Forward, for now, because it’s really just a forward operating base.”
“A hundred and—”
“Sixty thousand, yeah. Hard to wrap your mind around, isn’t it?”
“I gave up trying to wrap my mind around any of this about a dozen holy shits ago.”
Dash laughed, but before he could reply, a voice cut him off as the nearby elevator opened. It was Leira.
“Dash, there you are. I heard you ran into—”
She slammed to a halt and stared. “Spratley?”
“Okay, here’s another one. Holy shit, Leira?”
Dash glanced from one to the other. “You two know each other?”
Leira nodded, but her eyes were still locked on Spratley, gleaming intently. “Oh yes, we certainly do. We had what had to be the most passionate, torrid love affair, culminating in a night of sheer, unending bliss, that I will never forget.”
Dash blinked. “Oh. Really?”
Leira looked at Dash, raised her hands to her face, and laughed. “Of course not. But it was totally worth the look on your face.”
“I was gonna say, I don’t remember all that,” Spratley put in, then raised a hand. “No slight on you, Leira. I’m sure that if we’d had a romantic fling, I’d have remembered at least some of it.”
“How about those twelve hundred credits you still owe me from that poker game aboard—oh, what’s his name’s ship. You know, the Blob.” She planted her hands on her hips.
“You mean Sammy?” Spratley smiled and shrugged. “Eh, well, Dash still owes me a thousand, so you can square up with him.”
Dash raised both hands. “Okay, first of all, you wiped those thousand credits for, you know, saving your ass. And second, as much fun as these old reunions are, we’ve got bigger things to deal with. Custodian, have you uploaded that data from Spratley’s ship?”
“I have. I’ve also assembled the other members of the Inner Circle currently present in the vicinity of the Kingsport to review it in the Operations Center.”
Dash gestured Leira and Spratley back toward the elevator. Dash glanced at Leira as he fell in beside her.
“You’re quite the actor. That little performance about that fling with Spratley was pretty convincing.”
She smiled. “It was, wasn’t it?”
They rode the elevator up to the Ops level in silence. Dash snuck a few looks in at Leira, but her smile never quite faded away.
“Smug looks good on you, dear,” he said.
She curtsied like in the old Earth stories. “I know, right?”
“Those are Deepers,” Benzel snapped.
Dash crossed his arms and glared at the big display. There was no doubt about it. The sensor logs from Spratley’s ship, the Runaway, held clear images of Deeper ships, including the two light cruisers that had been chasing him.
The problem was that these Deepers were back in the Sagittarius Arm of the Milky Way, where they’d originally found the Forge, built the Cygnus Realm, and fought the Life War against the Golden.
Dash glanced around at the sprawling Ops Center. Similar in function to the Command Center of the Forge, this Ops Center was just one command and control locus aboard the Kingsport. When it was complete, there’d be at least three more command posts, all of them scattered well apart around the vast station. Part of the reason for the duplication was redundancy, but part of it was that the Kingsport was meant to be the hub of a growing, star-spanning civilization. It was meant to ultimately control not just many fleets and other military forces, but also oversee trade, commerce, construction, and the myriad other things that made such a civilization work.
Right now, given that the Kingsport was still only in its early stages of construction, this Ops Center was it. Still, it offered a place every bit
as well-appointed as the Forge’s Command Center, and even better equipped in some ways.
Like the main display. Instead of a flat screen at one end of the sprawling compartment, it rose in the very middle, a 3D surface that could depict insanely high-res images viewable from any direction. It certainly made it much easier to visualize the multi-dimensional aspects of space. The Deeper ships that had been caught on the Runaway’s sensors leapt out in sharp clarity, like they were about to fly right out of the display and into the ops center.
“What the hell are Deepers doing back in our old home turf, anyway?” Leira asked.
Benzel turned to Spratley. “Where exactly were you, Nate, when you caught these images?”
Dash turned, his eyebrows leaping upward. “Nate? Do you two know each other?”
“Nate and I crossed paths a few times, yeah,” Benzel replied, grinning.
“Yeah, and the last time we met, you relieved me of the better part of two thousand credits worth of cargo, as I recall,” Spratley shot back.
Benzel spread his hands. “Uh, sorry? I was young and foolish back then.”
“It was maybe five years ago.”
Dash cut in. “Hold on. Spratley, do you know everybody in the Sagittarius Arm?”
Spratley shrugged back with a roguish grin. “Sure starting to seem like it, isn’t it?”
Amy, who’d been leaning against a railing separating two of the circular rows of consoles surrounding the big display, raised her hand. “I don’t know him.”
Spratley turned his grin on her. “We could change that.”
Conover, who’d also been leaning against the railing, straightened and cleared his throat. “Wait a second—”
“Oh, pfft. Don’t you worry, Conover. I prefer my guys much less rugged and chiseled,” Amy said, her voice soothing. Then she sniffed in Spratley’s direction. “And more likely to shower.”
“Oh. Okay then.” Conover leaned back, grinning. “Showered twice this week.”
“Alright, everyone, if we could return to the matter at hand—namely, what are these assholes doing back in our old home space?” Dash said.
“The question is, how did they get there?” Amy asked, face flushed in anger.
“And how did you get here?” Conover added, looking at Spratley.
“That’s a good question. How did you get all the way out here, Spratley?” Leira asked.
“I’m honestly not sure. We ran into these—what did you call them? Deepers? Anyway, we ran into them a few weeks ago. Then we kept running into them, in more and more systems. We finally hopped into the Tangle system, and it was just crawling with the damned things. We ran in what I thought was the direction of clear space, but then we detected some sort of spatial anomaly—gravimetric and EM disturbances, that sort of thing. Before we could maneuver to avoid it, we’d intersected it, and just like that, we were somewhere else.”
“Sounds like a gate,” Conover said.
“That’s a reasonable conclusion. It’s furthermore backed up by the data from the Runaway’s sensor logs,” Custodian put in.
Dash called for Custodian to put up a star chart he’d once had burned into his memory. He hadn’t seen it, now, in—he wasn’t sure how long. It showed the Sagittarius Arm, centered on the star system PPM-378864, otherwise known as Tangle.
“Custodian, zoom in so we’re looking at, say, twenty light-years, centered on Tangle.”
The display obligingly expanded. Dash walked up and touched it, then rotated it slightly. The rest of them gathered in, watching.
“Looks like Tangle’s one of the systems controlled by our old friends, Clan Shirna,” Dash said, nodding at the display.
“Or at least it was,” Leira replied.
The system called Tangle, highlighted by Custodian with a red icon, was located less than a light-year away from the roiling, restless pall of dust and gas known as the Shadow Nebula. Dash had only traversed the Nebula once, back when he first met Leira and Viktor, and it hadn’t been a pleasant experience. The alternative, traveling around it, added days to the journey. It might explain why all the other red icons, the locations of Deeper activity Spratley had encountered while fleeing from the aliens, were confined to the Nebula’s spinward side.
Of course, it might also be that they just didn’t have any data for the anti-spinward side of the Nebula. At the moment, though, it didn’t really matter. Either way, a major Deeper incursion had slammed into the Sagittarius arm. The important question was, why?
Conover touched the display and rotated it again, then pointed at the ragged string of icons the new view revealed. “The Deepers seem to be mostly concentrated here, on the coreward side of Clan Shirna space.”
“I think you can forget about Clan Shirna,” Spratley put in.
Dash turned to him. “Oh? Why?”
“They stopped being a thing a few years back. I know some traders who did business with them when they had outposts on the far side of the Shadow Nebula from their own space. One of them told me that on his last trip there, he found their outposts abandoned. They haven’t been back since.”
“Yeah, that was probably our bad,” Dash said.
Leira glanced at Spratley. “We kind of beat the hell out of them. They were our first major opponent in the war against the Golden, what we call the Life War.”
Spratley whistled. “There were rumors, stories all over the place about that. They said there was some big war going on between aliens. The only thing I really got from it was that the Unseen were real.” He glanced around. “Which I guess they are, huh?”
“You might say that,” Dash said, furrowing his brow at the display. “And speaking of the Unseen, all of these Deeper positions Conover pointed out are close to the Globe of Suns.” He glanced back at Leira. “Ring any bells?”
“Yeah, it does. You’re thinking they’re interested in the Pasture?”
Dash nodded. The Globe of Suns, a distinct, roughly spherical cluster of stars spinward of the Shadow Nebula, was home to the Pasture, a vast, artificial Oort Cloud constructed by the Unseen. It had apparently been one of their caches of technology that included the Archetype. Given that there were literally tens of millions of chunks of ice and rock whirling around in the Pasture, it was a damned good place to cache things. Early on in his time as Messenger, Dash kept thinking they should go back there and investigate more fully to see what else the Unseen might have stashed there. But finding the Forge, and the Silent Fleets, and everything since had progressively put it further and further down the to-do list.
It was time to bring it back up to the top.
Dash nodded at Leira’s question. “Yeah, I am. I think they’ve somehow learned about the Unseen, and the Pasture, probably from data cores of ours that they’ve managed to snag.”
“So they want to dig into the Pasture and see what they might be able to turn up? Try to find things to use against us?” Amy said.
Dash gave a grim nod. “Exactly. And that is something that we cannot allow.”
He rubbed his chin for a moment, then looked around. “You know what this means, right?”
Benzel nodded and turned for the door. “I’ll go warm up the Herald.”
“Time to get the mechs ready to fly,” Amy added.
Dash blew out a long breath, then put his hands flat on the table.
“It looks like we’re going home.”
2
“Ah, the good ole Sagittarius Arm. It’s always nice to go back to your roots,” Dash said, decelerating the Archetype and taking up station alongside Leira in the Swift.
“We’re not there yet,” Leira replied. “We’ve got a gate to traverse first, remember?”
Dash sniffed. “Details, details.”
The near terminus of the gate through which Spratley had inadvertently fled loomed ahead of them. Based on his data, the other end should open into the Tangle system, unless the Deepers had switched it to another location. If they had, they could try to switch it back, thanks t
o the gate key Dash had recovered from a Deeper Battle Prince in the closing stages of the Second Battle of Backwater. To do that, though, they needed specific parameters to input into the Key that they didn’t currently have.
“Ready to launch the probe, Dash,” Benzel said.
“Go ahead.”
Dash watched as the Herald launched a heavily stealthed reconnaissance probe from one of her missile tubes. The little device, only a few meters long, immediately accelerated toward the restless, purplish-black distortion that marked the outline of the gate. It was like a scar, Dash thought, in spacetime. It was essentially identical to the Black Gate, the very first one they’d encountered, that had led them into the Orion Arm and their war with the Deepers in the first place.
He waited as the probe approached the gate boundary. He passed the time by studying the only nearby body, a lonely brown dwarf.
“I wonder what it is about brown dwarfs,” Dash said, a musing tone in his voice. This is the second time we’ve found one of the Deepers’ gates located near one. Sentinel, any guesses?”
“You want me to guess? Alright, my guess is that the Deepers like the color brown.”
Dash grinned. The Archetype’s AI had pretty much completed her transition to feisty backtalker and now gave sass as well as she got it. Supposedly, this somehow represented the best match with his own psychology—an important consideration, since he and Sentinel had to spend countless hours flying and fighting together.
“Okay, how about a little less guess, and a little more analysis?”
“Two data points always make a straight line,” Sentinel replied.
“By which you mean…?”
“That the occurrence of two gates near brown dwarfs appears to be a perfect correlation, but it’s really not. It may simply be coincidence.”
“Hmph. Yeah, I get your point. Still, it’s something to keep an eye out for. If brown dwarfs are significant to the Deepers somehow, I’d like to know it.”
“Understood. And the probe is about to pass through the gate.”
