Dark Origins (The Messenger Book 14)

by J. N. Chaney

  A day into the flight, he’d asked Sentinel to set up a comm channel with Newton, without alerting Jexin. She had, and a moment later, a very familiar voice came over it.

  “Yo, Dash. I was wondering if you’d ever want to talk to me.”

  “Okay, for the record, this is really weird.”

  “I’ll bet. I mean, I know you sometimes talk to yourself, but…” Newton trailed off, just as Dash would have.

  “Anyway, Newton, we need to talk about Jexin.”

  “Yeah. She’s a damaged individual.”

  “I know. And that’s what worries me. I still don’t think this peace overture is going to work. But I don’t want it to fall apart because Jex can’t get the better of her emotions.”

  “I hear you loud and clear. The protocols, though, kinda make me have to obey her. Only the Messenger can override that—hint, hint.”

  Dash pressed his lips into a hard line. The idea of going behind Jexin’s back and implementing some sort of backdoor failsafe through Newton bothered him. And Newton could tell, of course.

  “Hey, I get your reluctance, Dash. You’re nothing but open and honest with your people and expect the same from them.”

  “It’s the only way any of this works.”

  “So what it comes down to is, what’s the greatest harm, right? Is it better to give me some instructions to stop her from doing something dumb, or run the risk of her losing it and going after the Deepers? Which, I might add, is pretty understandable.”

  “Yeah, it is. When you put it that way, though, it sounds like you don’t quite trust her either.”

  Newton paused before answering. “You know what your problem is, Dash? Because I sound like you and have a personality specifically based on you, you’re thinking that I am you. But I’m not. I’m a construct intended to be the most efficient interface possible between the Polaris and its pilot. So I’m being careful to not suggest any particular course of action here. It really has to be your call.”

  Dash spent a few minutes scowling at the tactical display, which was blank except for their own ships, including the ones trailing far behind them.

  “It’s my call, yeah. But you’re a smart guy—”

  “You’d know.”

  Dash couldn’t help a brief smile. “What would you recommend I do?”

  “How quickly do you want to get back to fishing in that river, with Leira at your side bitching about the bugs?”

  “As quickly as I possibly can.”

  “Well, you think the Deepers are probably going to say no, and probably do it with torps and x-ray lasers. And you’re probably right. But they might also say yes, right?”

  Dash stared at the nearly blank tactical display without really seeing it.

  “Thanks, Newton. You’ve been a big help.”

  “Of course I have. So, can I assume you do want to have a failsafe in case Jexin can’t hold it together?”

  “Yeah, much as I hate it, I do. Until I say otherwise, she stays weapons-hold unless I give weapons-free or the Deepers shoot first.” Dash grimaced as he spoke, as though the words themselves actually tasted bad. The whole fleet was weapons-hold until Dash said otherwise. But for everyone else, it was just an order. He knew that he had no need to enforce it through a backdoor into their AIs. The fact he felt he did with Jexin, who’d been nothing but a loyal and diligent mech pilot, left him wanting a shower even more.

  “It kinda makes me wonder why we pilots aren’t our own best matches, and why each of the AIs isn’t just us,” he said, mainly to say something and end the brooding silence that had fallen off the end of his directive to Newton.

  “You already spend all of your time with you. Do you really want to basically double that?” Newton replied.

  Dash smiled. Not much, but it was something. “Nah. Besides, Sentinel would miss me.”

  Sentinel finally spoke.

  “Why? I’d always have Newton available.”

  “Touché, Sentinel. Touché.”

  The Deeper fleet continued its menacing approach. More than five minutes had passed since their transmission, with nothing even resembling a response.

  “Maybe they’re thinking about it,” Benzel said.

  Harolyn cut in. “Who knows what sort of internal bureaucracy they have to deal with? The schmuck in charge of this fleet might have to get hold of his supervisor, who had to get hold of his, and so on, ad nauseum.”

  “A Deeper bureaucracy. Huh. Never really gave much thought to what goes on inside their society.” Benzel paused. “Hey, do you think they have music? Go to concerts? Are there Deeper bars where they go to party?”

  “Yeah, I’m having a hard time imagining a bunch of Deeper warriors all sitting around a table hoisting a mug of—whatever—and bragging about the latest battle,” Dash replied.

  The banter, as lighthearted as it sounded, was shot through with tension. The Deeper fleet hadn’t varied even a fraction from its implacable approach. Their flippant joking around was just the ancient tradition of soldiers about to throw themselves into the chaotic horror of battle.

  “Don’t humanize them. They’re monsters, that’s all,” Jexin snapped, her voice cracking like a whip across the comm.

  Dash took a breath. “Not trying to humanize them, Jex,” he said. “We’re all just passing time here.”

  No reply. Dash let the breath out.

  “Sentinel, make sure Newton is standing by on a private channel,” he said.

  “Already done.”

  “I’m right here, Dash,” Newton said.

  The sudden sound of his own voice over the comm didn’t even startle him anymore.

  Huh. Guess you can get used to anything, he thought.

  “The Deeper force is thirty seconds from maximum effective range,” Sentinel said.

  Dash switched back to the general comm. “All stations, we’re still weapons-hold. Dash out.”

  Ten seconds before firing solutions started to come up, a reply finally came crackling across the comm. It was just a brief, hissing squeal of machine code. Dash waited for Sentinel to translate.

  “This is the Deeper reply. ‘The Corrupted uses. He does not save.’”

  A few seconds later, the Deeper fleet loosed a huge salvo of missiles and torps, while Battle Princes flung themselves out of the battleship and raced toward them, close behind their wall of ordnance.

  Benzel sniffed. “So I guess that’s a no then.”

  Dash waited for Jexin to say something, but she stayed silent. The Deepers had spoken for her.

  From the outset, the battle was a lopsided affair. As soon as Dash gave the weapons-free order, the Realm fleet lit up its targeting scanners, then followed up with its own salvo of missiles. Dash lined up long-range shots from the dark-lances, prioritizing the Battle Princes, but let JETS coordinate his fire with Jexin’s. He concentrated, instead, on the bigger tactical picture.

  The Deeper fleet held a gross advantage in firepower over the Realm’s smaller force. If they tried to form a conventional line of battle, much less counterattack, they’d be quickly overwhelmed. There was only one option.

  Dash gave the order to withdraw.

  At once, the Realm fleet turned, its ships moving in almost perfect unison, and accelerated away. The maneuver dramatically decreased the closing rate of the Deeper missile salvo. The Archetype and the Polaris, acting as rearguard, combined their scattershot and nova-cannon fire in lethal, JETS-enabled unison. At the same time, they punched out steady dark-lance shots at the Battle Princes. The Archetype’s blast cannon came online, the energy accumulators spreading open, turning to wings of howling blue flame.

  Dash could only marvel at how the linked fire of the two mechs danced from target to target, sometimes shooting together, other times in rapid succession. It all seemed random, almost chaotic, but beneath the apparent anarchy was deadly, machine-driven purpose. Missiles died, clusters of them flashed to scrap as the mechs’ fire played over them, before flicking quickly on to new tar
gets. Battle Princes died, too. Two had already fallen out of the pursuit, mortally wounded. Two more staggered under repeated dark-lance hits. Six more raced on in pursuit, leading the Deeper fleet onward behind their dwindling screen of ordnance.

  “The Deepers are closing. They’re maintaining a steady acceleration that’s eleven percent greater than ours,” Sentinel said.

  Dash’s reply was curt. “I see that, yeah. You know what that means, right?”

  “I do.”

  The Realm ships began to burn harder, but each ship at a slightly different rate. The varied accelerations started pulling the fleet apart, its compact formation turning ragged.

  “All ships are making best possible speed,” Sentinel said.

  As the fleet’s formation came apart, so did its fire. Ships were now firing as individuals rather than contributing to a massed fire plan. Only the two mechs maintained their smoothly coordinated shooting. But it wasn’t enough. The Deepers, sensing victory, surged forward. The Battle Princes pulled away from the capital ships, which likewise fell away behind their escort screen.

  “Okay, Jex, we’ve done all we can,” Dash said. “Let’s hightail it out of here.”

  No answer. The Polaris just maintained its pace and kept firing.

  “Jex?”

  Nothing.

  “Shit. Newton, you there?”

  “Yup. Standing by.”

  Dash clenched his jaw. The Herald and her consorts were pulling away, leaving the two mechs more and more exposed. The Deepers had now added the weight of massed x-ray laser fire to the bombardment, shots now landing on the Archetype and Polaris. The shields of both mechs started climbing toward saturation.

  JETS bought them a bit of time, firing the Archetype’s blast-cannon at full yield, a colossal blast that blew away most of the remaining missiles. But more and more fire converged on the mechs, the shorter-ranged Deeper burst-cannons opening up and spewing out plasma bolts. Few landed, but that would change as the range ticked down.

  “Jexin, we’re pulling back now,” Dash said. He’d give her ten seconds to confirm, then he’d have Newton assume control of the Polaris.

  And that would be the end of Jexin’s career as a mech pilot, and probably anything else even remotely related to operational duties.

  A few more seconds passed.

  “Roger that,” Jexin said and accelerated toward their retreating fleet. Dash unclenched his jaw and followed.

  “Dash, I’d say we’re screwed,” Benzel said.

  Dash studied the tactical display. That was another big advantage of JETS. Freed from the need to actually target the Archetype’s weapons, his only job now to assign firing priorities, he had time to consider the bigger picture.

  Benzel was right. They were indeed screwed.

  The Realm fleet was now a tattered shadow of its former self. Every ship burned as hard as it could, a desperate free for all of retreat. Slight variations in their maximum accelerations meant they just couldn’t maintain a coherent formation. The Realm’s fire had likewise become sporadic, disorganized, individual ships firing wildly at whatever target seemed most opportune. He and Jexin still fought a ferocious rearguard battle, but the writing was definitely on the intergalactic wall.

  The fleet would have to slink off in defeat, translating away to save itself. The whole effort to come out here as a peace overture was a costly failure and might even hint at some desperation on the Cygnus Realm’s part to end the war.

  “What do you think, Sentinel? Is it as bad as it looks?”

  “Probably worse. If we don’t translate away, our fleet will be subject to the full, effective weight of Deeper fire in no more than thirty minutes. And no more than thirty minutes after that, it will be completely destroyed.”

  Dash nodded. The situation was grim. Dire. Desperate, even.

  Perfect.

  “Okay, Leira, Conover, Wei-Ping, you guys ready?”

  “Whenever you are, Dash,” Leira immediately replied.

  “Kristin’s saying you’ve got no more than three minutes,” Conover put in.

  Dash sniffed. He didn’t need three minutes. He didn’t need even one.

  “All stations, let’s party,” he said.

  On both flanks of the Deeper fleet, a multitude of icons popped into being.

  To the left, the Victory led a twenty-ship task force that included the Stalwart’s brand-new sister ship, the Fortitude, and a squadron of Orions under Lori. To the right, the Stalwart herself commanded twenty-six ships, including the Sabertooth, and a combined flotilla of eleven comprising a mix of Rimworld League and N’Teel vessels. All of it was backed up by another squadron of Perseids.

  And then there were the remaining three mechs, the key to this whole sneaky plan. Leira’s Swift accompanied the Victory, while Amy’s Talon kept station with the Stalwart. Both mechs had essentially acted as powerful, hexacore-enabled repeaters for the Pulsar’s potently deceptive infowar veil. Dash still marveled at the fact that they could essentially hide two powerful fleets from Deeper detection in the utter emptiness of intergalactic space. But ships were tiny, almost impossible to see from more than a few thousand klicks away. The Deepers, staring at their otherwise empty scanners, simply had no reason to believe they were there.

  Of course, what they would also have seen is Benzel’s force suddenly shake off the apparent confusion of its wild, headlong retreat, smoothly wheeling about, reforming a lethally purposeful line of battle, and accelerating straight toward them.

  The Deepers had thought they’d won the day. And although they’d never likely fall for this again, today they were wrong, and now the full fury of the Cygnus Realm fell on them from all sides.

  Dash wheeled the Archetype out of a hard turn and slammed point-blank dark-lance shots into the flank of the Deeper battleship. As he swung around, banking like an aircraft in atmo on the fearsome power of the Blur drive, he saw the Victory disgorge another wing of fighters. Benzel had cannily sensed the moment when the battle finally and truly started to turn and now poured in his reserves to deliver the coup de grace to the unfortunate Deeper fleet.

  As he swept through his turn, Dash had a moment to just take in the overall tactical situation while he let JETS assume all fire control. The battle had turned indeed. Now it was the Deeper battle line that had collapsed, individual ships fighting for their lives in chaotic desperation. He decided to actually hold the Archetype out of the thick of the fight and let JETS take long-ranged potshots of opportunity. His mech continued pumping out dark-lance fire, still in precise coordination with Jexin’s Polaris. She dutifully kept station on his wing, scissoring nimbly back and forth, up and down behind him.

  He was thankful for that, anyway. Aside from her initial hesitation, when she stubbornly refused to fall back, she’d been one hundred percent a team player since.

  A massive explosion rippled along the length of the Deeper battleship. When the plasma glare faded, Dash saw it had broken apart, her bow more or less intact, but the rest of her just a slowly expanding cloud of debris.

  “That’s a lot of dead Deepers,” Jexin said. Her voice was as flat and emotionless as the rumble of a reactor.

  “It is that,” Dash agreed, then bit his lip. Now didn’t seem like the best time for an awkward talk, but when would there be a better one?

  He sighed out a breath. “Jex, look—”

  “I know about Newton, how you ordered him to watch me,” she said, cutting him off.

  “You do?”

  She actually hissed back a laugh. “No, not actually. But you just confirmed it.”

  Dash had to smile. “Clever.” But his smile faded. “Guess I’m not, though, if I was that obvious.”

  “Actually, Newton told me. And before you blame him, no, he didn’t really tell me, so you don’t have to worry that he violated your trust.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “As we were leaving the Forge, I asked him what he would do if he were in your place. He said he’d do
pretty much what you did, ordering him, as the Messenger, to take control of the Polaris if, um, something went wrong.”

  “Sorry, Dash, never occurred to me to lie about that,” Newton said. “I mean, you seem to trust your people absolutely, so my tendency is to do that, too.”

  Dash smiled again. “You two are going to drive me crazy. But you’re right, Newton. I do trust my people absolutely. Or I should. I’m sorry for doubting you, Jex.”

  “Don’t be. Much as I hate to admit it, it was a good precaution. I had a lot of trouble pulling back from the Deepers and starting our pretend retreat.” She paused, and Dash could imagine her taking in the carnage as the last of the battle played out. “I didn’t want the Deepers to think even for a second that they had the better of us. But I like to think that it just made this defeat even more painful for them when they realized they didn’t.”

  “Well, you can thank Ragsdale and Hannibal,” Dash said.

  “Hannibal? Who’s that?”

  “An ancient general from the human home planet, Old Earth. He was fighting a group called the Romans. At the battle of, er—“

  “Cannae,” Sentinel helpfully put in.

  “Right. That one. Anyway, he pretended to let the center of his battleline fall apart and start retreating, which sucked the Romans in so he could take them on both flanks. Ragsdale’s a bit of a student of military history, it seems.”

  “Well, it seemed to work out just fine. The Deepers are dying, and that makes it a good day, a bad day for them.”

  Dash narrowed his eyes at the distant dim point of the white dwarf.

  “Jex, how’d you like to make it an even worse day for the Deepers?”

  She didn’t even hesitate. “Just tell me how.”

  “Dash, are you sure about this?” Leira asked.

  “It does kind of feel like once we take this step, we can never turn back,” Amy added.

  Dash looked down on the tiny rocky world swinging in its lonely orbit around the white dwarf. He got it. It did feel like a step that couldn’t be taken back. But it wasn’t like they hadn’t given the Deepers a chance to work things out with no more bloodshed. Before he could speak, though, Jexin asked a blunt question that washed away the last dregs of even his doubts.