Dark Origins (The Messenger Book 14) Read online

  Copyrighted Material

  Dark Origins Copyright © 2021 by Variant Publications

  Book design and layout copyright © 2021 by JN Chaney

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living, dead, or undead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved

  No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing.

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  Book Description

  When a ship emerges near the growing expanse of The Kingsport, the captain tells a chilling story—Deepers are among humans, across the galactic arm in the region Dash began his march to greatness.

  The enemy is not standing still. Bishops and Battle Princes attack across a massive front, leading fleets of Deeper craft that straddle the bridge between life and machine. Fighting over a span of light years that boggles the mind, Dash and his crew are drawn farther out in the big black than any human has ever gone—

  —or so they thought, for a small beacon of humanity drifts, alone, frozen, and ancient, out where the light of days is more ancient than the history of mankind. Capturing the object, a secret is revealed, and the war, and Dash, will never be the same, for his mission just got a lot harder, and the enemy has changed their face yet again.

  With the Kingsport and Anchors under withering fire, Dash will lead his fleet into the teeth of an enemy force that has been lying in wait for a million years, and they will stop at nothing to turn humans into biomechanical servants who drift among the stars, dreaming of a peace that will never come.

  Unless Dash can win. And he always wins.

  Contents

  The Messenger Universe Key Terms

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Epilogue

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  About the Authors

  The Messenger Universe Key Terms

  The Messenger: The chosen pilot of the Archetype.

  Archetype: A massive weapon system designed for both space battle, close combat, and planetary defense. Humanoid in shape, the Archetype is controlled by a pilot and the Sentinel, an artificial intelligence designed to work with an organic humanoid nervous systems. The Archetype is equipped with offensive weaponry beyond anything known to current galactic standards, and has the ability to self-repair, travel in unSpace, and link with other weapons systems to fight in a combined arms operation.

  Blobs: Amorphous alien race, famed for being traders. They manufacture nothing and are known as difficult employers.

  Clan Shirna: A vicious, hierarchical tribe of reptilian beings whose territory is in and around the Globe of Suns and the Pasture. Clan Shirna is wired at the genetic level to defend and protect their territory. Originally under the control of Nathis, they are space-based, with a powerful navy and the collective will to fight to the last soldier if necessary.

  Couriers: Independent starship pilots who deliver goods—legal, illegal, and everything in between—to customers. They find their jobs on a centralized posting system (See: Needs Slate) that is galaxy-wide, ranked by danger and pay, and constantly changing. Couriers supply their own craft, unless they’re part of a Shipping Conglom. Couriers are often ex-military or a product of hard worlds.

  Fade: A modification to the engine. It is a cutting edge shielding device that rotates through millions of subspace frequencies per second, rendering most scans ineffective. If the Fade is set to insertion, then the ship will translate into unSpace, where it can go faster than light. The Fade is rare, borderline illegal, and highly expensive. It works best on smaller masses, so Courier ships are optimal for installation of the Fade. One drawback is the echo left behind in regular space, an issue that other cloaking systems do not have. By using echoes as pathway markers, it is possible to track and destroy ships using the Fade.

  Golden: A transhumanist race of beings who are attempting to scour the galaxy of intelligent life. The Golden were once engaged in warfare with the Unseen. They are said to return every 200,000 years to enact a cycle of galactic genocide, wiping out all technologically advanced civilizations before disappearing back from which they came. They destroyed their creators at some unknown point in the distant past and are remaking themselves with each revolution of their eternal, cyclical war.

  Globe of Suns: A star cluster located in the far arm of the Milky Way Galaxy. It is an astronomical outlier. Dense with stars, it’s a hotbed of Unseen tech, warfare, and Clan Shirna activity. Highly dangerous, both as an obstacle and combat area.

  Kingsport: Located in the Dark Between, these are planetoid sized bases made of material that is resistant to detection, light-absorbing, and heavily armored. Oval in shape, the Kingsport is naval base and medical facility in one, intended as a deep space sleep/recovery facility for more than a thousand Unseen. The Kingsports maintain complete silence and do not communicate with other facilities, regardless of how dire the current military situation.

  Lens: Unseen tech; a weapon capable of sending stars into premature collapse at considerable distance. The Lens is not unique—the Unseen left many of them behind in the Pasture, indicating that they were willing to destroy stars in their fight with the Golden.

  Ribbon: Unseen tech that imparts a visual history of their engineering, left behind as a kind of beacon for spacefaring races.

  Sentinel: A machine intelligence designed by the Unseen, the Sentinel is a specific intellect within the Archetype. It meshes with the human nervous system, indicating some anticipation of spaceborne humans on the part of the Unseen. Sentinel is both combat system and advisor, and it has the ability to impart historical data when necessary to the fight at hand.

  Shadow Nebula: A massive nebula possibly resulting from simultaneous star explosions. The Shadow Nebula may be a lingering effect from the use of a Lens, but it is unknown at this time.

  Unseen: An extinct and ancient race who were among the progen
itors of all advanced technology in the Milky Way, and possibly beyond. In appearance, they were slender, canine, and bipedal, with the forward-facing eyes of a predator. Their history is long and murky, but their engineering skills are nothing short of godlike. They commanded gravity, materials, space, and the ability to use all of these sciences in tandem to hold the Golden at bay during the last great war. The Unseen knew about humans, although their plans for humanity have since been lost to time.

  unSpace: Neither space nor an alternate reality, this is the mathematically generated location used to span massive distances between points in the galaxy. There are several ways to penetrate unSpace, but only two are known to humans.

  Pasture: Unseen tech in the form of an artificial Oort Cloud; a comet field of enormous size and complexity. Held in place by Unseen engineering, the Pasture is a repository for hidden items left by the Unseen. The Pasture remains stable despite having thousands of objects, a feat which is a demonstration of Unseen technical skills. The Lens and Archetype are just two of the items left behind for the next chapter in galactic warfare.

  Prelate: In Clan Shirna, the Prelate is both military commander and morale officer, imbued with religious authority over all events concerning defense of their holy territory.

  1

  Dash waited until the firing solution had reached seventy-five percent confidence, then hit the trigger.

  Searing bolts of energy erupted from the Archetype. A deluge of them spat out of the scattershot in what looked like a random cone of fire. It wasn’t random at all, though. The weapon used a powerful, shifting forcefield to direct each individual shot, but it did so ten times every second in a staccato beat of purest destruction. The result was a swarm of plasma bolts that slammed into each of the five separate targets, two every second. In mere seconds of shooting, all of them had been blasted to whirling scrap and cooling plasma.

  “Well, that worked,” Dash said.

  Sentinel’s voice held a glimmer of doubt. “There’s still a six percent error in the targeting. Of the forty-four shots fired, only forty-one hit their targets.”

  “That sounds pretty damned good to me.”

  “It could be better, though. The error shouldn’t be higher than three percent.”

  Dash snorted. “Are you implying your standards are higher than mine?”

  “I’m not implying that at all. I’m explicitly stating it.”

  The snort became a laugh. “I know you won’t rest until you’ve got that error worked out. For now, this thing is a nifty addition to our arsenal.”

  The scattershot was intended to fill a gap between the scalding point-defense and the various heavy hitters that the Realm wielded, from nova to dark-lance and everything in between. An analysis of all of their battles, against the Golden and the Deepers, had let the AIs determine just how much time they wasted firing big weapons against small targets like fighters and missiles.

  Dash had found the result eye-opening, in a troubling sort of way.

  “The overall effectiveness of Realm forces has been degraded, on average, by almost ten percent,” Custodian had announced.

  “What does that mean exactly?” Dash had asked.

  “It means that for every minute of combat, six seconds of time was lost engaging targets inefficiently.”

  Dash thought about how many minutes of combat they’d faced just fighting the Deepers, much less the Golden. And six seconds of every one of them had apparently been a waste of time and effort.

  He’d replied with a single word.

  “Ouch.”

  Ouch, indeed. The scattershot had been designed to plug that gap. It fired fast enough to engage multiple small targets, but with enough power and range to menace even light ships, like corvettes and frigates. That freed up their dark-lances and other big weapons to focus on the correspondingly big threats, like cruisers and battleships.

  In short, they saved their big punches for big targets. It was an upgrade, and Dash loved upgrades.

  “Okay, Sentinel, we’ve got five drones left. That’s enough to do one more run—”

  “A ship of unknown design has just translated into a point approximately one-half light-year away,” Sentinel cut in.

  Dash’s eyes widened in surprise. The Kingsport was the only thing out here. Around it yawned a gulf hundreds of light-years across, containing nothing but traces of dust and gas and intergalactic emptiness. Realm ships arrived through the Kingsport Gate. The only ships that would be likely to make the long translation here would be Deepers. But why would their alien enemies only send one ship?

  “Okay, that’s damned peculiar,” Dash said, aligning the Archetype onto a course to intercept the new arrival. “The Deepers must be up to something they think is clever.”

  “It doesn’t appear to be a Deeper ship,” Sentinel replied.

  “Oh. Okay, I’ll bite—who does it belong to then?”

  “Given the range, I can’t be certain. However, it casts no neutrino shadow, so it doesn’t contain any Dark Metal.”

  In Dash’s mind, if it didn’t contain Dark Metal, then it likely wasn’t a Deeper ship, or a Realm one. Nor was it likely to belong to any of the other factions from the nearby region of the Milky Way—the humans of the Rimward League, or any of the aliens, like the N’Teel, the Hriki, or the Oksa.

  So it must be somebody new.

  Dash commanded the target drones to return to the Kingsport, then accelerated the Archetype toward their enigmatic newcomer. “Well, let’s go greet our new arrival, shall we?”

  Sentinel managed her best sardonic tone yet. “I’ve got nothing better to do.”

  Dash translated across most of the gulf separating the Archetype and the new arrival, returning to unSpace just short of maximum effective weapons range. It gave Sentinel a chance to subject the ship to a detailed scan, but Dash didn’t need her results to know what he was looking at.

  “I know that ship,” he said.

  “You do?”

  “Well, maybe not that one in particular, but the type. It’s a Wayfarer-class, a combined courier and freighter. I’d always wanted to upgrade from the Slipwing to a Wayfarer, but I had to settle for hyper-advanced alien mech instead.”

  “I’m sorry you didn’t realize your dream.”

  “Eh, I’ll get over it.” Dash studied the enhanced image. The Wayfarer had taken damage, blast scars exposing gleaming armor amid black scorch marks. One of her three primary drive nacelles had been smashed to wreckage, and her sensor and comms cluster had been blown almost completely off. Whoever this was, they’d translated out into the middle of intergalactic nowhere with almost no ability to see or communicate and almost half of their maneuver capability gone.

  “Sentinel, can they see us at all? Do they even know we’re here?”

  “Unlikely. They do, however, appear to know about the Kingsport because that’s approximately where their current course will take them.”

  Dash bit his lip. A damaged ship of human construction and a type he’d only ever seen back in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way, out here in the Big Black, apparently intent on reaching the Kingsport.

  Dash accelerated the Archetype, closing on the strange ship. “Okay, I’m intrigued. Sentinel, try and open some sort of comms with them.”

  “One moment.”

  Dash enhanced the image a few more notches. He could make out a hull number, but it meant nothing to him. It was just a standardized designation used by all ships registered with the commercial authorities; the Slipwing had one of her own—CLC for courier light cargo, followed by 109786. But he could also make out a name, the Runaway. That just deepened the mystery, though. He was sure he recognized that name but couldn’t place it.

  “I have established comms via communications beam. It appears to be the only functioning comm system the other ship still possesses.”

  “Hey, whatever works. Go ahead and put me through to whoever the hell this is.”

  Sentinel popped open a window containing a g
rainy image of a human, a man. He was unshaven, generally unkempt, and looked as though he hadn’t showered in days.

  Even so, Dash immediately recognized him.

  “Holy shit. Spratley?”

  “Who’s this—” The man stopped and stared, then his eyes went wide. “Dash? Dash Sawyer?”

  Dash could only nod while his mind chewed on the cosmic improbability of running into someone he knew almost two hundred light-years from the rim of the Milky Way galaxy.

  For a moment, the two just stared at one another. Spratley finally broke the stunned silence, waggling a finger slowly at the screen.

  “You still owe me almost a thousand credits, you son of a bitch.”

  “Spratley, what the hell are you doing out here?”

  “Running.”

  “From what?”

  “I don’t know what they are. Some sort of alien assholes we’ve never seen before. We ran into them near the Pasture.”