The Messenger Box Set: Books 1-6 Read online

  “I’m not even sure what we’re looking for,” Dash said.

  Leira, in the copilot’s seat, shrugged. “Me neither. But I suspect it will be one of those, you’ll know it when you see it kind of things.”

  They watched the scans progress for a while, then Dash looked up at Leira. “Whatever brought you out here in the first place?”

  “I told you, we found that data aboard that wrecked courier’s ship.”

  “That’s not what I mean. You came flying out here based on some data you found, that you didn’t even know was accurate, or even at all correct. That was an awful risk for, let’s face it, no certain reward.”

  “Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” she said.

  “Yeah, but if anyone knows how to manage risk, it’s couriers. And this goes way beyond any sort of reasonable risk-and-reward thing.”

  Leira shrugged. “Honestly? I was bored. Hauling my ass from one shitty job to another—carry this passenger, cart this cargo, pick up this, deliver that.” She shrugged again. “It seemed like something different. Something worth taking that was—and you’re right about it—a terrible chance.” She looked at Dash. “But it was, I don’t know, exciting.” Her eyes narrowed. “Anyway, I could ask you the same thing. What brought you out here?”

  Dash shrugged. “I’m impulsive and irresponsible. You, on the other hand, just don’t seem to be that type—what?”

  Something on the scan had caught Leira’s attention. “Dash, look at this.”

  “Turns out you were right, that we’d know it when we see it,’ he replied, examining it. “And I think we see it.”

  The deep scan showed something lurking in the heart of the nearest comet—just a shadow, something more evident from only a slightly increased opacity to their scans. But it was a regular, symmetrical shape, something like a tetrahedron.

  It was tech.

  More than that, the shadowy outline inside the comet was clearly a ship, and it was generating power.

  10

  Dash tapped at the thruster controls, easing the Slipwing closer to the comet. It loomed like a mountain, a massive agglomeration of dust, rock, and dirty ice kilometers across. It was large enough to have a slight gravitation effect Dash had to account for, which just made him marvel that much more at the Unseen and their amazing tech.

  “Dash,” Leira said, her eyes fixed on the scanner’s vid, “you want to move, let’s see, plus one kilometer along the x axis, and plus 2 along the y. The z axis looks perfect.”

  Dash nodded and made more thruster inputs, keeping his own attention on the comet itself. This close to something he could actually crash into, he liked to keep his own eyes on the thing itself. Some pilots were okay with using data and vids and scans for everything, but Dash was old fashioned that way. He liked being able to see what was happening outside his ship.

  “Okay,” he said, “we should be right over the spot—”

  “Dash?”

  “Yo.”

  “There’s a body down there,” Leira said.

  Dash looked at the vid as Leira zoomed it in. Sure enough, a body—apparently human, or at least humanoid—was sprawled on a patch of grubby ice.

  “Is that an Unseen?” he asked. “I expected an ancient super-race to look more, well, more.”

  There was movement behind them, as Viktor and Conover pushed into the cockpit.

  “The Fade is back online,” Viktor said, “or as online as it’s going to be…” He trailed off. “Is that a body?”

  Dash nodded. “Like I was just telling Leira, I kind of expected the Unseen to be—”

  “It’s not one of the Unseen,” Conover said matter-of-factly.

  Dash looked back at him. “How do you know that, since they’re, you know, Unseen?”

  “Did you see them when you looked at the Lens?” Leira asked.

  Conover shook his head. “No. That’s an old-style vac suit. I recognize it from historical holos I’ve seen.” He stared at the image, then nodded. “Yeah. That’s a human.”

  Dash blinked at the display. “A human? What the hell is a human doing here?”

  “Based on that vac suit,” Conover said, “whoever it is, they’ve been here a long time.”

  They all stared at the image for a moment, then Dash said, “Well, only one way to find out. We need to go down there.”

  Dash hated wearing vac suits. They were cramped and uncomfortable, they stank of synthetics and electronics and your own sweat and other bodily emanations, and you couldn’t scratch or adjust things, if they needed adjustment. But absent an atmosphere, they had no choice but to land the Slipwing and conduct an actual excursion onto the surface of the comet, to find out just what the hell was going on.

  Dash had put the Slipwing down on a field of ice and gravel, the closest flat spot to the crashed ship big enough to fit her. There wasn’t enough gravity to hold her in place, so Dash had set her to station-keeping, her thrusters periodically firing briefly, at low power, to keep her in place. Now, they walked the couple hundred meters to what was apparently a crash site, using the low-grav shuffle that kept them from bouncing too far off the surface.

  Conover, who had levered himself to the top of a small rise a few dozen meters away, said, “There are structures over here.”

  They joined him and, sure enough, saw what seemed to be several shelters—portable survival structures intended to keep the crew of a crashed spaceship alive in a hostile environment until they could be rescued. Dash always thought that kind of apparatus was more of a feel-good thing than actually a practical way of surviving, but, as they approached them, it seemed they had kept their occupants alive, at least for a time. Mind you, that had been many years ago—probably centuries, at this point—so what remained were bleached, radiation-blasted tatters hanging from sagging aluminum frames.

  Reaching the shelters, they discovered more bodies in vac suits, all human and mummified like the first. Dash tried to imagine what it must have been like—time passing without rescue, the hours becoming days becoming weeks, the shelters starting to leak as radiation scoured them, frantic repairs finally falling behind the failures, then a last, desperate attempt to survive inside vac suits, until their air and power ran out and the icy emptiness of space could no longer be denied.

  Viktor pointed at a rugged field of boulders nearby. “This is the wreck itself, I think.”

  They moved that way, at once noticing metal among the boulders. A hull. Their ship had hit hard enough to bury itself in the ice and loose rock; a few dozen meters in any direction and it would have hit pretty much solid rock. It was unlikely anyone would have survived that, so it was a shock to see that any of them had survived long enough to even build those shelters. That was either amazing flying or amazing luck—probably a little bit of both.

  Conover found a way in, by way of an open hatch wedged between two large boulders. Their suit lights showed a drop to a corrugated metal deck, but to see any more, they’d have to clamber down inside.

  “Are we actually going in there?” Viktor asked. “I mean, it might not be safe. There could be radiation leaks, debris to snag our suits.”

  “We did not come all this way to see an entrance to an ancient, crashed ship just to turn away and head home,” said Dash.

  Dash led the way, climbing down into the opening. He could simply have let himself fall, but Viktor had a point—there could be sharp debris that could snag a vac suit. The suits were tough, and self-sealing, but they weren’t indestructible. So he took his time and care, as did the others as they followed him.

  The ship was definitely old.

  Dash couldn’t identify it at all. Neither could Viktor, who knew more about ships than he did. The tech was ancient, using components and circuits that belonged in a historical display. They soon found that essentially all of the ship forward of roughly the midpoint had been destroyed, smashed by the impact with the comet into crumpled wreckage. The rear half was largely intact. Dash was mindful of Viktor’s con
cern about radiation; if there was an old-style fission reactor on board, its fuel might still be dangerous, especially if it had been exposed by damage. But the radiation readings in what was obviously the engineering bay were only slightly higher than elsewhere aboard the ship, and actually somewhat lower than on the surface. The reactor containment had held, despite the crash and the passage of time—a testament to some rugged, if crude, engineering.

  “I’d say this ship is at least three hundred years old,” Viktor said, shining his suit light around the machinery and structure of the engineering bay. “Maybe four hundred. That’s the last time this sort of liquid salt reactor would have been used, anyway.”

  “Who the hell would have been flying around out here four hundred years ago?” Dash asked. “I mean, humans would have only just been starting to poke their noses away from the—oh, what’s the name of Old Earth’s star?”

  “Sol,” Conover said. “And I think these are Sooners.”

  Viktor and Leira both said, “Ah…” and nodded, but Dash had turned to stare at the kid through his vision plate.

  “Sooners?”

  “They were a group. A sect. Something like that, anyway. They had a reputation as being wild, impulsive—pretty fearless. They weren’t content to wait for humanity to establish colonies and trade routes. They wanted to explore and expand now, or Sooner. You know, like, sooner rather than later.”

  “Yeah,” Dash said, “I get it.”

  Light splashed around the ship’s interior as Leira turned. “Wild, impulsive, and impatient? Sounds like we found your ancestors, Dash.”

  Viktor laughed.

  “Very funny,” Dash said. “Look, I’m not actually wild or impulsive. I’m assertive.”

  “Yeah,” Leira replied, “let’s go with that.”

  They left the engineering bay to explore whatever other parts of the ship remained accessible. There wasn’t much. The rest was mostly cargo and storage. Dash frowned at each of the open bays—they’d been ransacked, probably by the crew, as they desperately sought anything they could use to keep themselves alive just a little longer. He barely gave the last cargo bay a cursory glance. Clearly, this was something of historical interest, but he was no archeologist. It was time to move on.

  “What’s that?” Viktor asked, looking into the same bay Dash had just written-off.

  “What?”

  Viktor entered, followed by Conover. There, on a shelving unit, lay a metallic ribbon about a hand-span wide and three meters long. Dash had dismissed it as a piece of cable or conduit, but as Viktor and Conover shone their suit lights on it, the reflected gleam seemed wrong. Different than it should be. Too bright. It was as though it actually threw back more light than what hit it.

  “It has writing on it,” Conover said. “Writing, or symbols. It reminds me of what I saw in the Lens.”

  Dash turned back. “Unseen tech?”

  “I think it is,” Conover said.

  Leira, still at the entrance to the bay, said, “Our decryption tool?”

  Dash shrugged, though no one could have seen it inside the vac suit. “Let’s take it back to the Slipwing and find out.”

  The Ribbon, as they’d immediately started calling it, was indeed strange. It struck Dash that he now had a second, inscrutable piece of alien tech aboard his ship, which was worrying, but they were here for alien tech, so there really wasn’t any way around it. The Ribbon, though, was a little more disconcerting than even the Lens, which was strange—the latter could apparently blow up stars. The Ribbon had no discernible purpose, which meant it might be intended to do anything, like vaporize cocky ship captains who dared to fiddle with it. For that matter, it had been aboard the crashed ship, so maybe it was somehow responsible for the crash.

  What it was, was a flat strip made of some unrecognizable alloy or compound, embossed along its length with what might be symbols, or words, or circuits, a combination thereof, or something else entirely. And that was all they could tell about it.

  The Slipwing wasn’t a scientific research vessel, and Dash wasn’t a scientist, so the instrumentation available on board was limited, as was any analysis they could perform on it. Even Conover, who’d managed to engage himself closely with the Lens, couldn’t tell much of anything about the Ribbon. His enhanced eyes couldn’t pick up anything special, which was a puzzle in itself. It was unusually cold, as though taking an inordinately long time to warm up from the frigid conditions aboard the crashed ship. But even that led to more strangeness.

  “Well,” Dash said, crossing his arms and staring at it, “there it is.”

  “There it is,” Leira agreed.

  “What do we do now?” he asked.

  The others shrugged. Conover said, “It’s metal, and linear. Maybe it’s meant to carry an electric current.”

  Viktor peered at the item with an engineer’s gaze. “Maybe. We could try that, I suppose, after it warms up enough that we can touch it.”

  Leira, pulled something out of her pocked — the Lens, Dash realized. She studied it for a moment, then moved closer to examine the Ribbon.

  Without warning, the Ribbon began to move.

  Leira yelped and stumbled back a few steps. It hit Dash that they hadn’t really planned for what to do with this thing beyond getting it aboard and examining it, and that included a way of ejecting it, if it proved dangerous.

  Looks like I’m not the only wild, impulsive one, he thought. He would have probably felt a humorous satisfaction to go along with it, if it wasn’t for the fact that this could be a real problem.

  The Ribbon continued to move, curling back on itself. It seemed to be reforming itself from a strip to a curve, except it kept curling until its two ends touched.

  SNAP.

  Now it was a ring. The air over the Ribbon, now the Ring, shimmered.

  He looked at the others. “Any ideas?”

  Three blank stares tinged with fear met his question.

  The shimmer intensified, became a swirl of light and color that smeared everything seen through it into a whirling blur, then resolved into an image.

  It was the Globe of Suns.

  No, it was the Globe of Suns being assembled.

  Because that’s what was happening. Stars were being moved. At the same time, their planets were being disassembled, rocky worlds into fractured chunks of lithosphere and searing streams of metallic core, gas giants stripped of their hydrogen and helium, ammonia and nitrogen, and all of it being towed away by massive, grey ships that seemed made of huge, multifaceted modules. The stars’ Oort Clouds, the vast fields of debris ringing the outermost edges of their gravity wells, were likewise repurposed, being shepherded en masse into the center of what was rapidly becoming a globe of transplanted suns.

  They were watching the Pasture being assembled as well.

  All four stood dumbstruck, watching the sequence unfold. What must have taken centuries, maybe millennia, happened in moments. Humanoid figures in sleek, black suits and gleaming silver faceplates implanted what seemed like much smaller versions of the multifaceted modules making the ships into each of the comets and asteroids, then set them spinning about in what was now their ancient dance, a vast mandala of bodies kept on precise trajectories by technology the nature of which they couldn’t even begin to guess.

  Enraptured, Dash and the others just kept watching. Now the Globe of Suns, and the Pasture enclosed by them, was complete. The grey ships, vast, but strangely generalized and without detail, lingered a moment longer, then, as one, they all simply vanished.

  A moment passed.

  “The Lens,” Conover said, his voice barely a whisper. He looked at Leira. “I think it’s glowing. Look!”

  Leira, her eyes still fixed on the image of the Globe of Suns and the Pasture, glanced down at the small device still in her hands. The Lens flared with crimson light, while the image portrayed by the Ring changed.

  It showed a single star—a rather nondescript yellow-white star of middling magnitude. A
fter a moment, the circuits, or veins—or both—inside the Lens writhed and moved, changing their configuration; a moment after that, the star suddenly shrank, collapsing in on itself, then rebounded in a colossal blast that turned the whole image white.

  “Did I just do that?” Leira asked, visibly shaken.

  Again, there were no words sufficient to even begin to answer.

  Now the image shifted again. This time, it showed a region of space. Dash immediately recognized the Pasture and the Globe of Suns, but a series of bright crimson points glowed throughout it.

  Dash looked at the others, then stepped closer and peered at the image. It took a moment to work out the various stars, but he was able to map enough of the Globe of Suns in his mind, against the charts on the nav, to reason it out. “That’s us,” he said, pointing at one of the red markers.

  “It must be the Lens,” Viktor said.

  “Or this Ribbon, or Ring, or whatever the hell it is,” Dash replied.

  Leira shook her head. “No, it showed us that holo after I got close with the Lens, and what the Lens does—which doesn’t seem to be in much doubt now.”

  “So these other points,” Conover said, stepping up beside Dash, “must be what, other Lenses?”

  “There’s got to be two dozen of them,” Viktor said.

  They just stared for a moment. But something plucked at Dash’s attention. One of the crimson points was outside the Pasture and in Clan Shirna space.

  “Well, if these are all Lenses,” he said, “then this one seems to be in the hands of Clan Shirna.” He straightened and looked at the others. “Which means that Nathis has one already, and I’m willing to bet he has plans to use it.”

  11

  While Conover and Viktor worked to make sure they had a map—admittedly a crude map, based on unreliable scans and alien data of unknown accuracy—depicting everything they’d discovered so far in the Pasture, Dash and Leira pondered strategy.