Farthest Shore: A Mecha Scifi Epic (The Messenger Book 13) Read online

  Then it was his turn.

  He powered up the blast-cannon, which essentially squirted a boosted antimatter charge through the Darkness Between, the netherworld border between real space and unSpace. The blast-cannon had always been tricky to use. It was slow to accumulate a charge, stressed the Archetype’s power systems as it did, and sometimes knocked the mech offline when it fired.

  But that had been before. Now, the wing-like energy accumulators unfurled with almost a snap and immediately surged with crackling power. He fired, catching a light cruiser with the full impact of the blast. The colossal explosion flashed the Deeper ship to vapor and glowing chunks.

  And then the blast-cannon itself went offline. Dash cursed. Now the Archetype could handle the weapon easily, but firing it knocked it out of action. That was definitely something that needed to be fixed.

  But he still had the mech’s other weapons. Dash had gotten greedy and had Custodian install a second dark-lance, as powerful as the first. He fired both, slashing into a second Deeper ship as he raced past it. The two surviving Deeper ships apparently decided that discretion was the better part of valor and veered hard, accelerating back out of the system.

  “You can run, but you can’t hide,” Dash muttered and set off in pursuit.

  He gained fast, grinning, as he imagined how the Deepers must feel watching him racing toward them like an avatar of destruction. That is, of course, if the Deepers felt anything resembling an emotion to begin with. The two Deeper ships opened up with more missiles, torps, and x-ray laser shots, but Dash nimbly dodged, wove, took a few hits on the shield, let his point defenses take down a few of the projectiles, and simply avoided the rest.

  He selected one of the Deeper ships, got a solid firing solution, and triggered both dark-lances. The twin beams lashed out, slamming into his target’s stern quarter, blasting its engines to scrap and leaving it coasting. He had to decelerate to avoid overtaking it too quickly, deploying the power-sword as he did. Like the other weapons, it had been upgraded. But it had internal limits to how much power it could handle because the Archetype could now deliver far more. He swept along the flank of the Deeper ship, plunging the sword deep into its guts and laying open its hull from stern to bow. Then he spun around and pumped a burst of rail gun fire into it as he pulled away. The ship swung violently to one side, then exploded.

  One to go. Dash took a moment, though, to look back at the tactical situation. He didn’t want to target-lock on this one Deeper ship if Ragsdale, Wei-Ping, and Jexin needed his help. They seemed to be gaining the upper hand on the main Deeper attack, though, so he refocused on the ship ahead. Again, he accelerated and quickly gained on it.

  This time, he used the nova-cannon. Essentially a much scaled-down version of the blast-cannon, it used a fusion charge instead of anti-matter. It now cycled fast enough that it punched out a staccato burst of shots, bam-bam-bam-bam, before the overheat safeties kicked in. All four shots slammed into the Deeper ship, and it, like its unfortunate predecessor, began to slow.

  Then it vanished in a dazzling white burst of light.

  Bingo.

  Dash grinned, but it didn’t last. As the display brightened after the flash, he could see the Deeper ship was still very much intact. It was still badly damaged but in one piece. Dash rectified that with more nova-cannon and dark-lance shots, quickly reducing it to tumbling debris.

  He swept his attention over the mech’s status. Everything was still green. In fact, the weapons had taken more stress than the mech had. It could have been parked in the docking bay back on the Forge for all the strain it showed after the battle.

  “Dash, that flash of visible light was a torp detonation, whose epicenter was about halfway between us and the Deeper ship at the time,” Sentinel suddenly said.

  “Okay. And?”

  “And, given that the torps are, in some fashion, self-aware, it struck me as odd that it would detonate so far away from us.”

  “Confused, maybe? Where are you going with this, Sentinel?”

  “I’ve reviewed the scanner logs for the ten seconds before and following the time index of the explosion. The Deeper ship transmitted a tight-beam, encoded signal at the instant of detonation. It passed close to the Archetype, so I believe the torp detonation was an attempt to obscure it from us.”

  “Huh. Okay, where were they sending a message?”

  “The nearest object along that path is a very small, very dim white dwarf star. It is barely detectable from this range. Indeed, I only know it’s there from its star chart entry.”

  “Huh again.”

  “There’s one other issue,” Sentinel went on. A looping course extended from their present location, in the direction of the nearly invisible white dwarf.

  “That is the continuation of the Deeper ships’ trajectory as they fled,” Sentinel said.

  “There’s something out there.”

  “So it would appear.”

  Dash pondered the shattered remains of the Deeper ship for a moment. They’d had experience with mysterious alien signals being sent to remote locations before. One of those had ultimately led them to the battered remnants of a stellar confederacy based around Old Earth, a handful of humans in cryo-sleep. Their know-how and weapons tech had been invaluable in fighting the Golden, and their leader, Mikells Armagost, remained a key part of the Cygnus Realm’s residual presence on the other side of the Black Gate.

  “Wei-Ping, Jexin, SITREP, if you would.”

  “A few dents and scratches here, nothing major,” Jexin said. “We’ve pretty much got this battle wrapped up.”

  “Wei-Ping here. Not sure what it is about this new ship of mine, but we’ve taken a lot more than dents and scratches. The Stalwart’s going to need more time in the yards—again. And I just got her painted, too.”

  Wei-Ping went on to update Dash on the rest of her force, which had generally fared better than the Stalwart. “Wei-Ping, did it ever occur to you that maybe it’s not the ship, but her commander? That maybe she’s being a little too, uh, forthright in her attacks on the enemy?”

  “You calling me aggressive, Dash?”

  “Hey, if the ass-kicking boot fits.”

  Ragsdale’s update brought everyone back to grim earth, though. The Eastern Task Force had been badly mauled. The Relentless would be out of action for days, maybe weeks. Two heavy cruisers, a destroyer, and two frigates were all complete write-offs, destined for scrapping and recycling. All of the ships had taken moderate to heavy damage. They were definitely going to have to do some quick reshuffling of fleet assets to get a working task force back in place around Eastern.

  Even the Anchor had suffered what could be called moderate damage. One hit, in particular, had the AIs concerned. A Deeper missile had, immediately before impact, generated a power particle-beam burst that had flooded the shield covering that section of the station, punching through it, then drilling into the station’s armor. The warhead had impacted an instant later, detonating between Eastern’s inner and outer hulls. The damage had been confined by the station’s design to only one section, but within that section, it had been catastrophic. That hit had been the plume of venting atmosphere Dash had seen emanating from the Anchor.

  “We can assume that such a tandem warhead was likely experimental since only one of them was used,” Sentinel offered.

  “Yeah, but a successful experiment, which means we might see more of them,” Dash replied. Sentinel could only agree.

  Worse by far than all of the physical damage, though, was the cost in lives. The tandem warhead alone had killed thirty-eight on the Anchor. Another seventy-one had died aboard the various ships of the Eastern Task Force. In total, they’d had one hundred and nine killed, and almost that many again wounded. By the time the SITREPS were done, Dash seethed with rage.

  “Okay, here’s what’s going to happen. You guys are going to rally and reorganize the fleet and start cleaning things up. Priority on figuring out how that tandem warhead thing works
and how to defend against it. For now, Wei-Ping, you stay on station here,” Dash said, his voice hard and flat.

  “What about you, Dash?” Jexin asked.

  “Me? I’m going to chase down the destination of that Deeper signal and turn whatever I find there into slag.”

  Dash flung himself through the void, pushing the Archetype to its vastly increased limits. Freed of the need to keep pace with other ships, he could drive the mech to the edge of a performance envelope nothing else in the Realm could yet hope to match.

  He needed to kill something. Kill Deepers. Kill them, and keep killing them until they were all dead. Just like the Golden, he was going to exterminate them. If it meant turning over every rock in the galaxy, or beyond, to see the last one of them die, he would make it happen.

  Unlike the Golden, though, he had no problem with the ethics of what amounted to a campaign of genocide. It didn’t bother his conscience at all. They still really had no idea why the Deepers were so innately hostile, but Dash didn’t care. They were vermin, an infestation from outside the galaxy that needed to be cleansed away.

  Now, an avenging angel of alloy and power, of armor and cold, implacable intent, the Archetype raced through unSpace, its relentless course fixed on a dim, almost invisible white dwarf.

  “We are returning to real space in thirty seconds,” Sentinel said.

  Dash just grunted his understanding and readied himself to unleash hell on whatever he found there.

  The star field flicked back into existence, centered on a white dot small enough that Dash could easily cover it with a fingertip at arm’s length.

  Aside from a few icy rocks, there was nothing else here.

  Dash hissed in frustrated rage. “Sentinel, could there be something stealthed up here?”

  “There’s nothing to indicate it. However, now we have a firm fix on the white dwarf’s precise location, it’s clear that the Deeper transmission was directed past it, into a distant orbit at the very edge of the star’s gravity well.”

  “Show me.”

  A red line tracing the path of the Deepers’ directional transmission suddenly slashed through the system—if a tiny, almost invisible star and a handful of rocks could be considered a system, that is. It bypassed the star and intersected a small cluster of rocky debris on the far side of the system, at the very edge of its Oort Cloud.

  Dash slammed the Archetype to its maximum acceleration, launching the mech at that distant place like a piece of ordnance.

  “We are being illuminated by surveillance scanners,” Sentinel said.

  Again, Dash just grunted, having already seen the threat board light up. So there was something here, something he could kill.

  Good.

  They flew on, racing through the system at ever-increasing speed. The surveillance scanners kept Dash lit up the entire way. He didn’t care.

  And when the surveillance scanners switched to targeting mode, he grinned a predatory grin.

  “Bring it, you bastards.”

  He closed on whatever was lurking in the Oort Cloud. The Archetype’s own scanners couldn’t resolve anything firm yet, beyond some sort of return that flickered and danced in and out of existence, like a ghost.

  “I am detecting multiple missile launches. There appear to be two distinct sources of launch signatures, probably weapons platforms,” Sentinel said.

  “Yeah, I see them. That’s a lot of missiles coming our way.”

  It was. In just under thirty seconds, the two platforms had spewed out almost one hundred projectiles. Dash didn’t hesitate, flying into the teeth of a gale of ordnance. In fact, he slowed the Archetype to improve his ability to maneuver.

  “The combined closing speed will see the missiles impacting in just over thirty seconds,” Sentinel said.

  Dash started jinking the mech, left and right, up and down. He made each leg of the jink a little longer than he normally would, watching intently as the missiles changed trajectories to accommodate his turns. Ten seconds before the first missiles would impact, he firewalled the mech’s Blur drive, using it and thrusters in tandem to sweep the Archetype through a hard banking turn that would have given an atmospheric fighter a run for its credits.

  All but about a dozen of the missiles lost their lock, the Archetype suddenly well outside their possible cones of maneuver. He snapped out dark-lance shots at the rest, blasting one after another to fragments. The point defense batteries took down several more. Of all the missiles launched at him, only two detonated, one square against the shield, the other a proximity blast. The mech’s shield flared with trapped energy, then quickly radiated it away.

  Eventually, Dash thought, the Deepers were going to start adapting to the Archetype’s vastly increased capabilities. Until then, though, he intended to drain every bit of advantage out of them he could.

  He rolled the Archetype back, just as a long-ranged beam weapon opened fire from a third location. It had opened at a much greater range than the typical Deeper x-ray laser.

  “Sentinel, what the hell is that?”

  “A high-band ultraviolet laser. The Deepers have apparently traded power for increased range, since intervening dust and gas is transparent to the longer-wavelength energy.”

  Dash watched as the beam lanced out, reaching for the Archetype. “Still seems plenty powerful to me.”

  “It is, likely because it is installed in a static installation, with its own dedicated power source.”

  Dash nodded. It made sense. They’d made the weapon more efficient, then made up for its diminished energy by just pouring in raw power. That made it good for fixed defenses but more cumbersome for a ship.

  So there was a third platform of some sort out here, along with two missile platforms. Why? What was so special about this tiny dwarf star?

  Dash realized the answer as he swung the Archetype onto an attack run. There was nothing special about the white dwarf. This installation, whatever it was, had some other purpose. And whatever that was, it was better served by staying hidden in this remote, utterly unremarkable place than it did from strong defensive systems.

  And that just made it even more interesting.

  Dash angled his course slightly, slowing even further, so he could bypass a trio of comets that tumbled along in a tight orbit around one another. He caught the first missile platform with dark-lance shots, blowing it apart before it could launch more than a few missiles. The second one unloaded a full volley, while the third platform kept pounding out shots from its UV laser. Dash wove back and forth, opening up rapid fire with the nova-cannon and the dark-lances at the onrushing projectiles while firing a missile barrage of his own at the laser platform. A moment later, a spasm of violence flashed through the Oort Cloud as missiles impacted and detonated. Fire from the Archetype blasted the second missile platform apart, and Dash’s missiles slammed into the laser platform, the staccato series of explosions leaving nothing but an expanding cloud of debris.

  Just like that, it was over.

  Dash cursed, at himself, this time. He’d let his rage get the better of him. Destroying all three of the Deeper platforms had been satisfying as hell, but it also destroyed any indication of what they’d been doing here.

  Some post-fury depression set in. He felt spent, burned out, like a missile that had exhausted its fuel. He wheeled the Archetype around the remnants of the Deeper platforms, hoping that Sentinel might find something useful, still intact.

  “There’s an unusual signal emanating from one of the pieces of wreckage, of the laser platform,” she said. That perked Dash up. Maybe he hadn’t screwed up entirely.

  “Can you make out what it is?”

  “A small piece of wreckage, about two meters on a side. It is broadcasting an unusual, high-frequency signal which is modulated, suggesting it’s transmitting information.”

  “To where?”

  “To nowhere. It is a conventional radio signal. From this location, it would take almost seven hours to reach even the white dwarf
star. Even then, it is far too weak to be detected from much further away from that before being lost in background noise.”

  Dash narrowed his eyes at the icon Sentinel had used to highlight the source of the signal. What was the point of broadcasting a weak radio signal out here, in the middle of nowhere? Nothing would be able to detect it from more than a short distance away—

  “Ah, I get it. It’s a beacon. Like a distress call,” he said.

  “That would make sense. It may be an escape pod.”

  Dash turned the Archetype and eased it toward the signal. Eventually, he got a visual fix on a small cube, just under two meters on each side. If it was an escape pod, it was an awfully small one.

  “Any signs of life?”

  “This is Deeper technology. There are always signs of life since it’s partly organic.”

  “Fair point.”

  Dash stopped the mech about a klick away. The little cube slowly tumbled, broadcasting its encoded radio signal, and that was it.

  “Could it be a weapon? A booby trap, maybe, intended to lure someone in and then explode?” he asked.

  “It certainly could be. But it seems unlikely. The Deepers are notably efficient, and installing such a device in an installation obviously never intended to be found in the first place seems . . . inefficient.”

  “Okay, then.” Dash nudged the Archetype forward until the cube was within the mech’s reach.

  “I don’t believe it’s a weapon. I believe it has some other purpose. The beacon was likely meant to aid in its recovery.”

  “So it’s the something the Deepers don’t want to lose. If this platform of theirs was destroyed, they wanted to be able to come and get this thing, whatever it is. That would seem to make it something important.”

  “I don’t disagree.”

  On impulse, Dash reached out and grabbed the cube, taking it gently into one of the mech’s massive hands.

  Nothing changed.