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

  This was why the Deepers had struck the N’Teel homeworld again. Whatever this thing was, they wanted it, desperately enough that they were prepared to risk a fleet to retrieve it.

  “I’ve finished scanning. This is—”

  Sentinel abruptly cut off, then did something she’d never done before. She took control of the Archetype, redlined the drive, and slammed the mech through a wild gyration. As she did, the threat board lit up with a distinct and terrifying annunciation.

  A purplish beam, not too different than their own dark-lances, punched past the Archetype. It was the new Deeper beam weapon, the one that had killed a mech with a single shot. If Sentinel hadn’t seized control, it would have struck the Archetype.

  “Apologies, Dash. However, danger was imminent—”

  “We’re a team, Sentinel. You do whatever you have to do to keep us both alive and kicking,” Dash said. Now that he knew what they were facing, he could deal with it. And he did, taking advantage of the Archetype’s fearsome performance to maneuver in ways that even the much smaller fighters found hard to match.

  The beam weapon fired again. Dash avoided the shot, then punched out dark-lance shots, taking down fighters. The beam-ship, as he’d come to think of it, presented a problem, though. If he destroyed it, the wreckage would just plunge back into the ocean depths. But if he didn’t destroy it, that damned weapon was going to reach orbit, its threat effectively holding the entire Realm fleet at bay.

  He slammed the Archetype into a vertical climb, followed by an Immelmann turn and a sudden dive. The beam fired again, and again missed. Sweat beaded Dash’s brow. Every instinct screamed at him to pull back. The Archetype might be able to resist a hit, but it might not.

  Was it worth risking the mech’s very existence?

  Dash dodged another shot. That was something, at least. The weapon had a cycle time of about thirty seconds. Such a slow rate of fire made it easier to avoid.

  He bit his lip for a few seconds, then puffed out a sigh. “Screw it,” he muttered and threw the Archetype back into the fracas. They couldn’t just let the Deepers cart this new weapon away. They had an intact and working example of it, and Dash was determined to capitalize on it.

  For that, though, he needed a plan.

  And he had one.

  “Dash, why the hell did you let that thing get into orbit?” Leira asked. Her tone was taut, even a little angry, but she held back, giving Dash the benefit of the doubt.

  He made to reply, but the weapon fired, skewering the Realm heavy cruiser Implacable. Benzel cursed over the comm.

  “Well, it’s in orbit now, and taking shots we can’t avoid the way you can, Dash. The Implacable is out of action, and we’ve probably lost the Destiny, whose crew is abandoning ship. I’m pulling the rest of the fleet back before it can do any more damage.”

  Benzel didn’t sound like he was giving Dash the benefit of the doubt at all.

  But Dash just dug in mental heels. “I’ve been waiting for it to get into a stable orbit.”

  “But why?” Leira asked.

  “Yeah, they’ve got their big ships around it, now. They’re just going to scram out of here with it,” Amy snapped.

  Dash didn’t get a chance to answer, though. Jexin did it for him.

  “Dash wanted it to make stable orbit so that when we destroy it, the debris stays in orbit,” she said.

  “Drinks on me, Jex. In fact, I want them to raise the orbit a little more, so we have less risk of pieces deorbiting,” Dash put in.

  “Okay, well, we need to get to the destroying it part, and soon,” Benzel said.

  “Well aware of that. Just hang on,” Dash said. He turned his attention back to the display.

  “Sentinel, how much longer until we aren’t risking anything deorbiting when we blow that damned thing apart?”

  “Technically, until it breaks orbit completely, there is always a chance that debris will be propelled by an explosion into a decaying orbit.”

  Dash opened his mouth to snap out something about an answer that was good enough, but Sentinel went on.

  “However, I understand what you’re asking. The probability of losing fragments in the atmosphere is now as low as it will be, as long as it remains in orbit.”

  He nodded once. “Okay, now it’s time to destroy it.”

  Dash snapped out instructions. Benzel was to pull the fleet back, disperse the ships and generate as much noise as he could to degrade the Deeper targeting scanners. The other three mechs would likewise hang back, keeping up erratic evasive maneuvers until he called them in.

  “Dash, you’re going in alone?” Leira asked.

  Dash stared at the fearsome array of Deeper ships clustered protectively around the beam-ship as they prepared to break orbit.

  “It’s the only way this is going to work. Wait for my command, got it?”

  “Dash—”

  “Got it?”

  A pause, then Leira replied, a touch guilty. “I—I do.”

  Dash sent her a private message. “Thanks. You’ll see.” To everyone else, he called out, “Let’s do it.”

  Dash accelerated the Archetype and aimed himself directly at the beam ship.

  A hurricane of fire lashed out at the onrushing Archetype. Missiles, x-ray lasers, torps, a multitude of them. Dash grunted and strained as he threw the mech through the hardest gyrations he could manage. The Blur drive and thrusters hummed with power that, just a few weeks before, he could only have dreamt of. With the hexacore installed, the Archetype was living up to its vast potential.

  Now, if he could just avoid getting it blown to bits by this new beam weapon.

  Which fired, missing Dash by less than a klick. He accelerated again, fixed his eyes on a point in space—the beam weapon itself. He swiveled his attention up and down, left and right, keeping it locked on that point while dodging the ever-intensifying typhoon of fire pouring at him. The Archetype rocked and shuddered as more and more weapons landed hits. The shield absorbed all it could, then blasted the energy away in a dazzling pulse. During that brief window, though, more hits slammed into the mech’s armor. Dash grimly ignored it. There was only one weapon he had to avoid, and he was almost there.

  The beam fired again. It just clipped the Archetype’s right leg, vaporizing the foot and part of the shin just above it. Dash groaned at the shock. If there’d been any doubt that the beam could savage the Archetype the way it had anything else, that dispelled it.

  Thirty second cycle time, give or take. Thirty second flight time to his target, give or take. This was going to be awfully damned close.

  Fifteen seconds. Ten.

  Dash deployed the power sword.

  Five. The Archetype staggered under more hits from the other ships. He forced himself to ignore them.

  Either he was going to take out this weapon, or it was going to slam into him at point-blank range, with no hope of avoiding it.

  One.

  Dash swung the power sword, neatly slashing the beam weapon’s emitter apart. It exploded with a burst of accumulated power, the very energy it was about to shoot into his face.

  Now he slammed the Archetype to full acceleration, pulling away from the battle so fast that missiles fired after him couldn’t keep up.

  He let out a long, slow breath. “Okay, I’ve done my bit. Benzel, Leira, you guys can take care of the rest of them. I’m just going to fly top cover for a while.”

  “You have to change your shorts after that, don’t you?” Benzel asked.

  “I can neither confirm nor deny the state of my underwear,” Dash said, easing the Archetype into a long, arcing turn. Of course he wasn’t just going to fly top cover. He was going to rejoin the battle.

  Soon. But he was going to take a break first because he’d freakin’ earned it.

  With their fearsome beam weapon out of action, the Deepers suddenly faced a much superior force, bent on vengeance. The Herald bore back in, leading the attack, while Leira, Jexin, and Amy pincered them
from the opposite direction. In apparent desperation, the Deepers turned their own weapons on the disabled beam-ship, a frustrating turn of events that they couldn’t avoid. So they demolished the Deeper ships as fast as they could to try and limit the damage to their prize.

  “It got pretty slagged, unfortunately,” Benzel said after he’d ordered the fleet to cease fire. All of the Deeper ships had been destroyed, and the N’Teel, aided by the Victory’s fighter wings, were mopping up the aliens left behind in atmo.

  Dash nodded glumly. The beam-ship was mostly intact but had been severely damaged by the Deepers’ attempts to scuttle it. It would truly suck if, after all of that, they found themselves in possession of nothing more than wreckage.

  Jexin closed in and secured what was left of the beam ship. As soon as she did, though, she called over the comm, her voice edged with excitement.

  “I’m not sure about the rest of this thing, but something seems to have survived that I think is going to make you happy, Dash. Our scans are showing there’s there another of those Radiant Point things aboard.”

  Dash perked up. “Sentinel, can you confirm that?”

  A moment, then she spoke. “Not directly. The beam ship was heavily armored, which is why the Deepers weren’t able to destroy it. The armor is also obscuring scans that aren’t conducted at close range. But the Polaris’s data seems clear. There is another Radiant Point aboard the Deeper wreck.”

  “Okay. Benzel, that is the absolute priority for recovery. That Radiant Point needs to be secured and taken back to the Forge asap. Aside from doing whatever we have to, to save our people’s lives, nothing else matters. As soon as that’s done, I want whatever’s left of that beam weapon to be recovered.”

  “Could they be related? The Radiant Point and that beam-thing?” Amy asked.

  “That’s a really good question, Amy. Right now, we’ve got no idea. But it’s definitely something we have to answer.”

  “It explains why the Deepers were so hell-bent on coming back here, though, and attacking the N’Teel again,” Leira said.

  “Yes, they were desperate to recover this thing. That’s what the whole attack was about,” Jexin replied.

  “Yeah. And the damned thing was sitting there, on the bottom of the ocean, the whole time. How the hell did we miss that?” Dash snapped.

  “We weren’t looking for it,” Sentinel offered.

  Leira barked out a humorless laugh. “True, that. Kind of hard to find something if you’re not even aware you should be looking for it.”

  Benzel’s salvager’s eye had been correct. Both the Destiny and the Implacable had been damaged beyond repair. Both would be hauled back to the Forge, scrapped, and recycled. But the loss of the two heavy cruisers, along with a frigate and two corvettes, only aggravated the situation facing the Realm. Worse, they’d lost another sixteen dead and twenty wounded, most of them experienced spacers. Benzel and Wei-Ping were both starting to make noises about how thinly the fleet was being stretched.

  Benzel turned from the big screen in the Command Center, hands on hips, and puffed out an irritated sigh at the Inner Circle. “The real problem is that we still don’t know what we’re facing. Yeah, we keep managing to kick the Deepers’ slimy guts every time they poke their noses, or beaks, or whatever into our business. And, yeah, we’ve given a lot better than we’ve gotten when it comes to inflicting losses. But, for all we know, they could be building ships at twice the rate we are. Or five times. Or a hundred times. We just don’t know.”

  Wei-Ping, who’d backed up Benzel during his somber presentation, nodded. “The fact is, we can’t properly cover the Forge, the Anchors, help the League protect their territory, and help the N’Teel and the Hriki and the others protect theirs. If we try, the Deepers might just overwhelm and pick off each piece of our fleet in turn.”

  “Defeat in detail,” Conover said.

  Wei-Ping glanced at him. “Huh?”

  Conover suddenly startled and glanced around, turning a shade redder when he realized everyone was staring at him. “Oh. Um, sorry. It’s called being defeated in detail when one side deploys itself in small pieces, so the other can defeat each one in turn. There’s a whole principle of war intended to prevent just that—concentration of force.”

  Dash gave Conover a quizzical look. “Wait, have you been a secret military genius this whole time?”

  “Would’ve been good to know we had a Soo-Sun in our midst, like, back during the Life War,” Leira said.

  “I think you mean Sun Tzu, the ancient military philosopher who wrote The Art of War,” Amy put in.

  Silence again. This time, everyone just stared at Amy.

  “What? Sometimes I read over Conover’s shoulder.”

  Leira smirked. “That’s what you two do when you’re alone in your quarters? Read stuff?”

  Amy gave her eyebrows a suggestive lift. “Hey, you haven’t really read Von Clausewitz’s On War until you’ve done it naked.”

  Dash raised his hands. “Alright, before you ruin Jomini and Marcus Aurelius for me as well, let’s move past the nude strategy sessions, shall we?”

  Conover had, of course, gone bright red by now, but he just shot Amy a glare, making her giggle, then turned back to Dash. “I figured that reading up on military history, the conduct of battles, and stuff like that might be useful.”

  “Makes sense. So, is it useful? Does it offer anything that might help us out?”

  “Well, I know you want to show our new allies, like the N’Teel, the Hriki, and the Oksa, that we’re going to look out for them, right? So why don’t we centralize most of the fleet and deploy it forward, close to their home systems, so that we could react to any Deeper incursion with overwhelming force of our own?” Conover said.

  Benzel crossed his arms and scowled. “Unless we move the Forge and the Anchors, that’s going to leave them without much fleet back-up.”

  “It’s also going to pull us even further away from the League,” Viktor put in.

  But Conover persisted. “We’ve armed the League with a lot of new tech. They’re pretty capable of taking on the Deepers themselves, now, and that only gets truer every day. And as for the Forge and the Anchors, if we group them up, they’re as powerful as the whole fleet themselves.”

  Custodian cut in. “Technically, more powerful. If the Forge and all four Anchors are deployed together, firing in mutual support, the absolute destructive force they could deliver as measured in exawatts exceeds that of the current fleet by almost fifteen percent. In other words, they can kick ass.”

  Grins all around, and a few chuckles. Dash wondered if the Unseen had ever envisioned the AI running the Forge, the pinnacle of their technological achievement, saying that he could kick ass.

  Benzel still looked doubtful, but, surprisingly, it was Wei-Ping who spoke up in sudden support. “This might work, you know. If we deploy enough of an early-warning screen of lightships and scanner-buoys, we could centralize the rest of the fleet roughly here.” She pointed at a star system roughly equidistant from Backwater, the N’Teel, Hriki, and Oksa home systems, and the most spinward of the League systems. “And if we put the stations together about here, to cover our rimward flank, I think we’d still be covering everything we want to cover, more or less, anyway.”

  Dash let the discussion ramble on for a few minutes to see if it headed toward consensus or division. It turned out to be the first, so he interrupted and took center stage.

  “This isn’t a perfect plan. For one, it relies heavily on us having the earliest warning we can get of any Deeper attacks. If we miss one, we could be screwed. It’s also going to require some vigorous diplomacy with our new allies, so they don’t feel like we’re pulling back and abandoning them.” He looked at Harolyn, who nodded and gave a thumbs-up.

  Dash went on. “But, it’s better than what we’re trying to do now. It also has the advantage of having the fleet together, in case we get a chance to strike a killer blow of our own. And that is where the R
adiant Points come in. Teasing out the secrets of those things is still our absolute top priority, so we can start attacking the Deepers where they live.”

  The Iron Gate was still their test bed, but she’d been assigned to the new League research ship, the Absolute Zero, as a full-time consort. With a direct uplink to Custodian, they’d effectively managed to replicate the full capabilities of the Forge, doubling their research capacity.

  Dash glanced out the Absolute Zero’s viewport, at the dreary, grey-tan surface of Backwater below. He could just see the Archetype’s legs and feet protruding into view from where he’d docked it with the science ship. The mech was, once more, fully repaired and green across the board.

  “So we’re geosynchronous with the gate down on the surface? Is that important?” he asked.

  Elois smiled and shrugged. “No idea. It just seems, though, that if we’re going to try and understand how these Radiant Points work, and how they might relate to that gate down there, that keeping them all as close together as we can makes sense.”

  “Yeah, fair point. Anyway, you came up with something about the Radiant Points important enough to bring me here in-person, instead of just using the comm.”

  Elois nodded. “With the help of Conover and his mech—and, by the way, Kristin is an absolute delight, but also a master when it comes to unraveling how tech works—we’ve figured out something about them, yes. Or, at least, about the one seized on the N’Teel homeworld. I’m not sure of the significance of it, but I thought that for security’s sake, this should stay off the comm, at least for now.”

  Dash chuckled. “I see we’re carrying on the time-honored tradition of scientists revealing their findings in the slowest, most dramatic way possible. What did you find out, Elois?”

  “That the second Radiant Point, the one from the N’Teel homeworld, can sequence DNA and transmit or receive it.”

  Dash stared. “What does that mean, exactly?”

  “That the Deepers can transmit genetic information through these Radiant Points. Or, at least, they can do it through this one. We think it might even be able to reassemble an organism based on its DNA, but we’re not sure about that yet.” She pointed at the Iron Gate through the viewport, keeping station about ten klicks away. “That’s why I wanted to keep this off the comm. We really don’t know the significance of this. But if word gets out . . .”