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

  Wei-Ping had to nod again. “Yeah, good point.” She turned to the comm. “Lori, you and the wing commanders watch that asshole in case he decides to go all crazy like a hero.”

  A moment passed, then Lori came back on the comm. “Understood. That said, I’ve talked to the fighter commanders out here, and we’d like your leave to press home our own attack. More experience for the pilots and all.”

  Wei-Ping pursed her lips. Despite the Deeper ship having given up on offensive action, something still didn’t seem quite right about all of this. The Deeper ship still raced on, accelerating as hard as it could, but the Stalwart would inevitably catch up. In fact, glancing at the tactical display, she saw that they’d have solid firing solutions for the nova-cannons and missiles in only a few minutes, and the pulse-cannon and graser batteries just a few minutes after that. The grasers—gamma-ray lasers—were another new and still experimental piece of tech. They’d been inspired by the Deepers’ x-ray lasers, but they delivered even more high-frequency energy per unit of time. They were also ferocious energy hogs, so the Stalwart currently only mounted two batteries of the largely unproven weapons.

  Her instinct was to deny Lori’s request, have the fighters and mechs back off, and leave the inevitable destruction of the Deeper ship to the Stalwart. But she really had nothing to base that flicker of instinct on, other than her own unease at the whole situation. And she couldn’t discount that just being her own mild case of Lonesome Fever. She actually hated it out here and would be glad to get back among the stars, where she and every other human belonged.

  Her long delay in answering attracted a frown from Sukovic. He leaned in.

  “Wei-Ping, you okay?”

  She glanced at him, then gave a quick nod and a smile. “Yeah. I’m fine.” She went back to the comm. “Lori, you and the fighter wing commanders are cleared to attack. You have fun, now.”

  “Oh, we will.”

  Wei-Ping watched on the tactical display as the fighters and mechs accelerated and rapidly gained on the fleeing Deeper ship. She had to take a moment to marvel at the clarity and succinctness of the display, a vast improvement over previous versions, which she always found cluttered. It had been a lot easier when she was with the Gentle Friends because they rarely attacked more than one ship at a time. Even then, it was barrel in, shoot, board the prize, loot it, sometimes even seize it, and then scoot away. This waging war, complicated-battles-between-fleets thing had been entirely new to her.

  Fortunately, she hadn’t only proven to be good at it, but she also loved it. It gave her a sense of purpose, of doing something important, that privateering never had.

  “The fighters and mechs are engaging,” the Tactical Officer said—unnecessarily, because Wei-Ping could see that for herself. She glanced at the young officer.

  “Tactical, let’s get firing solutions cranked up on all batteries anyway, just in case.”

  “Roger that, ma’am,” he replied, turning to his console. An eyepiece hung in front of his face, projecting a HUD that repeated the tactical display in simplified format. That way, he’d never have to take his eyes off the situation. Wei-Ping had one too, but the damned thing kept pinching her ear, and—

  “Shit. What just happened?” Sukovic asked.

  It took Wei-Ping a second to see whatever he had. There—one of their Denkillers had just vanished.

  She spun around, facing FIGHTCON. “Transponder drop?”

  The Fighter Controller shook her head. “Don’t think so, ma’am. We should still be getting primary scanner returns. Denkillers just aren’t that stealthy.”

  Wei-Ping spun back to the tactical display, just in time to see another fighter, a Super Mako, also abruptly disappear.

  “Stalwart, mech leader here,” Lori said over the comm. “The Deepers are shooting—I don’t know what the hell it is. Some sort of beam weapon, purplish, barely visible when it shoots. Reminds me of the Archetype’s dark-lance, but—”

  A sudden streak of what was almost but not quite light lanced out of the Deeper ship and stuck one of the Perseids. Wei-Ping had the brief impression of purple, but a purple so deep and dark it barely stood out even against the black void. The beam skewered the mech, punching right through it as though it wasn’t even there.

  Lori snapped out a curse. “Whatever that is, it’s going through shields and armor like pissing through tissue paper!”

  Wei-Ping gaped for a second at a phrase she’d only ever heard Benzel use, then shook her head. “Lori, break off,” she said. “You, and both fighter wings.”

  A pause before she answered. Wei-Ping knew just how she felt.

  “Roger that,” she finally replied, bitterness hardening her voice.

  “Are we just going to let them go?” Sukovic asked.

  Wei-Ping felt all eyes in the CIC watching her, waiting. Breaking off the chase meant letting the Deeper ship, and whatever new and deadly weapons tech it mounted, get away. It also meant no payback for the fighters or the mechs.

  This time, her instincts argued against giving up. She, like the fighter and mech pilots, and the rest of the Stalwart’s crew, had gotten the scent of battle. They didn’t want to turn aside now.

  But.

  Wei-Ping leaned back in her chair. “Tactical, fire a spread of missiles at that sonofabitchin’ Deeper. Lori, you and the fighters do the same. Then everyone cut their engines, and we’ll recover the fighter wings and rescue anyone who’s still alive to need it.”

  Sukovic just stared, hard. “So we are just going to let them go.”

  “Yeah, we are. They obviously have some sort of weapon we haven’t seen before that seems to just ignore our defenses. It’s more important we get that, and all the data we’ve collected, back to the Forge.” She glanced at Sukovic. “That okay with you?”

  She waited for him to object any further, but they’d known each other for too long. He knew she wouldn’t break off the chase unless she genuinely believed it was the right call. He just shook his head.

  “Probably a good decision, considering.” He rubbed his chin. “What the hell was that, anyway? What could do—this? And to our mech armor, at that?”

  Wei-Ping studied the scorched slag that had once been a Perseid, a frontline Unseen weapon of the highest order. “I don’t know. But we’re going to find out.”

  She puffed out a long breath as the recovery and rescue ops began. The Deeper ship, still being pursued by a barrage of missiles, just kept accelerating away. She watched it with a hard, cold gaze.

  It seemed that the Cygnus Realm hadn’t been the only ones doing some innovating.

  2

  Dash scowled at the big display in the Forge’s Command Center. He had it replaying the fatal attack on the Perseid, as captured by the Stalwart’s sensors, for the fourth time.

  “What the hell is that?” he asked, his question directed at no one in particular.

  “Unfortunately, we don’t have sufficient data to draw any firm conclusions,” Custodian replied. “And yes, that’s a convoluted way of saying I don’t know.”

  Despite the tension, Dash smiled. It didn’t last, though. There was nothing to smile about. They’d lost two fighter pilots outright when their small craft was almost vaporized by the new Deeper weapon. The pilot of the stricken Perseid, a young woman named Dunham, had also died right in the midst of being extracted from the wreckage. They’d lost the mech, too. It had been too damaged to get underway, so they scavenged whatever useful materials from it they could, then scuttled it.

  “Well, we’re going to have to find out,” Leira said.

  Viktor nodded. “We can’t risk any close engagements until we do. Whatever it was, it seems to be able to defeat our shields and our armor in a single shot.”

  Dash crossed his arms. “Yeah. Which is a serious problem because we’ve got a major op coming up. Custodian?”

  The display changed to depict a star chart centered on the Forge. They’d moved the station, and essentially the entire Realm with
it, to rimward of League space. They now occupied a region about ten light-years long, with the Forge in the center, orbiting a red giant bereft of planets. The four Anchors were deployed spinward and anti-spinward in two pairs, each in, or close to, another star system.

  But Dash had Custodian move the display back toward the galactic core. A highlighted system appeared just outside the spinward boundary of League space.

  “That system is called GX followed by about nine digits, but the League calls it the Leaping Star,” he said.

  Amy gave a huh? look. “Why the Leaping Star?”

  “An early stellar survey contained an error, placing the system about two light-years from its actual location. That was corrected in a later survey,” Custodian said.

  “So the star leapt, you see? From one place to another?” Dash said. “As jokes go, it’s . . . thin, but the third planet there is terrestrial class, inhabited by an arboreal race called the N’Teel. They’re trying hard to fight off a Deeper incursion, another of the bastards’ resource harvesting ops.”

  As he spoke, an image of a N’Teel came up on the display. Dash was reminded again of a creature much like a large, furry rodent about five feet tall with vestigial wings. He couldn’t decide if they looked more like squirrels with small, bat-like wings, or a bat with facial features similar to a squirrel.

  He shook himself out of his brief reverie. “Anyway, the N’Teel have done a pretty good job of holding their own, considering that they, like everyone else in this part of the galaxy, are outclassed by the Deepers across the board. They’ve appealed to us for help through the Hriki, their closest ally. That’s been echoed by a corporate interest, a gas-mining guild from the Rimward League. They’ve got a deuterium and helium-3 harvesting operation in the system, as well, under an agreement with the N’Teel. We want to protect that, too.”

  “Why didn’t the N’Teel just get hold of us directly?” Leira asked.

  “Because they’re apparently only just dabbling in spaceflight and don’t have reliable long-range comms.” Dash turned back to the gathering in the Command Center. “I also kinda get the impression they’re a little xenophobic.”

  Harolyn, standing near the back, rolled her eyes. “More xenophobes? The galaxy’s lousy with them.”

  “Maybe because the galaxy has things like the Golden and the Deeper in it. When it comes to them, at least, I’m pretty xenophobic too,” Viktor replied.

  Dash went on. “Fair, and not without some merit. Anyway, we’re deploying to help them. You’ll find the op plan uploaded to your ships and mechs when you board them. We’ll conference about it on the way. Try to save some time.”

  “Dash, what about that new Deeper weapon?” Wei-Ping asked.

  “Yeah, that. Well, since we don’t know much about it, we can’t do much about it. And the only way we’re going to be able to know anything about it is to face it, right?”

  An uncomfortable ripple of reluctant nods and muttering followed, but no one objected in the face of what, after all, was cold, hard reasoning.

  The Inner Circle broke up, and everyone hurried off to their ships, mechs, or other duties. Leira lingered, waiting for Dash to finish a quick conversation with the Command Center’s Duty Ops Officer.

  She joined him as he came down from the dais. “You want to do the pre-op briefing on the way to the op? In a hurry?” Her face took on a more serious note. “Something we should know about?”

  Dash walked on in silence for a bit, then looked at Leira. “If you mean, am I holding anything back, the answer is no, I’m not. I’m just—”

  He broke off, still walking, trying to decide exactly what was nibbling away at him. Leira waited.

  “There’s just so much we don’t know about the Deepers. Hell, we’re still not even really sure what they are, exactly, or where they originally came from. Right now, all we can do is try to out-think them and get inside whatever sort of decision-making loop they use,” he finally said.

  Leira thought about that, then nodded. “Yeah, okay. I get it. I just hope we don’t start rushing. Because when you rush, you start missing things, making mistakes.”

  “And that, my dear, is why I’ve surrounded myself with all you smart people. If I screw up, someone’s bound to notice and let me know about it.”

  Leira grinned. “Oh, you can count on that.”

  Dash leaned more toward bat-like squirrels than squirrel-like bats. At least, that’s what he saw in this particular N’Teel named Garciss, who was a Cloud Leader, which seemed to roughly equate to General among her people.

  “I have commanded all of our defense forces to stand ready to assist you,” Garciss said from the comm window Sentinel had opened in the Archetype’s tactical display. “However, we have little we can do outside our planet’s atmosphere. Our only spaceflight-capable ships are research and survey vessels, test beds for new technology, and prototypes.”

  “That’s no problem. We’ve got the space battle side of this covered.” Dash glanced at tactical. “A space battle that should be getting underway in about ten minutes, in fact. Where we could really use your help is dealing with the Deepers in the atmosphere and on the surface. A great start to that would be some decent maps. Is your planet always that cloudy?”

  “Aside from Sun Return, yes, it essentially is.”

  “Sun Return?”

  “A brief period in mid-summer in the southern hemisphere when atmospheric phenomena cause the clouds to disperse at mid-latitudes. It’s a time of festivals. Many N’Teel are born not long thereafter.” Garciss chittered softly, presumably laughing.

  Dash smiled, understanding. “Ahh. That kind of celebration. We have a couple of our own.”

  As Garciss arranged for a detailed terrain model of their homeworld’s surface to be uploaded to the Realm task force, Dash took one final look over its deployment. Unlike their last major engagement with the Deepers, when they seized the Backwater Gate, the plan here was simple.

  Benzel would lead the bulk of their force directly into battle against the Deeper fleet that was defending their resource thievery on the N’Teel world. At the same time, Dash would lead Leira in the Swift and Jexin in the Polaris, along with six Orions and six Perseids led by Lori, and both fighter wings from the Stalwart. They’d go down into the atmosphere to take on the Deepers there. Once they cleared away any problematic defenses, two battalions of Realm ground troops would drop in their assault shuttles to seize two Deeper mining operations that were encroaching directly on N’Teel territory. In the meantime, the mechs and fighters would turn their attention to three towering constructs known as Beanstalks, Skyhooks, or, in this case, Water Hooks. All three were being used to bring water up from the planet for loading aboard tankers at the top terminus of each Water Hook.

  “The Deepers have a real thing for water, don’t they?” Jexin had said. “It’s almost like they don’t have enough of their own.”

  Dash had just acknowledged it at the time, but maybe Jex was onto something. Was there some connection between the Deepers and water? A weakness or vulnerability they could exploit?

  He shelved the thought again and focused on the imminent battle. Benzel, once more aboard the Herald, led the rest of the capital ships in a headlong charge directly at the Deeper defensive force. The aliens had apparently learned their lesson from Backwater and the other planets they’d lost to the Cygnus Realm, and stationed a reasonably powerful fleet here. Benzel still had a significant edge in numbers and firepower, but if the Deepers had that new and terrifying weapon of theirs in play, that might not be the advantage it seemed. As a hedge against the weapon, he’d deployed a screen of light ships, frigates, and corvettes forward. A third of them were actually uncrewed, operated by AIs similar to those that controlled their Red Baron fighter drones. The remainder had been stripped down to the barest-bones crews possible. It was a quick and dirty countermeasure to the new Deeper weapon. In theory, if they could provoke the Deepers into using it on an aggressive attack by these s
maller ships, they could minimize their losses.

  Of course, that meant the crews that were aboard those little ships were flying straight into a good chance of dying. The fact that they had to actually turn away volunteers to man them made Dash’s chest swell a little with pride.

  “The fleet has entered engagement range. They are launching missiles now, and the Deepers are responding in kind,” Sentinel reported.

  “Okay, folks. Once more into the breach and all that,” Dash said, accelerating the Archetype and veering it away from Benzel’s task force. The other mechs, the Stalwart, and the assault carriers smoothly followed, plunging toward the cloud tops of the N’Teel homeworld.

  Dash blinked as the Archetype plummeted out of the clouds only a few thousand meters above the surface. The N’Teel terrain map had them over relatively flat ground but offered little detail other than elevations and relief. He saw thick forest rushing under the mech in a blur the color of old pine trees. Rain washed across the mech, streaming into its wake in long, vaporous trails. He glanced back and saw Leira and Jexin right behind him, right and left. Further back, the Stalwart’s fighters punched through the clouds and fell into formation. He saw the individual Super Makos and Denkillers surging ahead slightly, falling back, then surging again. Their pilots were champing at the bit, eager to get to grips with the Deepers and earn some payback for their comrades lost to the new weapon.

  Out of the mists ahead, a long, slender tower rose. It was more like a thick cable with enormous tensile strength, its base anchored here on the surface at the planet’s equator, its top attached to a platform in geosynchronous orbit some thirty thousand klicks overhead. The whole system therefore rotated in sync with the planet, making a permanent, stable construct up and down that could carry loads to and from space. In this case, it funneled water from a chain of large lakes sprawling ahead of them and off to the leftward distance. A stark rim of bare rock and soil around the nearest showed how much the water level had already dropped.