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

  “Tactical, concentrate fire on that right-hand cruiser. And find out if our two remaining destroyers can take some of this heat off us.”

  “Stalwart, Tsunami here. You’re starting to look a little beaten up. Want some help?”

  Wei-Ping curled her lip. If she pulled the Tsunami away from the assault carriers, they’d be left to fend for themselves. But if she didn’t, the Stalwart was certainly going to suffer severe damage—or worse.

  She hovered on the brink of indecision, before finally taking the leap. The assault carriers were too valuable, the cold calculus of war too clear. It would take more time and effort to replace them than it would the Stalwart.

  “Tsunami, hold your position. Don’t—”

  That was all that Wei-Ping was able to say before a sudden burst of information from the tactical display yanked her attention away. Two of the Deeper corvettes had started a hard burn, their prows aimed directly at the Stalwart.

  “Shit—impact in sixty seconds!” the Tactical Officer shouted.

  Wei-Ping forgot about the Tsunami. “All batteries, those corvettes are priority targets!”

  Even as she said it, though, Wei-Ping knew it was too late. The Deepers had pushed her into the most newb of newb mistakes. She’d got target-fixed on their capital ships and their potential to let loose with the new beam weapon. The small ships had taken advantage of it to cleverly position themselves for a suicide attack on the Stalwart. Even if they hammered both of them into scrap, the debris was going to impact the ship and no amount of nifty superconducting armor was going to do anything about it.

  The Archetype burst out of the cloud tops into the hard glare of The Leaping Star. Dash powered on, Jexin and Leira right behind him, rushing through the thinning atmosphere and back into space.

  “Wei-Ping, SITREP?” he snapped.

  Silence.

  “Wei-Ping, what the hell’s going on?”

  Nothing.

  “Shit. Anyone aboard the Stalwart, this is Dash. Talk to me!”

  He waited but got no reply. All that Sentinel knew was that the Stalwart’s primary AI reported that something catastrophic had happened, and then gone quiet.

  Dash hunted for the Stalwart’s IFF transponder signal but couldn’t find it. His heart sank even further. For the IFF signal to be lost entirely, the ship must have been completely destroyed—

  “There, just rising over the sunward limb of the planet,” Sentinel said.

  Dash let out a breath of relief at the sudden appearance of the Stalwart’s icon, near that of the Tsunami and the assault carriers. Red icons representing Deeper ships surrounded her in a way that would have told him she was in trouble even without the truncated comms.

  Dash flung the Archetype through a hard turn and accelerated as hard as the mech’s Blur drive would allow. His ETA to firing range was only two minutes. But a hell of a lot could happen in two minutes.

  “Hang on, Wei-Ping, we’re nearly there.”

  Wei-Ping winced. Something had smacked her in the head. She looked around, blinking, momentarily disoriented. Where the hell was she? This wasn’t the Forge.

  No. Wait.

  Realization came flooding back. The Stalwart had taken a solid hit from the remnants of one of the Deeper corvettes and a glancing blow from the other. Fortunately, neither had exploded. Why, she didn’t know, but that was probably all that had saved the Stalwart.

  Even more surprising, most of the displays around the CIC were still active, and those that had failed were flicking back to life as the AIs routed data around damaged systems. Despite two hard, punishing hits, she was still in the fight.

  For the moment, anyway. Tactical showed that two of the Deeper heavy cruisers were closing in, apparently intent on finishing the Stalwart off at point-blank range. Just a few torps would do it.

  “Tactical, shoot at those bastards!”

  As soon as she said it, the Stalwart’s main batteries opened up. That made Wei-Ping gape, since the Tactical Officer was still heaving himself back into his seat.

  Who the hell was giving the firing orders?

  The answer came in the form of Sukovic’s sardonic drawl. “Hey, Wei-Ping, while you and the rest of your gang decided to take a break, we kept up the fight. You ready to take over again?”

  Wei-Ping grinned, despite the throbbing pain in her head. “Yeah, we have control—again.”

  But not for long, it seemed. Six torps were sailing relentlessly toward them. The point-defense batteries had opened up, but the projectiles were smart, jinking and dodging. One got taken out, but the other five raced on toward impact. The Tactical Officer frantically retargeted the main batteries, but it was, again, clearly too late.

  “Shit.”

  Wei-Ping braced herself. What was this going to be like, dying in a space battle?

  One of the torps abruptly exploded. Then another. Then two more, in rapid succession. An instant later, the Archetype flashed by, followed by the Swift and the Polaris. The three mechs poured fire into the Deeper ships, rapidly cutting them into glowing chunks of slag and vaporized organics.

  “Wei-Ping, Dash. Please tell me you’re alive.”

  Comms were back, it seemed. She smiled and flopped back into her command seat. It felt ridiculously comfortable in the middle of the shitstorm of battle.

  “Not sure yet, Dash. Ask me that again when I’m good and drunk back on the Forge.

  She could hear the relief in Dash’s laughter.

  “Will do. And the first round’s on me.”

  4

  Dash exited from the Archetype into what felt like a steam bath.

  “Holy—this is like a sauna. Gonna lose the creases in my uniform,” he said.

  Leira waited as he finished dismounting. “Like they say, it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.”

  “Actually, I think it’s both.”

  He looked around. The N’Teel spaceport sat on a rocky highland, overlooking a sea as calm and flat as a mirror. A few hundred meters past its perimeter, a rainforest loomed, dark and somewhat ominous. Except for a raised mag-lev monorail and a paved road, it completely enclosed the port.

  “They’ve certainly protected this place pretty well,” Jexin said, joining them in the shadow of the three mechs—or what would be their shadow if the sunlight was more than just a diffuse, dull grey filtering through the clouds.

  Dash made a noise of agreement. All around the spaceport, batteries of wicked-looking beam weapons squatted, their muzzles pointed skyward. They were all what Sentinel had dubbed plasma-lasers, the same potent weapons carried by the N’Teel fighters, but much bigger versions. Plasma-laser wasn’t really correct, though, because the weapon collimated its ferocious plasma-blast effect in a second annular beam, like a tube of magnetic force. They were innovative and extremely powerful but relatively short-ranged and could be defeated by sufficiently strong electromagnetic fields. Still, Dash hoped they could convince the N’Teel to let them have one to study.

  “I think this is our ride,” Leira said, nodding toward a small ground car heading toward them. The N’Teel driver greeted them, then chauffeured them back to a squat bunker hunkered alongside the spaceport’s main terminal building. As they dismounted and made their way inside, a quartet of N’Teel fighters came shrieking in over the ocean at low level and rushed overhead with a thunderous roar.

  Dash offered them a silent salute. The N’Teel fighters had turned a hard battle into a much, much easier one. Clearly, they were tough and competent warriors, and damn could they fly.

  Once inside the bunker, his first face-to-face meeting with Cloud Leader Garciss confirmed it. She greeted them with a brusque, efficient friendliness, then gestured for them to sit at a conference table that barely cleared Dash’s knees. She immediately turned to a flatscreen display of the planet’s surface and got right to business.

  “It doesn’t look like any of those three Water Hooks you took down are going to impact any inhabited areas, which is good. And your gro
und forces have seized the nearest”—the translator skipped over the next word—“mining complex to us here, which is even better. However, it seems they’re getting bogged down in the more northerly one.”

  Dash felt his brows lift, impressed by her quick summary. The N’Teel seemed to be excellent at collecting tactical information, at least on their own planet.

  “Yeah, we’re going to redeploy two companies from the first complex to reinforce the attack on the second,” Dash replied, a little bemused and actually rather pleased at the utter lack of small talk. “Oh, and by the way, we took out the Water Hooks, as in, your people and ours. It would have been a lot harder without them.

  Garciss flashed what he could have taken as a furious glare, but her steady, even tone belied that. “Redeploying your forces won’t be necessary. We’ve already got two battalions of our own ready to attack from the southeast and east. We’re just holding them back so we can coordinate with you and avoid having our troops shooting at each other.”

  Dash stared for a second. He felt Leira and Jexin sitting to his left and right at the uncomfortably low conference table. Dash thought back to the Archetype’s tactical display. He did not recall any indication of N’Teel ground forces in such close proximity to their own.

  He switched to his comm. “Sentinel, have the ground commander at the northern mining complex stand by. He’s got some N’Teel reinforcements about to join in the battle, but we need to do some coordination first.”

  “Actually, I’m already speaking to the N’Teel headquarters commanding their forces and have initiated a liaison between them and our own assault force.”

  Dash looked at Leira, then Jexin, and made a Huh sound. “Don’t know about you guys, but I’m starting to feel a little unneeded.”

  Leira reached out and took his hand. “I’ll probably always need you, Dash.”

  “Probably?”

  “Hey, a girl’s gotta keep her options open.”

  Garciss surprised them with the acidic hiss that apparently was N’Teel laughter. “Your reputation for a casual nature precedes you. I see that it is well earned.”

  “My reputation? Really?”

  “There is much discussion among the various races about the Messenger and his Cygnus Realm, and now they have arrived to save us from the evil of the—” The translator cut out again.

  “Sorry, but our translator keeps cutting out on your word for the aliens we call the Deepers,” Dash said.

  “That would be because we don’t deign to recognize them by that name. To us, they are the—” untranslated word.

  “What does that mean, exactly?”

  The meaning for the word Garciss described made both Dash and Leira raise their eyebrows. “Wow, that’s harsh,” Leira said.

  Jexin leaned toward her. “I still don’t understand. Why is it so egregious for someone to—”

  “I’ll tell you later, Jex,” Leira said quickly.

  “At least we can agree that the Deepers are bad news,” Dash said, tugging the conversation back on track.

  “Indeed they are,” Garciss replied. “And after today, we would consider the reputation you are building across the galactic arm to be good news. So much so, in fact, that the N’Teel are prepared to enter into a formal alliance with your Cygnus Realm.”

  Leira grinned. So did Dash. But a flicker of suspicion lurked behind it—small, but present. He didn’t think the N’Teel were in league with the Deepers. He’d personally seen N’Teel fighter pilots fight and die in battle against them. What tickled Dash’s senses was something more pragmatic. The N’Teel were on the cusp of achieving a sustained presence in space. Garciss undoubtedly saw an alliance with the Realm as a way of accelerating that, obtaining tech, and assistance in using it, that would advance their efforts by decades. Harolyn and Kai had done some background research on them. She’d already told Dash that the N’Teel were bristling at the fact that nearby races were already reaching out to the stars, and they were lagging behind.

  Which meant that Garciss and the N’Teel were ambitious. They saw an alliance with the Realm as an opportunity. Dash wondered if, assuming they won this war, the N’Teel would be the new aggressors in this part of the galaxy.

  For now, he simply thanked Garciss warmly and then, as he always did with prospective allies, invited her to visit the Forge. She eagerly accepted.

  “I look forward to planning our upcoming campaigns against the—I will use your term for them, the Deepers,” she said.

  Dash and Leira exchanged a glance at that. So far, the races they’d helped throw off Deeper incursions in the arm had remained mostly focused on consolidating and rebuilding their own planets and systems. Each did maintain a small contingent on the Forge, but for liaison and diplomatic purposes. At most, Dash kept them generally informed of the Realm’s plans, but only as they impacted on each race directly. The fewer parties that knew the details, the less likely there were to be leaks. But Garciss was planning on getting involved directly in their strategic planning.

  “And we look forward to having you as allies,” Dash said, standing. Garciss did as well, then accompanied them back to the Archetype and the other mechs. She seemed surprisingly sanguine about the giant mechs, regarding them with only a mild interest. Dash narrowed his eyes at that. It wasn’t like she was seeing something remarkable for the first time. Instead, it seemed more like something remarkable she’d seen before and was now seeing again.

  Even so, when they disembarked from the ground car, Garciss walked directly to the Archetype and stared up at its towering bulk.

  Dash moved beside her. “I’ll make arrangements for you to be taken aboard the flagship of our task force, the Herald, and accompany us back. That’s assuming this is a convenient time for you, of course.”

  “It is. However, there’s something I’d like to show you on the way,” Garciss replied.

  “Oh? Mind if I ask what?”

  “Better if you see it. All I can tell you is that it’s an old thing. Older than your magnificent friend here.” Garciss gave the Archetype an affectionate pat with one small hand, peering up at the gleaming expanse of armor.

  “Is it—ruins?” Dash asked, his curiosity suddenly tingling, along with a hint of alarm.

  Garciss turned to him but kept her hand resting on the mech.

  “I don’t think it’s ruined at all. And that’s the problem.”

  Conover studied the remains Custodian had just tractored into the Forge. He still had misgivings about this. Dash had made it clear that he didn’t want to bring potentially hazardous things aboard the Forge if it could be avoided, hence their rigging up a former mine layer, the Iron Gate, as a sort of a remote, combined storage and research vessel. The idea was that things that might be dangerous to the Forge could be kept and examined there. The trouble was that there was simply no substitute for the Forge’s potent analytical resources and scanning systems. They simply couldn’t be duplicated aboard an old mine layer.

  But Lomas and Elois had insisted that a detailed examination of what had just been brought aboard was crucial. So Conover had discussed it with Custodian, Ragsdale, and Harolyn, and they’d all reluctantly agreed that the risk was worth it. So, they’d decided to use their initiative and bring this potentially dangerous thing aboard.

  Because the remains of a Deeper Battle Prince definitely fit the definition of potentially dangerous.

  “It’s pretty clear that the Deepers don’t want us learning anything about these Battle Princes,” Elois said.

  “Which is why they put so much effort into attacking and trying to destroy the first one we stashed aboard the Iron Gate,” Harolyn added.

  Conover nodded but kept his eyes on the shattered, scorched and partly melted remains. They sat in a grav-cradle just a few meters from one of the big docking ports opening into the Forge’s fabrication bay. Conover and the others present all wore vac-armor and were tethered to hardpoints further inside the bay. Their fail-safe, if anything went wrong,
was for Custodian to drop the force field closing off the docking port, blow everything into space, then sort everything out afterward.

  That was also why it was only him, Harolyn, Lomas, and Elois in the bay. Ragsdale and Kai monitored the proceedings remotely.

  “I assume that we didn’t find it like this. Do we know what happened to it to leave it in this state?” Harolyn asked.

  Lomas nodded. “We do. Dash happened to it. This is one he knocked out in a skirmish about a week ago, near Fulcrum.”

  Conover knelt down and examined a section of the Battle Prince’s armor that gleamed almost mirror bright. “This damage was done by the Archetype’s power-sword. Nothing else leaves such a smooth, clean cut.”

  “Dash loves that thing,” Harolyn replied, grinning and shaking her head. “If it were me, I’d want to kill my enemies from as far away as possible. He just loves making it up-close and personal, though.”

  “Probably because he’s been in about a thousand bar brawls,” Conover said, letting his gaze roam away from the polished gleam of the power-sword cut and over other parts of the wreckage.

  “Man after my own heart,” Lomas said, chuckling.

  Elois shot her a raised-eyebrow glance. “Really?”

  “Hey, I had a life before I became a stodgy senior officer.”

  “We need a couple of glasses of some of that amazing plumato wine they make here, and some time for you to tell me some stories.”

  “You’re on.”

  Conover barely heard the chatter. He’d let his tech-enhanced vision settle on a section of undamaged armor on the Battle Prince. Slowly, he tilted his head one way, then the other, ensuring that he was actually seeing what he thought he was.

  “Custodian, tell me everything you can about this section here,” he said, pointing.

  The AI replied immediately. “Understood.”

  Elois turned back to him, her face a question. “I thought we were going to focus on the Dark Metal network inside this thing.”