The Messenger Box Set: Books 1-6 Read online

  Viktor narrowed his eyes. “Wait. Many things, orbiting each other, the size of a star system?”

  “The Pasture,” Leira said.

  Dash looked at her. “The place you found the Lens? Well, that makes sense. If the Lens was located there, and it was made by the Unseen for whatever reason, then it would make sense that there’d be other things hidden there, too. I mean, we already talked about that, right? More of these Lenses in there?”

  “No,” Conover said. “You don’t get it. The Pasture isn’t just a place. It’s the ‘much bigger thing’. It was built to do something. But each one of those comets, asteroids, whatever they are, has a purpose. They’re all part of a greater whole. And this Lens is connected to them…and they to it.” The kid puffed out a frustrated sigh and shook his head. “It’s hard to explain when I don’t even fully understand it myself, like trying to look at one piece of a ship at a time, and figuring out what the whole looks like, how it all goes together, what it’s all for. Just imagine that you’ve never seen a ship. How would you explain it?”

  Dash rubbed his chin. “Okay. So let’s summarize. This Pasture is one big construct, made by the Unseen, and everything in it is connected, and this Lens is just a small part. So, there must be more Unseen tech in there.”

  Conover looked at him. “You still don’t get it. The Pasture doesn’t contain Unseen tech. It is Unseen tech. The whole thing. The power there…the sheer energy it contains inside, it’s probably more than the rest of the galaxy combined.”

  Dash blinked. “More power—wait. Do you mean more power than, like, all of the civilizations in this galaxy combined? Or all of the stars and everything else, too?”

  “The first for sure. The second, I don’t know. If it was all somehow activated, all at once maybe?” Conover shook his head. “That’s something I can’t really see. It’s just too big.”

  “Yeah, but…” Dash took a moment to take in the implications. “If that’s all Unseen tech, like, millions of pieces of it—”

  “It’s got millions of parts,” Conover cut in, “but it might really be something grander.”

  “Yeah, okay, fine. Anyway, whatever else it is, I know one thing it is for sure.”

  “What’s that?” Viktor asked.

  “Valuable,” Dash said, raising a finger.

  Leira curled her lip. “I think valuable is an understatement. And shortsighted.”

  “If this is what Conover says it is,” Viktor said, “it would be worth more than—well, there aren’t enough credits. And that ignores the fact that it’s—again, based on what Conover is telling us—a whole system made of alien technology. I don’t really think you can put a value on that.”

  Dash crossed his arms. “I’d be willing to give it a try.”

  Viktor frowned. “I think this is more a scientific discovery. Maybe the greatest one ever. That’s besides the fact that it’s exceedingly powerful, the true extent of which remains unknown. In the wrong hands, it could be problematic.”

  “A scientific discovery?” Dash raised his eyebrows. “Is that why you and Leira went there, for science?”

  Viktor’s frown deepened, but he looked down at the deck and shrugged. Leira, though, smiled.

  “No,” she said. “Of course not. Like I told you, we discovered some data that pointed at the Pasture as a place we might find some Unseen tech.” She held up the Lens. “And we did. And yes, we were interested in the credits we could make from it. But we had no idea that it was what Conover is telling us.” She shrugged.

  “Now that we know that,” Viktor said, “well, that changes things, doesn’t it?”

  Dash tugged at his chin. “How?”

  Viktor tossed him an incredulous look. “We can’t just go back there and start ransacking the place.”

  “Why not? It’s not like the Unseen are going to care, what with them all being long dead.” But Dash frowned as something occurred to him. He turned to Conover. “They are all dead, aren’t they?”

  The kid shrugged. “I don’t know. I didn’t see anything to suggest they weren’t, though.”

  “Okay. Well, let’s assume they are all dead. In that case, all of that tech, even a fraction of it, would be priceless. Hell, that Lens you have is probably priceless. We could be—I don’t think rich even begins to describe it.”

  “You’re forgetting something,” Leira said.

  Dash swung his gaze to her. “What’s that?”

  “Clan Shirna. Once you get past the Shadow Nebula, you’ve got them to contend with. They aren’t really that happy to have people trying to get through the Globe of Suns and into The Pasture. They do everything they can to stop it, in fact.”

  Dash leaned against the bulkhead behind him. “Yeah, about that. Seems to me that you and Viktor managed to get in just fine. You got that Lens and got most of the way out again.”

  “The important part,” Viktor said, “being most of the way back out.”

  “Uh-huh. But you managed to get past this Clan Shirna and into The Pasture. So, if they’re so dead set on keeping people out, how’d you manage that?”

  Leira and Viktor exchanged a brief glance, nodded. “We had a cloak,” she admitted.

  “A cloak?” repeated Dash. “That’s fancy. I’ve heard they make electromagnetic energy wrap around a ship so it just doesn’t seem to be there at all.” He had the Fade, certainly, but the modification wasn’t entirely the same as a real cloaking device. It burned through fuel and limited what he could see in real space. A true cloak, on the other hand, didn’t require any of that. It had all the benefits and hardly any of the downsides.

  “Unfortunately, what a cloak doesn’t do is hide your emissions,” Viktor said. “We could essentially coast into The Pasture, since we were going down a gravity well. Trouble is, we had to light the fusion drive to climb back out again. A cloak doesn’t do much to conceal a fusion exhaust plume.”

  “Clan Shirna detected us right away,” Leira said. “We needed to get away, fast. Turned out they were faster. We tried to outrun them, but they caught us.”

  “Yeah, I remember,” Dash said. “I was part of the aftermath of all that, remember?”

  “But your Fade,” Viktor said, a musing look on his face, “is different. It translates you partway into unSpace. You still leave a footprint in real space, though, yes?”

  Dash nodded. “Yeah, it’s called an echo. How big an echo depends on how far into unSpace you translate. Deeper means a smaller echo, but the downside is the deeper you go, the less you can see back into real space.”

  He stopped as the implication of Viktor’s question set in. It hadn’t just been idle curiosity. “You want to go back into that Pasture, don’t you?”

  Leira gave Dash a keen look. “Don’t you?”

  “Sure, as long as it was just all about piloting among those comets and whatnot. That, I can do. But this whole Clan Shirna thing? It’s a whole lot different when you’ve got someone gunning for you on top of everything else. I mean, do you remember how big that ship was? How many weapons it had?”

  Viktor nodded. “Vividly.”

  Conover looked up from wherever he and his strange eyes had been staring. “Why hasn’t this Clan Shirna already plundered this Pasture? If it’s full of Unseen tech, I would have thought they’d have picked it clean by now.”

  “Because of this,” Leira said, producing something from a pocket inside her utility vest. It was a small book, worn and shabby, bound in red leather.

  Dash looked at it carefully. “What’s that?”

  “Clan Shirna’s holy book. Every member of the Clan carries it, lives by it, regardless of species.”

  “Okay, and what does it say about the Pasture?” Dash said, his brows lifting in curiosity.

  “That anyone who even attempts to enter it must be put to death.”

  Dash sighed in disgust. “Well, I guess that rules out making a deal with them.”

  7

  Dash lay in his bunk, leafing through the
Clan Shirna holy book. He’d encountered a lot of sacred treatises and the people motivated by them in his travels, from isolated, essentially nut-case sects with a few dozen members, to hugely sophisticated, system-spanning religions. He’d mostly ignored them all, except to the extent he could either benefit from them, or they got in his way. His own beliefs were…fuzzy. Sure, there might be bigger things out there, but the minute-to-minute grind of just getting by made it hard to really put much time into looking for them.

  A sudden vibration rumbled the Slipwing’s hull. Since they were still outbound from Penumbra on low-energy departure, Viktor had offered to tune up some of her systems. Dash had been more than happy to accept. The guy knew his way around the guts of a ship; he’d already knocked a half-dozen errors and failures off the list.

  The vibration increased, making Dash sit up. Then it faded and died away altogether. The overall feel of the Slipwing was smoother now, so he shrugged and lay back, lifting the book and flipping a flimsy page.

  Scanning the pages he could read—because only half the book was written in common tongue, while the other read in the original language the Clan had been founded under—it struck Dash that Clan Shirna certainly didn’t seem to have a problem with believing in bigger and better things. Everything about them was steeped in mysticism, beginning with the Induction—the process, or ritual, or ceremony, or whatever the right word was, by which someone could join the Clan. And anyone, it seemed, could join the Clan. Species wasn’t important. All that mattered was belief.

  Dash flipped back and forth through the pages he could read. It would be good to know as much as he could about Clan Shirna before trying to slip through their lines to the Pasture, and then back out again.

  The initial impression he got was of a fervent belief system based on protecting the Pasture from intruders. It seemed to be the Clan’s main, even sole, purpose. Initiates were brought to the Clan’s home world, a medium-sized planet orbiting an aging star on the margin of the Globe of Suns. The place sounded awful—a thin, dry atmosphere, almost devoid of cloud cover, shot through with blasts of radiation from the star. Most of the planet seemed to consist of dry oceans and lakes, the landscape scoured down to desiccated soil and bare rock, forming scrubby deserts known as Sinks.

  “Sounds like a place I vacationed once,” Dash muttered, flipping more pages.

  It was on this foreboding and desolate planet that Inductions occurred, initiating a would-be into Clan Shirna. The actual Induction was described in ponderous, metaphorical terms, such as “a lifeform born anew, beginning a new childhood” and “one alone, joined unto the whole and all stronger.” Dash skimmed it, finally found the part—and it wasn’t obvious, that was for sure—where the book described what Clan Shirna was all about. Frankly, it wasn’t much. They “stood guard over the faith” and “prevented those not of the Inducted from committing sin and entering the maelstrom.” This was all sounding a bit too dangerous.

  But something did catch Dash’s attention. Throughout the book, reference was made to change, to those joining the clan undergoing an apotheosis, an elevation, a transformation. He would have simply dismissed this as part of their rhetoric, except the context around these parts referred to things that sounded decidedly non-religious. Dash noted words and phrases like pregenetics, overprinting in-born codes and beneficial mutation. Those all sounded more like scientific terms, which may not be that surprising, since Clan Shirna was definitely a technologically advanced society. But there was something about the undertone of the book, something about the overall context, that made Dash wonder.

  He sat up and swung his feet to the deck. Okay, he was a courier, not a scientist, or anthropologist, or whatever. But there was someone on board who knew lots of stuff.

  Dash stood. “Hey, Conover,” he called. “Got a question for you.”

  Conover scanned the book. He just sat there, hunkered in the copilot’s seat, reading.

  Dash started to fidget as the minutes dragged on, until he couldn’t stand it. “So, what do you—”

  Conover held up a hand, silencing him.

  Annoyed at the dismissal, Dash turned to the instruments. Everything looked good—better than just good, in fact. Viktor had worked marvels. There were only two failure statuses he hadn’t managed to clear, both apparently requiring parts he didn’t have and couldn’t just print on board, but neither critical. The Slipwing was, in fact, in as good a shape as she’d ever been. Combine that with a full load of fuel, and Dash could almost convince himself he was one of those especially successful couriers, the ones who had the biggest, fastest ships. They got the best jobs on the Needs Slate, probably didn’t have to worry about things like affording fuel or landing fees, and sometimes even franchised themselves out, operating small fleets of ships and making credits faster than they could possibly spend them.

  A small smile played across his lips. It was nice to dream, sometimes.

  “I think you’re right, Dash,” Conover said, breaking into his reverie.

  “Right about what?” Leira asked, as she and Viktor returned to the cockpit.

  “About Clan Shirna,” Conover replied. “This book makes it sound like they’re basically bred to stand guard over the Pasture, which they also call The Maelstrom. It has different aspects, like light and dark, or good and evil anyway, that’s all part of their creed. But, there are references, all through this book, to genetic manipulation.”

  Viktor narrowed his eyes. “Genetic manipulation? For what purpose?”

  “To better protect the Pasture. To not let anyone in or out.”

  “Including themselves,” Dash put in.

  Conover nodded. “Especially themselves. It’s the Pasture when you’re outside it and obeying the edict to never enter it. But if you do enter it, then it’s the Maelstrom, a place of great violence and danger. To keep your spirit pure, you stay out and worship the Pasture from afar. If you enter the Maelstrom, though, your spirit is corrupted.”

  “And their whole angle,” Dash said, “seems to be protecting the Pasture. It’s their mission.”

  “And this Induction,” Conover said, “seems to be the key. They manipulate the genetics of anyone who joins the Clan, hardwiring them to protect the Pasture. Needing to protect it, even, like it’s their overriding reason for existing.” The kid looked up and around at the others. “Nothing else—not food, not sleep, not sex, nothing—matters more than keeping anyone out of the Pasture.”

  “In other words,” Dash said grimly, “they’re guard dogs.”

  Conover nodded. “Yeah. Clan Shirna was designed specifically to protect the Pasture, probably by the Unseen.”

  “That explains their amazing hostility,” Leira remarked. “I knew they threatened anyone who tried to enter the Pasture with death, but I assumed it was because they considered it their territory, their space to explore and exploit.”

  “Which means,” Dash said darkly, “There won’t be any reasoning or dealing with them.”

  “So, given what we now know,” Viktor said, slating a glance at Dash, “are you sure you want to try going there?”

  Dash opened his mouth to answer, but Conover cut him off. “I’m wondering if the Unseen are still there, in the Pasture. Maybe that’s where they stay, and they use Clan Shirna to keep outsiders away. Or did they all wither away and die?”

  This abruptly changed the trajectory of Dash’s thoughts. “That’s an interesting idea. After all, if the Unseen are really all dead, gone, whatever, then they wouldn’t care if anyone busted into the Pasture because, you know…they can’t.”

  “Except,” Viktor said, “Clan Shirna could just be doing what they were programmed to do. All this time later, they either still have all these beliefs that were originally created for them by the Unseen, or they created them themselves, over time.”

  Leira shifted uncomfortably. “True, except…”

  Dash looked at her. “What?”

  She hesitated, a pinched expression taking over her
face. “When we were in there, there were ghosts.”

  “Ghosts. What makes you think that?” Dash waved, inviting explanation.

  She gave him a sheepish smile. “Not spirits. But there were phantom electromagnetic emissions. They made scanning inside the Pasture difficult—in some places, nearly impossible. And some of them seemed like deliberate transmissions. Things I could almost understand. Like listening to someone speaking a language I’ve heard, and picked up a few words and phrases from, so I thought I could understand them if I could just listen closely enough. But we never could resolve them, and they never seemed to repeat.”

  Viktor shrugged. “Our equipment didn’t like being inside. We were pretty busy trying to navigate without running out of fuel, so I didn’t pay much attention. But there definitely were emissions.”

  “So even if the Unseen are no longer there, in the Pasture,” Leira said, “their ghosts might be.”

  Conover looked at her in surprise. “You actually believe in ghosts?”

  “I don’t necessarily not believe in them.” She looked at Dash, silently asking for a little backup. “You know it, right, Dash? That there are things out there that are hard to explain?”

  “Sure,” He replied, giving her a little nod. “I’ve seen my share of the unexplainable.” He wouldn’t have attributed any of what he’d seen to the paranormal, but her look of thanks warmed something inside him.

  “They’re not ghosts,” Conover said flatly. “There’s no such thing.”

  Dash raised a hand. “Before we start a long debate about whether spooks exist or not, let’s return to the subject at hand.” He looked at each in turn. “The Pasture is a massive chunk of alien tech. It contains things like that Lens. Even a tiny fraction of it would make us rich beyond…well, I was going to say our wildest dreams, but when it comes to wealth, my dreams can be pretty wild.”

  “I’m not so sure going back is the best idea,” Viktor put in.

  “The Lens blows up stars, right?” said Leira, sweeping a gaze at Dash. “Whatever the reason the Unseen built it for, it’s still massively destructive. Do you really want to sell something like that and just put it out there? Who knows who’ll end up with it? And what they’ll use it for? It’s hard to enjoy being rich when the galaxy is being turned into supernova remnants.”