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

  “Kai! Are you okay?”

  A worried pause, then a response. “I’m fine!”

  They waited for the swirling dust to thin before returning to what had been their way in and out. Now, it was just a pile of broken rock. If it spilled as far back into the corridor as it did into his chamber, Dash figured it must be at least ten meters thick.

  “We are not digging our way through this. Or even blasting through it, for that matter,” he said.

  “I imagine it would take days,” Kai agreed.

  The rock around them trembled again. More bits of rock spalled off the ceiling, a few clacking against their vac-armor.

  “I guess this is the rock finding a new point of stability, as Sentinel described,” Kai said.

  “Yeah, if it all collapses, it’ll finally be stable.”

  Dash looked around, peering through the dusty air. The suite of chambers containing the remaining archives seemed intact and still sturdy. But that might actually be an illusion because this first chamber had seemed intact, too, until a chunk of its roof fell in. And now ominous cracks radiated away from where it had broken. To underscore the danger, the chamber trembled yet again.

  “Yeah, I don’t think waiting days to get dug or blasted out is going to be an option. If this whole place doesn’t collapse and crush us, the carnivorous bugs will,” Dash said.

  “I quite agree.” Kai turned to the wan daylight filtering through the dust. “That would seem to be our only way out, however.”

  “Yup. Sentinel, you there?”

  “I am, Dash. I’ve just recorded a seismic event in your immediate area.”

  “No kidding. We’ve kind of recorded it, too.”

  “The ground troops accompanying you have reported that your egress is now blocked.”

  “It is, but we do have another option,” Dash said, then went on to explain the small window set somewhere into the cliff-face under the monastery. Sentinel lifted the Archetype, bringing it over and then into the canyon.

  As the mech slowly dropped into view from above, Dash saw another problem—of course. The cliff above them overhung enough to prevent the mech from getting close enough to easily mount it. The best Sentinel could do was reach out with one of the mech’s hands and get it to a point about five meters below the window.

  “Shit. That’s still a hell of a drop,” Dash said, leaning out. “And if you don’t land just right, you might flop off and, well, let’s just say you’d get a few seconds to really take in that spectacular view as it flies past.”

  And when you hit the bottom, all the vac-armor would do is keep the gooey remains more or less intact, his inner voice went remorselessly on.

  “We will have to climb down, I think, Messenger,” Kai said.

  As soon as he’d said it, the rock trembled again, hard. Another fall of rock, deeper into the suite of chambers, raised another cloud of dust.

  “Okay, Kai, go.”

  “Messenger, your survival is—”

  “Really important to me, believe me. Now go!”

  Kai looked like he was about to protest again, but the rock shuddered, more fell, and he just nodded and clambered out of the window. Then, as nimbly as a mountain goat, he climbed down and dropped into the Archetype’s hand with a clunk.

  Dash had to chuckle at himself. Kai had at least ten years on him and belonged to an ascetic, scholarly order of monks. Dash kept tending to think of him as being somewhat—sedentary, was the word. That is, until a moment like this when Kai reminded him he was as sharp of body as he was of mind.

  A tremendous crack split the dusty air, following by a long, rumbling crash. More dust billowed in waves. The entire first chamber had collapsed, and the failure was spreading to the remainder, faster and faster. Dash moved to climb out the window when something caught his eye a few meters away, just visible through the dust, partly fallen behind a bookcase. It was a shape he recognized immediately.

  He crossed the room as both Kai and Sentinel urged him to hurry. It took only a moment to dislodge the small object, a model, from where it had stuck in place.

  It was a model of the Kingsport, or something virtually identical to it.

  Another crack, like an explosion, but much closer. Dash saw the next chamber in fall to ruin, leaving only this one, and one adjacent to it, still intact. He jammed the model into his satchel, then hurried back to the window and swung out a leg. His booted foot found purchase on the rock, and he started to climb down.

  He almost made it. With less than three meters to go, the entire cliff-face shuddered. Dash’s footholds broke away, and he plunged into the void—

  —only to be stopped short as something grabbed him and yanked him down onto the flat expansion of armored alloy that was the Archetype’s hand.

  “Sentinel, go!” Kai shouted.

  The mech smoothly backed away from the cliff, just as a blast of dust erupted from the window, announcing the final collapse of the chambers inside. To increase the drama, the entire overhang broke free. A few seconds later, thousands of tons of shattered rock starting the long fall to the canyon floor far below.

  As the Archetype rose skyward, heading back to the plateau, Dash sat up. Kai stared back down at the soaring plume of dust that marked the ruined archives.

  “We shall never return here, I think,” he said.

  “No need. We have what we came for,” Dash said, patting his dusty satchel.

  “Perhaps not entirely,” Kai replied, flipping open his own pack and touching one of the old tomes inside it with armored fingers. “But we have a long trip back. I will use it well.”

  “Hey, Kai, thanks for catching me down there. I guess I owe you one, huh?”

  “Not at all. I am privileged to have been able to preserve the life of the Messenger, the envoy of the Unseen.”

  Dash nodded gratefully, just as Kai gave him a sudden and uncharacteristically mischievous look, before adding one more word.

  “Again.”

  8

  A tense silence hung over Command Center as everyone watched the big display. It held an image of an experimental power core, one based on a design found among the records he and Kai had retrieved from the now-lost archives. It consisted of six sub-cores arranged in a flattened hexagon, an odd geometry that Custodian explained as being necessary for it to operate properly. The hexacore, as they’d dubbed it, had been mounted in a remote receptacle aboard their test bed, the Iron Gate, now parked ten thousand klicks away from the Forge. The AIs had no idea how much power the thing could potentially deliver, which also meant they had no idea how large an explosion might result if it failed.

  “Is ten thousand klicks enough?” Dash had asked Custodian.

  “If that distance and the Forges defenses are not sufficient protection, then we probably don’t wish to pursue developing this technology in the first place,” Custodian had replied.

  “Good point.”

  Their first attempt had failed, the core simply melting down to slag. Custodian, in consultation with Kai, Viktor, and Conover, had made some adjustments to the design. The document they’d retrieved had been vague in some key details, forcing them to infer them from other parameters. If it worked, though, it stood to revolutionize their tech, using Dark Metal not merely as a moderator, as in conventional cores, but actually incorporating it into the power source itself. It was yet another property of Dark Metal they hadn’t yet realized.

  “The core is running at ten percent capacity. Its absolute power output has increased by an order of magnitude from its five-percent value.”

  “Double the demand on it, and it produces ten times as much power? Pardon my indelicate language, but holy shit,” Viktor said.

  Amy sniffed and shook her head. “Is there anything this Dark Metal stuff can’t do?”

  “It can’t be as pretty as you are,” Conover said, flashing Amy a sappy smile. In response, he got a barrage of eye-rolls, snorts, and a few exaggerated gagging sounds.

  Conover looked aro
und. “What?”

  In answer, Leira leaned toward Dash and batted her eyes at him. “Oh, Dash, no matter how strong this Dark Metal turns out to be, it will never be as strong as my love for you.” She then shot Conover a sardonic, sidelong glance. “That’s how you sound, you know.”

  “I do not!” Conover looked around, turning red. “Do I?”

  Everyone, even Amy, nodded in unison.

  “I hate to interrupt this artificially tender moment, but the core is now operating at twenty percent demand. Output has increased by three orders of magnitude.”

  “Wait, so another doubling multiplies the output by a thousand?” Viktor said, a look of sheer wonder on his face.

  “I wonder how far we can go with this?” Amy asked but just got shrugs and headshakes in reply.

  Dash watched intently. The demand was nearly at thirty percent—

  The core suddenly flared from red to yellow to searing white in just a few seconds, then the automatic safety system ejected it from the Iron Gate. The whole receptacle-core assembly had been mounted in place of the warhead of a missile, which now streaked away. A single, dazzling point of light washed out the stars for a moment, then died away.

  “Well, that was spectacular,” Dash finally said, his voice flat.

  Viktor and Conover, standing at a console studying the telemetry of the hexacore up to the point of failure, both made tsk sounds.

  “The problem isn’t the sub-cores. The problem is the connections between them, the moderators. Even being Dark Metal-infused alloy, they just can’t handle the amount of power being produced,” Viktor said.

  “How about if we just used pure Dark Metal for them, instead?” Leira asked.

  Amy, who’d joined Viktor and Conover and leaned in between them, shook her head. “I wondered if there was anything Dark Metal couldn’t do. I think this might be one of the things it can’t,” she said.

  Both Viktor and Conover nodded their glum agreement.

  Dash looked back at the big screen, now just showing an empty starfield. “Well, unless that schematic in the archive was just meant as a prank, this hexacore thing must somehow actually work, right?”

  Conover suddenly straightened. “Why don’t we try using Dark Metal Two? The Battle Princes use it in their neural nets, which they also seem to use for power distribution. The fact they use it for both seems to suggest it’s pretty durable.”

  “Custodian, what do you think?” Dash asked.

  “We still haven’t finished determining the properties of DM2, so there’s no way to quantify the likelihood of success. However, the resulting degree of certainty doesn’t preclude it working,” the AI said.

  Dash curled his lip. “By which you mean—”

  “It’s worth a try.”

  Dash smiled, then turned to Kai. “How explicit is that old document you and Custodian have been translating about this? Does it mention anything about using DM2?”

  The monk studied an image of the retrieved schematic for a moment, tracing his finger along spidery lines of text. Finally, he shook his head. “Just as Custodian acknowledges a degree of uncertainty, so must I.” He pointed at the text. “This paragraph is the one of interest, but its translation is problematic. This was a transcription of a schematic that was clearly Unseen in origin, but we have no way of knowing how many intermediate steps there may have been in translating it.”

  “In other words, you don’t know if it’s a copy of the original, or a copy of a translation, that might have been based on a translation, and so on,” Harolyn, who’d been watching from the back of the Command Center, said.

  “That’s correct. All I can confirm is that this paragraph refers to the use of the Dark Metal substance. Whether that means Dark Metal, or DM2, or something else entirely, though?” Kai just ended on a shrug.

  Dash clapped his hands together. “Well, like Custodian said, let’s give it a try. Conover, Viktor, I’ll leave it to you guys to work with Custodian to rig up another attempt.”

  “They do say third time’s the charm,” Harolyn offered.

  But Leira spoke up. “They also say accidents happen in threes, though, don’t they?”

  Dash glanced back at the empty starfield. “Well, let’s hope the first they are right, and the second they aren’t.”

  “We are at sixty percent capacity. The power output has now reached the limits of the automated safeties. Do you want to continue with the experiment, Messenger?” Custodian asked.

  “Damn right I do. I want to know what one hundred percent looks like,” Dash replied.

  Everyone had clustered around the big display. Again, it showed the hexacore in its receptacle aboard the Iron Gate. Despite the ferocious amount of power flowing from it, it hadn’t produced as much as a spark.

  “The Iron Gate’s power distribution system is nearing failure. I will have to vent excess power before we proceed any further,” Custodian said.

  Dash nodded. “Do it.”

  They’d mounted three of the new gamma-ray lasers on the ex-minelayer, just for this reason. The weapons were enormously energy intensive and should be able to draw excess power away from the core and divert it harmlessly into space.

  “The first graser is firing now. I am increasing the hexacore’s capacity.”

  Aside from an understandable spike in the flux of gamma rays, none of the other indicators changed.

  “I am continuing to increase the output. The second graser is firing.”

  Dash and the others were all leaning forward, toward the image, their weight on their toes. “Keep going, Custodian.”

  “Ninety percent. The third graser is now firing.”

  Dash gritted his teeth. Even if it blew now, this had been a success. They might have to install some sort of limiter to prevent it from rising above a certain power threshold, but even so—

  “One hundred percent. All grasers are firing at maximum output,” Custodian intoned.

  Dash just gaped. They’d redlined three grasers with the power coming out of the hexacore and brought the Iron Gate’s entire power distribution system to the brink of failure. Custodian ramped the test ship's drive up to full power, activated every system aboard, and pumped out continuous rapid-fire from its single nova-cannon, and it still wasn’t enough.

  “I am shutting the hexacore down,” Custodian finally said. At once, the power levels dropped to zero. The Iron Gate nonetheless coasted along, accelerated to a fearsome velocity in the few seconds its drive had been maxed out.

  Dash turned to Benzel. “Can you get someone to recover that ship and our spiffy new hexacore before it flies off to parts unknown?”

  Benzel looked up from his comm. “Already on it, boss.”

  Custodian spoke up. “Preliminary data indicates that the hexacore experienced no thermal degradation from the test. In fact, it barely exceeded ambient temperature.”

  “I’d call that a success,” Amy said, grinning.

  But Leira turned a concerned frown to Dash. “The only input to that hexacore was whatever the fusion powerplant of an ex-minelayer could produce. What happens when we hook that up to the Archetype’s kugelblitz powerplant?”

  Dash stared at the data on the big screen and bit his lip. It was a good question. The power cores didn’t actually produce power on their own. Rather, they took an input power and magnified—many, many, many times in the case of the hexacore. The thought of putting the sort of power the Archetype could produce into the hexacore was, he had to admit, a pretty frightening proposition.

  On the other hand, it would overcome the Archetype’s biggest remaining limitation. The kugelblitz, essentially a miniature black hole, could produce far more power than the mech could actually use. It seemed like a gross design oversight by the Unseen. It would be like putting a high-end fusion plant into a rickety tramp freighter. It would work, but a huge amount of potential would be wasted. So what would be the point—?

  Dash’s eyes went wide. “Oh.”

  Leira’s eye
s, in turn, narrowed. “Uh-oh.”

  “What’s wrong?” Amy asked.

  “It’s Dash. He has that look, the one he gets when he has an idea, one so bizarre it’s got a good chance of getting him killed,” Leira said.

  “Yeah, I recognize it, too. If it doesn’t get him killed, it’ll be brilliant,” Benzel said.

  “Well, he hasn’t been killed so far,” Amy offered.

  But Leira just crossed her arms. “So far.” She scowled. “Dash, what are you thinking?”

  He’d ignored the banter and concentrated on the data on the viewscreen. But he wasn’t even really seeing it, either. Instead, he was thinking through just where this new gut feeling had come from and its implications. He glanced at Leira.

  “What? Oh. Yeah. I think this hexacore was meant for the Archetype. I mean, I’ve always wondered why the mech’s powerplant was able to produce way more energy than the mech could ever use. Now I know. It was because, eventually, these hexacores would be plugged in.”

  A thoughtful silence fell over the Command Center. Finally, Viktor cleared his throat. Doubt clouded his expression. “Why, though? Why would the Unseen have left the only record of a crucial component for the Archetype in an obscure monastery, on a dying planet back on the other side of the Black Gate?”

  “It really doesn’t seem to make sense,” Amy added.

  But Dash shook his head. “I don’t think the Unseen ever imagined that the Deepers would come along and open up that gate. They expected we’d just stay in our original arm of the galaxy once the Golden were defeated. And as for why they stashed it on that planet, well, they didn’t, did they? We just found a copy, made by Kai’s Order.”

  “So where’s the original?” Benzel asked.

  Custodian spoke up. “I have examined all available archives, including those of the Forge, and the additional information that has been brought here since the Forge was reactivated. There is no record of a hexacore or of Dark Metal Two. However, there are indications that there are additional, hidden stores of data back on the other side of the Black Gate. As Kai and the members of his Order continue to pore through all available archive material, they would likely make connections similar to those that led to the Procyon expedition.”