The Silent Fleet: A Military Scifi Epic (The Messenger Book 4) by J.N. Chaney & Terry Maggert

Author:J.N. Chaney & Terry Maggert [Chaney, J.N.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Variant Publications
Published: 2019-12-21T16:00:00+00:00

“And that is the whole story,” Dash said. “Pretty unbelievable, I know. But there it is.”

Silence.

It dragged on, Benzel simply staring at Dash, the rest of the Gentle Friends present exchanging looks ranging from alarmed to disbelieving. Dash glanced at Leira, who just shrugged back. This was, Dash knew, a critical moment—far more critical even than all of his clashes with Benzel so far. He wasn’t really here, of course, to just extort a ship from these people; there were much easier ways of getting a ship. Dash needed the Gentle Friends, and his pitch to them was based on something pretty much as alien to them, as the Unseen had been to him—doing something dangerous, not for profit, but for a greater good.

Benzel finally crossed his arms and scowled. “Yeah, that’s a good story. You should sell the rights to it to some vid producer. It’d make for great fiction.”

Dash shook his head emphatically. “It’s not just a story. The Unseen, the Golden, their war, it’s all only way too true. Believe me, I wish it wasn’t. But there you go.”

Benzel shook his head right back and opened his mouth, but Wei-Ping, who’d been patched into the meeting via comm line—she apparently really was Benzel’s chief lieutenant, and number two in the Gentle Friends—spoke up. “What sort of weapons, capabilities, are we talking about here?” she asked.

“You’ve seen the Archetype and the Swift,” Leira replied. “You have to realize there’s no way they were built with conventional tech. If that’s not enough, the Forge has enough firepower to obliterate your entire fleet, without really putting much effort into it. And if that’s not enough—well, this all started, you might remember Dash saying, because my partner and I got our hands on a piece of Unseen tech. That tech, which you can hold in one hand, is called a Lens, and it can make a star explode.”

“Come on,” Benzel said. “Alien wars and Silent Fleets and—” He paced a couple of steps to one side, then back again. “It’s all just bullshit! It can’t be real.”

“What about that probe, Benzel?” Wei-Ping cut in.

“That was nothing. Some new military tech or something.”

“What probe?” Dash asked.

Benzel just shrugged and tried to play dumb, but Wei-Ping spoke up. “About a month ago, one of our ships ran across some mysterious probe cutting chunks out of an asteroid. As soon as it detected them, it attacked. They survived it, but their ship got shot up pretty bad—and there wasn’t a damned thing they could do about it. They couldn’t even see the damned thing on their scanners, had to try targeting their own weapons by sight. It flew off without a scratch and disappeared.”

“Describe this probe,” Leira said. Wei-Ping did, then Leira looked at Dash.

“That sounds like one of the drones we saw working from that station orbiting Brahe.”

Dash nodded. “Yeah. It sure does.” He turned back to Benzel. “That was a Golden mining drone. It means the Golden have been here. They know all about this system.

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