First Fleet #1-4: The Complete Saga

by Stephen Case

  I shook my head. “No, I’ve lost plenty. It’s not that.”

  “Then why the stupid question?”

  “I don’t mean a flatline. I mean sort of the opposite. Regeneration occurring too quickly, even when you’re trying to stop it.”

  He stared at me.

  “The rate of regeneration,” he said slowly, as though I was indeed a first-year medical student, “depends on the density of the nutrient matrix. Cells can’t build themselves faster than you give them material to work with. You shut off the flow, and you shut off mitosis.”

  “I know all that.”

  “Then you check the unit itself. Run the standard self-diagnostics, make sure the nutrient flow controls aren’t faulty.”

  “I’ve done that.”

  He shrugged and turned back to his screen.

  “What if there was—I don’t know—a malignancy?” I pressed. “Contamination of some sort?”

  “The bio-filters would have picked it up. Nothing dirty gets into a res-pod.” He tossed down his screen. “What’s this all about?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve got—”

  The klaxons went off again. Another influx of pods.

  Donovan swore under his breath. “This is getting ridiculous.”

  Six

  The pods came up through the night like flotsam stirred from deep sea beds. They drifted to us in a steady stream all the rest of that evening and into the morning hours of the following cycle. The Elphinstone and the other frigates opened their bay doors to accept them, and we went to work over the twisted, broken forms.

  “Doctor.”

  I was passing my control panel in the medical bay when the hologram flickered to light. It was the image of one of the men who had ordered the suspension of Ensign Grale’s regeneration. The HUD near his form identified him as a commander on board one of the fleet’s capital ships.

  “I have an order from Command,” the image told me, “regarding patient Jens Grale.”

  I waited.

  “You are to terminate immediately.”

  The image was grainy and blinked unsteadily, which bespoke either great distance or a large amount of interference. Even with the poor quality of the image, though, I could tell the officer’s face was worn. If the fleet was engaged in a battle, both his expression and the pods still making their way to us indicated that things were not going well.

  I asked him what was going on.

  “The order alone should be clear, Doctor. Command will not authorize the release of memory scans for Ensign Grale. You are to terminate her biological regeneration.”

  “I’m going to need a bit more information than that. I’ve never been asked to terminate a patient.”

  The man hesitated, and his image wavered.

  He paused. “We have reason to believe that Ensign Grale is in fact dead.”

  I snorted. “Of course she’s dead. What I want to know is why she shouldn’t be regenerated. A soldier’s contract guarantees it, if any possibility for regeneration remains.”

  He shook his head. “We’ve been looking at reports of what took place on the surface when Grale was killed. We have information indicating that her suit was compromised and that her vitals failed nearly a full solar day before the res-pod launched.”

  He gave me a moment to let that sink in.

  “Command doesn’t take a termination lightly. But it looks like whatever cellular material was in that pod cannot belong to Grale.”

  There was movement in the background of the image, and the officer turned to speak to someone outside the field of view. Portions of his torso dissolved into static.

  “I don’t have a lot of time, Doctor. We’re in the middle of operations out here or I would have visited the frigate again in person. You have your orders.”

  “This is ridiculous,” I pressed. “The signature of the cells in the pod matched Grale’s DNA perfectly.”

  The man frowned. “That’s what worries us. I’ll be ordering a full-scale investigation of this as soon we return. We suspect a Colonizer agent may have gained access to Grale’s pod, overridden identification controls, and seeded it with material from one of their own dead.”

  Another burst of static.

  “But it won’t matter without a memory scan,” I said. “I should test the DNA again.”

  “Negative. If the genetic database was indeed compromised, then it’s likely we’re dealing with internal Colonizer sympathizers. It’s possible they could have a memory scan of their own ready for when the regeneration is complete.” He paused. “I don’t have time for this. Terminate immediately.”

  Suddenly the tall man’s repeated visits to the regeneration unit and his conflicting stories made sense.

  “Understood,” I said. The image faded.

  At unit C-47 I stared a moment through the glass. Whoever the Colonizers were trying to bring back, she was huge. Her skeleton, nearly complete now despite my reduction of the nutrient matrix to the bare minimum required for life support, was half-sheathed in tissue. It was large enough that it was already curled below the glass, legs bent like a fetus. The eyes had formed, but the eyelids had yet to grow, so she stared out at me blindly from eyes that seemed far too wide.

  I shuddered and deactivated the unit.

  Seven

  Donovan joined me in the corridor by a row of portals, through which I could see the winking lights of the rest of the fleet. They flashed like a storm on the horizon. We had been receiving still more res-pods throughout most of the night. The bays of the Elphinstone were nearly filled to capacity, and from what I heard it was the same with the other frigates.

  “Things must be getting pretty bad out there,” Donovan said.

  I nodded wearily.

  “It’s not just the number of pods,” he went on, “though that’s bad enough. Have you seen the shape of some of the bodies?”

  “I’ve seen them.” I was trying to decide whether I needed sleep or food more before the next wave arrived. “Whatever the Colonizers are doing down there, it’s getting nasty.” I decided on food, and Donovan trailed me to the mess.

  He kept talking as we walked. “I just memory-dumped and discharged about a dozen pilots who came in with the first wave. They weren’t nearly ready to go.” He scowled. “Command sent over their memory scans with orders to get them back on the line as soon as possible, so I dumped the memories and woke them up. Some of them could hardly stand. We brought them out of it too quick.”

  “And?” I had been doing the same thing for days now.

  “And one of the pilots went nuts. An orderly brought her to me because she was screaming that she wasn’t going to go back. I got her sedated, but she started spilling her guts before the guys from Command showed up.”

  The view beyond the portals was largely devoid of stars. Dust falling into the cluster of singularities below obscured those that were still visible this far out. The green and red lights of the other frigates seemed lost on a velvet sea of ink.

  Donovan said, “They haven’t found any Colonizers down there.”

  I turned back to him. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m telling you what she said. She said that on the planets with the ruins, they weren’t finding any active Colonizer cells.”

  “Then who the hell are they fighting?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “She said the Colonizers had been there, but the camps they were finding in those caverns were empty.”

  I waited, trying to wrap my mind around what he was saying.

  “She said the ruins were swallowing whole platoons. Ships were getting lost down stone throats.”

  “She had a faulty dump, Donovan. She was trying to sort out her memories. And you had just sedated her. If there are no Colonizers down there, who’s butchering these soldiers?”

  Donovan was ready with an answer. “She said they were doing it to each other.” His voice dropped. “They were going mad, fighting ghosts. Turning on each ot
her.”

  “Bullshit.” I increased my pace. “A new Colonizer weapon, maybe. They’re down there all right. Biding their time. Dug in and hiding.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Definitely.” I rounded on him. “You need rest. We all do. How long has it been since you’ve slept?”

  He grimaced. “Too many bodies. I see them when I sleep.”

  So did I. But I didn’t say so.

  *

  Still the res-pods flowed in. Transports docked with our frigates to shuttle revived soldiers back to the front. None of the soldiers who I woke said anything about what was happening on the planets. In fact, none of them said anything about those planets at all. We were all run pretty ragged with the amount of bodies we had coming through, so it took me some time to realize that Command had started sending over old memory scans. Whatever had happened to these soldiers on the campaign, their memories were being reset to the very start of combat operations.

  That scared me more than anything.

  We were too busy to think much of it, though when I told Donovan he just nodded grimly. “They’d been having trouble getting them to go back.”

  Eight

  Amid the rising tide of the dead I had forgotten about the tall pilot until he reappeared in the medical bay.

  “What did you do to her?” he demanded to know.

  He was beside her res-pod, though I hadn’t seen him arrive. Opaque brown fluids circulated beneath the glass. It usually took a terminated unit several days to fully discharge the organic materials and cleanse itself in preparation for the next culture.

  “Is she dead?”

  I ignored the question and asked who he was, careful to remain on the opposite side of the long row of glass coffins.

  “You can’t kill her,” he said, laughing softly. The eyes that had seemed clouded before were now somehow empty, as though he looked out on a world blurred by fear or despair. He bent over the unit until his forehead rested against it.

  “The termination order came through days ago from Command,” I said slowly. “There was nothing I could do.”

  He did not seem to have heard, though he raised his head. “Some of us knew.” His fingers were splayed on the surface of the unit as though reaching for what was within. “Some of us saw. We had orders to dig deep, to find them and send them up. Even though it had been so long. Even though all her worlds were dead. She was our weapon. She was the flame, and your ships are so many moths.”

  “You’re a Colonizer,” I said. “I don’t know how you got aboard, but I’ve alerted Security.” I was edging away.

  He fixed me with a stare that was suddenly unclouded and sharp, and I thought again of the sightless eyes of the body in C-47.

  “The caves do strange things to the mind,” he whispered. “And we had to go deepest, looking for her. And then, when you came, we were ready. We poured out of the Sinks and we stole your pods, and we sent her pieces back.”

  He seemed to be looking past me, through the walls of the frigate itself, to something only he could see swimming toward us through space.

  I froze.

  There was movement in the unit. The man saw it and stroked the surface gently.

  “Down there,” he murmured, “all we heard were her echoes. All we saw were her shadows. But it was enough. We thought the worlds were her grave, but I think she knew we were coming.”

  His eyes unfocused again, he smiled.

  The brown fluid in the pod surged like a swollen river.

  It was impossible. Nothing could still be alive in there.

  “We brought her back!” His tone had risen in pitch and volume. “We found her in her house of stone, but we brought her back.”

  “What have you done?”

  The low klaxons sounded again. Beyond the hull of the ship, I knew more res-pods were rising from the deep with their carrion cargoes.

  His laughter was soft. “Resurrection.”

  There was another sound, this one strangely like stone on stone. Something inside the pod was tapping on the glass.

  “It’s impossible,” I said, aloud this time. Nothing had overridden my commands to the pod. The nutrient flux had been shut down. The cleansing enzymes should have scrubbed the interior of any organic matter.

  The pod was still between us, but now there was a pistol in his hand.

  “Open it.”

  I shook my head.

  “She’s alive. You said so yourself. All it takes is as few as half a dozen cells.”

  I stalled. All I could think of were those worlds coughing up the broken bodies of the rows upon rows of soldiers all around me. It wasn’t bravery; it was an overpowering fear of whatever was waiting behind that glass.

  “What did you bring back? Is this what’s down there, killing our men?”

  “They’re killing themselves. Or each other. It doesn’t matter.” He laughed again.

  The tapping came again, louder this time. Something like a shard of bone dragged along the inside surface of the glass.

  “Open it,” he ordered.

  The doors at the far side of the bay hissed apart as incoming pods slid into the few remaining positions. His eyes glanced that direction for a moment, and I broke for the entrance to the corridor. It was a long sprint. I was only halfway there when I heard the shattering glass.

  “She is here.” His voice rose even higher, a sort of agonized, ecstatic keening, only to end suddenly in a strangled scream. There was no question of turning to look.

  I met Donovan in the corridor, his face clouded with worry.

  “I was coming to find you,” he said. “Something’s jammed our contact with the rest of the fleet, and even intra-ship—What the hell is going on?” This last was as I elbowed past him and slammed the manual lock to the med bay entrance.

  When I turned back to him his face was grey as stone.

  “There was …” He was struggling to find words. “In the bay, standing over one of the pods …” He started shaking.

  “They brought something back, Donovan.” I grabbed him by the shoulders. “Look at me. You saw it. They brought something back.”

  He slumped against the wall. “What are you saying? Who brought something back?”

  “The Colonizers, somehow. They found remains of—of whatever built those ruins on those planets, and they’re using our res-pods to—to culture it or something.”

  Donovan’s mouth opened in horror. “Oh my God!” He brought his hands to his head slowly. “Oh my God, I hear her. I hear her in my head.”

  The entire corridor seemed to slope. I braced myself beside Donovan. He was right—there was something outside, something beyond the door, beyond the surface of my mind. It was as though it was slowly, methodically trying different frequencies one by one until it locked on and was able to get a clear and overpowering message through. The voice was growing clearer.

  I had once, as a boy, stood beside the spillway of a huge earthen dam with nothing but a low rail between me and hundreds of feet of yawning space with a thousand gallons of water surging below. The sensation to simply step over the edge—the horrifying and almost overpowering realization that there was nothing between me and the abyss—had been dizzying. It was like that now, except that space itself, a chaos of surging emptiness, was itself whispering for me to step closer. There was something utterly and immensely alien on the other side of the wall, and I felt my mind sliding toward it.

  I fought down an urge to turn and release the lock. Instead I pulled Donovan to his feet, and we ran farther down the corridor.

  Where the corridor branched, Donovan stopped and shook himself. “We’ve got to.” He licked his lips. “We’ve got to get a warning to the rest of the fleet, and then we’ve got to self-destruct the Elphinstone.”

  Farther from the medical bay it was easier to think.

  I blurted, “What about opening the space-side bay doors, evacuating it?”

  He nodded. “That might work. But from the command deck, not from
down here. I can’t go back.”

  It was like running in a dream. It took a huge effort just to move farther down the corridor. Before we had gone far Tsun-Chan emerged from another bay, walking as though asleep. When we tried to hold her back, she started screaming. By this time more crewmembers had spilled into the corridor. They all drifted toward the locked entrance.

  Donovan pushed me into the medical bay Tsun-Chan had just exited and locked the entrance behind us. It was empty apart from us and the hundreds of regenerating soldiers.

  I wondered what she would look like to the other crewmembers when they opened the door to the medical bay. An alien intelligence, resurrected after billions of years. Something so incredibly old, something that had crafted the sublime stones in the warmth of those caverns unspeakable eons ago. Something sleeping for so long returned—

  “No you don’t.” Donovan caught my hand. It had been drifting toward the entrance release.

  I bit my tongue until I tasted blood. The pain seemed to help keep my mind clear.

  “There’s no way to get to the command deck now,” Donovan was saying, “and there’s no way to send a message from here if she or whoever is out there has jammed transmissions.”

  “A memory scan,” I said. The terminals waited above each res-pod, and it would be easy to reconfigure for a scan instead of a dump. “They couldn’t have taken down the memory net.” The memory storage units on each ship—what we called the bricks—were quantum-resonance tethered. It was the closest thing in space to being hard-wired. Command had gone to the utmost to ensure they’d be able to dump the consciousness of their soldiers back into their bodies wherever they ended up being regenerated.

  “Fine, but what good will that do without a body to dump it into?”

  There were voices in the corridor now.

  “That’s our way out,” I explained, motioning to the doors at the far end of the bay where the pods docked. “You first. You saw it; you’ll be able to tell others,” I said as I pushed him toward the nearest memory terminal before the implications could sink in.