First Fleet #1-4: The Complete Saga

by Stephen Case

  Tonight was different.

  Beka dreamed she was at sea, in a boat so small that parts of her body were always hanging precariously over the edge. Below, the water was a complete black, but she saw things swimming in the depths. Some of them came very close to her boat. They trailed through the water like ghosts, and Beka realized with a start that they were exactly that. She was not on an ocean, but on the surface of a vast quantum-tethered Brick. She knew that below her, down in the vast coldness where the black of the water bled away to empty sparks of stars, her sister was waiting. If she could find her, if she could call her, Beka could bring her back.

  No one died in space, not really.

  A wind picked up, and her boat swayed dangerously.

  Something was rising from beneath the water. Someone had seen her, had seen her boat crossing the roof of its watery sky. Someone knew she was here. For a flashing moment, Beka felt a surge of hope. Jens was coming home. A shape broke out of the surface. It was something white, with tresses of tangled hair that fell down around it like smoke, writhing in agony. There was a face, wailing terribly. Even as it broke the surface it was falling apart, dissolving into flecks of silver and bone that shivered and separated as Beka watched until there was nothing but a thin phosphorescent sheen on the black water that mirrored the stars above.

  This is a nightmare, Beka thought. I need to wake up now. Right now.

  Then it was over, and the sea was still again.

  *

  Time passed in the shipyard. The shipyard had a name, after a dead general or someone like that. Beka hadn’t bothered to learn it. The group in the lab had their own separate, tiny commissary, and Beka began taking her meals there with the others. This evening they were joined by a fifth member of their party, a woman who was introduced to her simply as Eleanor, special attaché to the admiral. She was, Beka guessed, perhaps in her fifties, with striking features and thick, dark hair she wore loose.

  “She’s here to pick our brains, check our status and report back to Tholan,” Davis sneered.

  Tholan had explained to Beka that each member of the small team had a personal link to the missing ships and some expertise that explained why they were there. Tsai-Liu, for example, had been one of the pioneers in the interface aspect of regeneration technology—the conduits that transferred memories from the body to the Brick. He came out of retirement when the Fleet went missing.

  “My son was captain of the Biddell Airy,” he told Beka as they sat to eat, sad but clearly proud.

  The commissary was much smaller than the soldiers’ mess where Beka had eaten her meals when she first came to the shipyard. It was buried down in between the lab and some of the engineering modules that made up the lower levels of the shipyard. There were no windows and the only furniture was a single, long table.

  “What do you think happened to the Fleet?” Beka asked Tsai-Liu. It had been a long day. She and Aggiz had spent the entire afternoon going back and forth about the possibility of parsing data in the Brick for memory alone and the instrumental parameters that would be necessary for this. Aggiz approached the problem from the neurological side: what they would need to look for from the human brain’s point of view. Beka looked at it as a disentanglement specialist: how those neurological signals would be encoded and entangled in the condensates of the Brick.

  Davis heard her question and leaned in. “We have the million dollar – no, scratch that. The trillion dollar question on the table, folks! Trot out the moth-worn theories, please.”

  Tsai-Liu sighed. “I have no idea.”

  “Boring!” Davis leered like a shark. “Some of Tholan’s officers are sure it’s a new kind of Colonizer weapon. A dirty bomb of some sort. Something that either blew a hole right into the sidespace or sent the entire Fleet back in time half a million years. They’ll tell you all about it if you let them corner you. So don’t. Because it’s asinine. Aggiz, here,”— Davis jabbed his fork at Aggiz like an accusation—“thinks it was a biological agent. Something mind-altering that proliferated through the entire Fleet. Though I’ll be damned if I can figure out how you spread a virus through a thousand miles of vacuum and solid bulkheads.”

  Beka could tell Davis was making this spectacle on her behalf. This was obviously something the others had all heard before.

  “And then.” Davis lowered his voice. “You have Madame Commandant’s belief that this represents our first, and disastrous, encounter with ETI.” Eleanor inclined her head slightly at this. Davis’s voice dropped even lower. “Because I’m sure you’ve heard the final transmissions.”

  Aggiz and Tsai-Liu were uncomfortable. Davis was enjoying it to the fullest. Beka swallowed and shook her head slowly. She hadn’t known that there were recorded transmissions from the Fleet, though now it seemed reasonable that they would have sent some kind of message if they ran into trouble. She felt vaguely foolish that she hadn’t asked about it sooner. There would be clues there, despite the fact that certainly anything useful had already been gleaned from them.

  “No?” Davis feigned surprise. “Then don’t listen to them. At least not if you ever want to sleep again. Command cleared us for access to those, of course, because they know we’re not going anywhere to tell anyone and also because they thought maybe we could pull something useful from them. Though we couldn’t do what they wanted.” He paused. “At first they’re what you expect. Unexpected resistance from the Colonizers, surprisingly heavy losses, casualty reports-stuff like that.”

  No one at the table was eating anymore. Tsai-Liu stared down at his plate.

  “There were probably more than twenty times as many Colonizer ships in that place than there should have been, which doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. And then things start making even less sense.” Davis leaned forward. “Hallucinations. Dementia. The transmissions grow increasingly nonsensical and disturbed. Deranged, even. The final transmissions make absolutely no sense at all. People screaming. Sobbing. Singing.”

  “Singing?”

  Davis shrugged. “Uh huh. Lends some credence to Aggiz’s theory. The one that it was a biological agent. As near as we can tell, something drove every last soldier on the First Fleet insane.”

  No one spoke.

  After a few moments, Beka forced herself to break the silence. “How long ago did Command receive the last transmission from the Fleet?”

  Davis sat back in his chair, his performance concluded. “You’ve been poking around inside the Brick. You tell me.”

  “The latest memory scans logged are from five weeks ago,” Beka said. “Does that correlate with the last transmissions?”

  Davis shrugged again; apparently satisfied with the effect he had had on the atmosphere of the room. “As best as we’ve been able to tell. There were apparently medical frigates that were still uploading and downloading scans for a few days after the rest of the Fleet went dead.”

  Eleanor spoke up. “That’s the subset of data we should be focusing on.”

  Davis scowled and shook his head. “For whatever reason, they were downloading old scans into the soldiers they were regenerating. Anything those soldiers saw was gone before they were sent back to the front.”

  “Which meant,” Tsai-Liu said softly, “that someone higher up knew the soldiers were seeing something they were afraid to face again. They were resetting their memories to the beginning of combat operations.”

  “Which is precisely why we need the most recent memories!” Davis stabbed with the fork again, this time toward Beka. “How goes the disentanglement?”

  If Beka were more like Jens, she would have been disturbed by how soon the gruesome implications of what Davis had just shared faded into the background as soon as she began discussing the technical details of her work. But she pushed the thoughts of Jens on those ships out of her mind and fled back to the comfort of wave functions and probabilities. Sharing, processing, and analyzing information had always been her safe haven from her own insecurities and fears. Her tiny audience
, even if they did not understand all the particulars of the problem, understood it well enough to ask insightful questions. She let that shield her all the time. Her sister, the First Fleet, the memories of the ghosts within the Bricks—they could be faced as long as they remained in her mind only as puzzles to be solved.

  *

  Davis wanted results, and quickly. For two weeks Beka and Aggiz poured over theories, running simulation after simulation. They built computational models of the Brick and models of minds within the model Brick. They mapped them onto detailed scans of dozens of different sample brains. They argued over how drastically cognitive pathways could be simplified and still provide meaningful information. Finally, after another gruesome failure on his end of the lab, Davis stalked over to the base of the Brick and demanded why Beka and Aggiz had not requested a meat-sack yet. Eleanor followed and stood behind him, ignored. She seemed to come and go on her own schedule, not beholden to Davis or anyone else in the lab.

  “He means a body,” Aggiz whispered. “Don’t ask where they get them.”

  Davis performed a standard eye-roll. “You can’t imagine the military would have had regeneration technology this long and not used it to create a few blank slates.”

  Beka had tried to ignore the origin of the bodies that he and Tsai-Liu continued to try to dump memories into, never with much success.

  “We don’t need one, Davis,” Aggiz muttered, his dark face closed and his boney shoulders hunched in irritation. “Beka and I have been over this, over it again and again. It won’t work.”

  “You can’t isolate the memories?”

  “We can,” Beka put in. “I’m actually rather proud of that. I could publish the technique if I ever get home.” She stretched. It had not taken much time for Davis’s intimidation techniques to wear thin on her. “But it’s not disentangling the memories. It’s getting them communicated once we have them.”

  “Explain,” he demanded.

  Eleanor had stepped forward and was watching her intently.

  “Maybe Aggiz should. This is his area of expertise.”

  Aggiz looked small and slumped beside Davis, who was not very tall himself. He was always nervous, but this uneasiness seemed magnified to outright fear in the presence of Eleanor, who was still standing at Davis’s shoulder.

  “Memories are just data,” Aggiz stammered, looking at everyone but her. “But in us, in our minds, they’re tied to personality and most importantly for us—most importantly, mind you—to our language functions. We interpret and communicate through our memories. If we carve them, if we pull them, untangle them from the Brick, and put them into a blank meat—a blank body I mean.” He swallowed. “If we put them into a blank body without a personality-just the memories alone-then there’s no way for us to communicate, for them to make communication with us.”

  “Memories aren’t any use without the rest of the mental apparatus to share them,” Beka concluded. “We could extract them from a specific personality in the Brick, but we’d have stripped them from all of the linguistic and contextual apparatus that humans use, along with destroying the personality.”

  Aggiz looked relieved.

  “But you can pull them out, right?” Davis demanded again.

  Beka nodded. “Yes, but they’d be locked in an empty mind. In an empty shell. You’d need to—” She waved her hand vaguely. “You’d need to construct an artificial mind or something to nestle the memories in, and that’s well beyond the reach of current neurological programming. At least from what Aggiz tells me.”

  “He’s right,” Eleanor murmured.

  Davis glared at her.

  “So we’re done with meat-sacks,” he said. “We move on to the next option.”

  Eleanor’s lips tightened, but she said nothing. Somewhere farther down the bay, another body rejected a memory dump and started screaming.

  *

  “Why does Davis hate her so much?”

  Beka had started jogging again. There was too much, both in her mind and in the work before her, to not have a release. Tsai-Liu told her about the circular track running the perimeter of one of the shipyard’s main spurs, and she had begun to circuit it regularly in the evenings after leaving the lab. It was perhaps a half a mile in circumference, wrapping the outer hull, with portholes on either side looking down into space. These were placed at regular intervals, so the track felt like a bridge spanning an abyss at times. She counted laps by how many times the white flare of the dwarf star swung into view.

  She slowed her pace to fall in beside Tsai-Liu. The track was usually crowded in the evenings. He slowed a bit further to answer her.

  “Who?”

  “Eleanor,” Beka answered. “The woman no one the lab can seem to ignore except Davis.”

  “Ah.” Tsai-Liu huffed and smiled wryly. “She actually does have a rank, though I’m not sure what it is. She’s the admiral’s eyes and ears in the lab.”

  “Is that why she annoys Davis so much?”

  Tsai-Liu shook his head. “The admiral has more than just her eyes and ears, if you know what I mean.”

  This was news to her. “Are they Licensed together?”

  His laugh trailed into a wheeze, and they slowed further.

  “I don’t think the admiral needs to worry about that sort of thing out here. But their relationship is clearly more than simply professional. Frankly, I think Davis simply hates having someone around he can’t bully.” He grimaced. “It’s hard not to be a little envious of Tholan though, I admit. A woman like that out here.” They jogged in silence for a dozen paces or so. “What about you? Did you leave someone behind in System?”

  “No. I Licensed once, just after graduation. We had been roommates. We didn’t renew it though. She left System.”

  “Ah.”

  “You?”

  “Harriet and I were on a long-term License after our son was born. When he matriculated at the academy we let it lapse. We still get in touch occasionally, though of course she doesn’t know I’m here.”

  They went on in silence again for a while.

  “Davis said we’re done trying to dump ghosts into the blanks the admiral has been providing.”

  Tsai-Liu nodded. “He told me about the conclusion you and Aggiz reached. It seems reasonable.” He held up a hand and they slowed to a walk. A wide, black window opened out of the shipyard hull beside the track. “I’m glad. I don’t know where they were getting those regenerated bodies, but I don’t regret being finished with them.”

  “What’s next? Davis mentioned having another option.”

  “I’m sure he has several on his mind.” He bit his lip. “But I think we’re running out of time.”

  They walked on in silence. Beka thought, again, of the bodies on their tables in the laboratory bay and of the silver figures in her dream. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know what other options Davis had in reserve.

  Thirteen

  The long-range scout ship Grenada dropped off the terminus of the light line, near the First Fleet’s last known coordinates. The vessel was small, barely large enough to power the jump-set that protruded from either side of its hull like a pair of oversized headphones on a child. The jump-set was necessary though. It gave the lone, tiny scout ship its only chance at locating whatever was left of the Fleet.

  This was where the First Fleet had been deployed. No light lines could reach farther than this. From here, given that the First Fleet had followed Command’s orders, its ships should have diverged for various approaches to the Colonizing mining worlds nestled within the Perseus Limb. Several medical frigates should have held back, stationed in a high orbit around a cluster of singularities several parsecs to the rear.

  The Grenada’s captain sent a transmission back to System.

  “Command, this is Grenada. We’ve arrived at the end of the light line.”

  “Copy,” came the reply after a brief delay. “Commence scanning.”

  Magnetic and imaging sensors blinked to life
along the tiny ship’s studded hull. Fields swept out into the night, returning with information and the lack thereof.

  “No picket ships in formation,” the captain reported. “Nothing on short-range instrumentation. No sign of Colonizer vessels.”

  “Confirmed. You are clear to proceed, Grenada.”

  The jump-set hummed to life and curdled space around Grenada’s minuscule mass. It was not the laminar slipstream of a light line. The jump was a study in controlled chaos. For several moments, all of the ship’s considerable computing power was bent on calculating an entry and exit point that would bring it considerably closer to the first of the unnamed Colonizer worlds. Its computational engines moaned as equations were given form and pumped out into tensor fields.

  Several light minutes away, space yawned and the ship reemerged.

  “Scanning.”

  Though invisible to sight at this distance, there were definitely signals.

  “We’ve got something, Command. It looks like a few of ours. Drifting.”

  “Copy, Grenada. Move in and maintain contact.”

  The Grenada slid forward until it was within visual range of a distended, broken mass of bulkheads spinning silently.

  “We have visual.” The captain studied a readout. “It’s the Rowan Hamilton.”

  The Hamilton was a heavy carrier. It dwarfed the scout ship considerably. No running lights were blinking. Several of the exterior airlocks and shuttle ports had been opened. A tenuous debris field surrounded the entire wreck.

  “Magnify and scan debris, Grenada.”

  “Roger. Largely metallic. Looks like battle detritus. Some organic signals are present as well.”

  “Bodies?”

  The Grenada nudged closer, moving carefully to avoid the artificial satellites the larger ship now wore like a grave shroud.

  “Looks like there are some floating around.” The captain paused. “Confirmed. Some broken suits, but several unshielded bodies. They must have been vented when airlocks or bay doors were opened.”