First Fleet #1-4: The Complete Saga

by Stephen Case

  From this angle, there appeared to be no damage to the Hamilton. The Grenada oriented itself along the Hamilton’s main axis, compensating for the listing caused by unequalized engines. The lack of any interior or exterior lights and the dead ship’s slowed rotation indicated that it was a derelict. The tiny scout ship held its position until the Hamilton’s far side swung into view.

  “Here we go, Command. Major battle damage along the port side.”

  The hull of the Hamilton was blistered and peeled open, exposing interior struts and habitation suites as well as a long, narrow bay where heavy-suits were launched during combat operations. The Grenada flicked on its spotlights and swept them along the ruin.

  “No exterior charring. No residual radiation.”

  The scout ship drifted closer.

  “Command, this damage does not appear to be from an exterior source.”

  There was a long pause on the other end.

  “Copy that, Grenada. You are cleared to board for further assessment.”

  Over the next several minutes the scout ship maneuvered closer to the Hamilton until it was only a few dozen meters from the hulk and matched the dead ship’s orbit. The gaping bulkheads below ceased relative motion. The two ships swung together as though tethered together. Grenada kept its exterior spots trained on a particularly large hole in the Hamilton’s side.

  A hiss of discharging air was heard within the tiny ship, and two thinsuited figures dropped from the Grenada into the Hamilton.

  “Command, we’ve sent over two boarders. Switching to open communication. Ajax and Hammersmith, confirm arrival.”

  “Roger, Captain.” The voice was Hammersmith’s. “We’re aboard. Spin’s not generating enough gravity, so we’re locked magnetically.”

  “What do you see?”

  “Nothing yet.”

  Grenada waited like an impatient fly poised over the open wound of the Hamilton’s ruptured hull.

  “Captain, this is Ajax. All the systems on board appear dead. Plenty of bodies. Some are suited. Most are not. Looks like there was a massive pressurization failure.”

  *

  Time passed as the Captain waited for Ajax and Hammersmith’s report. The two ships remained motionless, relative to one another. The only sign of movement were the stars swinging in wide scythe-like arcs around them both. The Captain of the Grenada grew listless. This was taking too long. The boarders should have reported in by now.

  “Grenada, this is Command. What is the status of your men?”

  “Unknown, Command. We’re still reading their life-signs, but we have been unable to reestablish contact. Please advise.”

  A transmission broke in.

  “This is Ajax.” The voice was strained. “They’re talking to me.”

  The captain leaned forward. “Who are?”

  There was no hint of static in the transmission. The words were clear. The silence between them was sharp and defined.

  “I see it. My blood. I hear it…”

  Someone was breathing into a communication unit. The breaths were heavy and labored.

  There was a flash of red light from within the broken side of the ship. A figure emerged, careening end over end. It was Hammersmith. He righted himself with tiny fingers of compressed air from his thinsuit and barreled toward the waiting Grenada.

  “Command, this is Grenada. We’ve lost contact with Ajax.”

  “Confirmed, Grenada,” said the distant voice. “Do not allow entry to the boarding party.”

  There was silence for a long moment. Hammersmith had reached the Grenada’s airlock and was pounding on its tiny, transparent portal. The sound echoed through the scout ship like a gavel crashing down.

  “Command, please repeat.”

  “Do not allow members of your boarding party to enter.”

  There was a low, keening wail on the transmission.

  “Switching to closed channel, Grenada.”

  The pounding was fainter now. The anguished cry cut out.

  “Hamilton is now designated an extreme biohazard. Proceed to next search coordinate.”

  The Grenada’s captain cleared his throat. “Roger that, Command. Grenada is underway.”

  The scout ship veered away from the Hamilton’s wreckage with enough acceleration to tear off the man still clinging on to the airlock. The figure tumbled, end over end, back towards the Hamilton. By the time Grenada had jumped to the next search coordinate, the figure had become indistinguishable against the ring of debris circling the dead ship.

  Fourteen

  Cam was in the attic, staring at the body in the pod. There was only a week left now until resupply. Though the process was largely automated, there was simply no room for it. The cargo units that contained the water, food, sundry, requested tools, and medical supplies would completely fill the room.

  She had to decide what to do with the body. Soon.

  The regeneration was nearly complete. There were no longer signs of facial or cranial trauma. There was simply a sleeping man, in perhaps his thirties or very early forties, suspended in the blue-green gel of the res-pod. The power drain to Station had dropped in sync with the near completion of the regeneration, and the major tissue damage all over the body had been repaired. Now it was drawing just enough to keep its occupant suspended and alive. Soon it would be ready to wake.

  She and Paul had discussed their options that morning while the twins were in class. The week before, Paul had finally prevailed on her to take the elevator up to station and investigate the pod herself.

  “I was right,” she had explained to him. “It’s far too small to have a jump-set. It must have made its way here via the light lines.”

  “So we can just send it back the way it came. Won’t it keep the guy alive until it finds a military ship or something?”

  “It will have logged its time here. And before you ask—no. No matter what you say about how wonderful I am with computer logs, I can’t re-construct or alter the trajectory and manifest logs of a military transport. Which means whoever finds it could trace it back to us, and ask why we didn’t report it.”

  “Can we bring it down here?”

  “It’s too large for the elevator. And the pod looks like it’s built for space travel only: evac from heavy suits to medical transports. No capabilities for surface transport or landing at all.”

  “Okay. So we get the guy out of it and bring him down here, then chuck the pod into the atmosphere and let it burn up on its way down.”

  “Paul, what are we going to do with a brain-dead body? We don’t have the medical facilities or the proper training to keep it alive. It would waste space, air, and food. And that’s assuming we could even get it to eat.”

  And so it went on for the rest of the morning.

  She finally convinced Paul to leave for his maintenance tour with a promise that she would figure something out while he was away. He’d departed for a tour of the rock-burners to the far north of their plantation that morning and would be gone for three days.

  Figuring things out, that’s what I do, she kept reminding herself and thought briefly of all the figuring out she had done in the past few years. After she had died and regenerated for the first time, she had realized what it had done to her, and she had figured out how to get away. Everyone had said was impossible to desert, but when it became clear that the military would not let her go so easily, she had figured out how to create a new life for herself. When System began to get too uncomfortable for her, she had figured out how to get posted to a brand new terraforming colony, where her old life was unlikely to come looking for her. And along the way she had figured out how to make Paul fall in love with her and offer her a License.

  Paul, her husband. Actually, he had tried to get her to marry him. It was an indication of how old-fashioned he was in some ways. He settled for an extended License, but he still talked about it sometimes. He was hardly frontier material. Yet here he was, with her, working to pump oxygen and nucleic parti
cles into an atmosphere that would likely never generate a raincloud until long after they were both dead and gone.

  I will figure this out. I have to.

  Floating in the attic, Cam stared down at the body in the pod. She hefted the rail-pistol in her left hand. It had no weight up here, obviously, but it still had mass and thus had inertia. It still felt solid. Paul didn’t even know it existed, but she still disassembled and reassembled it at her workbench when he was gone overnight and couldn’t sleep. She knew its components so well that they came apart and found their places again effortlessly, like an extension of her own hands. Its feel in her palm was reassuring. She had not fired it in years.

  It would only take one shot from it. She imagined the dull recoil and the EM flux coursing through her hand as the magnetic field lobbed its tiny slug at near-relativistic speeds. The shielding had never worked right, no matter how much she tweaked it. A discharge always left her hand feeling numb for a moment.

  One shot.

  She would release the canopy afterwards. The stasis fluids would drain away. The gun would fire, her fingers would tingle, and she would close the pod and disconnect the power before it could start the regeneration cycle again. It would only take a few minutes to rig the power cell to drain itself completely. Re-constructing its logs or circuitry was definitely beyond her, as she had told Paul, but basic sabotage was not. Then when she would eject it from the airlock, it would disintegrate completely falling onto the thin skin of their young world.

  Even if the military did trace it, and even if the tracer in the pod survived an uncontrolled planetary descent—which Cam highly doubted—there would be nothing to link it to their habitation, nothing to link it to them.

  Nothing to link it to Cam.

  Cam checked the charge on the pistol for perhaps the fourth time.

  It wouldn’t even be murder. There were no memories in that organic shell sleeping in the res-pod. There was no personality. It was a blank. She had gone through training to kill active, thinking beings with more going on behind their eyes than this empty body ever would have again.

  Cam’s eyes fell on the stenciled label on the res-pod’s side. Mountstuart Elphinstone. It was a medical frigate. That meant the body most likely belonged to a doctor.

  It didn’t matter. She would not let them find her and possibly destroy the life she had created here with Paul and her kids. If they found her here, they would take her.

  She drifted over to the body and keyed the release on the pod’s side. There was slight hiss as the pressurized lock disengaged and the blue-green fluid disappeared into the pod’s interior. With one arm she pulled the pod’s cover up and out of the way. With the other she extended the rail-pistol.

  How long had it been since she fired it?

  “Mom?”

  Cam froze. It was Perry. For an instant, Cam had the craziest thought that Perry had stowed herself away in the car and rode up the elevator with her. She spun, half expecting to see her daughter waiting at the door or floating beside one of the wide portals.

  “Mom,” the voice came again, over Station’s speaker. “Where are you? I had a bad dream.”

  They should have been asleep. It was nearly midnight. Knowing that what she was doing had to be done alone, she had checked on them both. They were sound asleep when she left. They were usually deep sleepers. She hated leaving them alone, but their habitation was secure. Even if they woke up, there was nowhere they could go. The twins were smart, but Cam didn’t believe they were to the point of bypassing the habitation’s safety locks.

  Nonetheless, her stomach clenched with anxiety. They were awake, and she had left them below. Alone.

  “Mom?” Perry’s voice was rising in tone. “Where are you? I had a bad dream.”

  “I’m here, sweetheart,” she said. “I’m in the attic.”

  Her mind raced. Station would alert her if there was any danger down there, but the presence or absence of actual danger made no difference to a frightened child. She cursed her hesitation, her desire to spare Paul any part to play in this. It had made her wait until she was alone with the twins to act.

  “There’s someone here, Mom. There’s a man.”

  She looked from the pod to where the car waited at Station’s entrance. The rail-pistol was still in her hand.

  “Station!” she barked. “Is there anyone down there?”

  “Your daughters are currently in the habitation.”

  “Anyone besides them? Any stranger?”

  “No.”

  “Perry,” she said, struggling to keep her voice calm. “You were just dreaming. Wake your sister up if you’re scared. I’m coming down right now.”

  She glanced back at the body, Damn, damn, damn! She slammed down the lid and pushed off back toward the entrance.

  “I’m on my way, Perry. Don’t worry.”

  “I’m not worried, Mom.” Perry’s voice had the maddening exactitude of a five-year-old. “I’m scared.”

  “Talk to me about it.”

  The car began its long climb back down the carbon-cable tether. Cam had made some modifications to its engine in the past, frustrated that it couldn’t climb up and down from the surface faster. She pushed the engine as far as it safely could go now, feeling the tiny carriage shudder as it lurched down its beanstalk.

  “There was a man inside. He was trying to tell us something.”

  “Here? Inside the habitation?”

  There was silence for a moment on the other end, and Cam could imagine Perry nodding solemnly in the dark. “There were other people too.”

  “Did you dream about me and your dad?”

  The face of their naked world was growing slowly, the blistered brown and black features resolving themselves out of the distance.

  “You weren’t there, Mom. Just Agnes and me. And a bunch of other people outside the habitation. In the rain.”

  “The rain?” Cam said. Perry was calming down. She could hear it in her voice.

  “We never see them. But we know they’re there.”

  “We?”

  “Agnes and I. We dream together.” Cam waited. Perry’s voice was starting to sound sleepy. “He wanted our help.”

  “Who did?”

  “The man who came inside.”

  The whine of the car’s engine became a shuddering lurch, but Cam ignored it. A dark suspicion was growing inside her. An impossible fear.

  “What did he look like?”

  “He kept trying to say something, but we couldn’t understand him. He was scared.”

  “What did he look like, Perry?”

  “I don’t know. White, like Daddy. He was wearing a white uniform.”

  Cam closed her eyes. It was just a dream. It could be anyone. The twins hadn’t seen the body in the res-pod. They could’nt have.

  “I think he was a ghost, Mom.” Perry’s voice was growing quieter. “He wanted his body.”

  *

  When Cam finally returned to the habitation, the gears of the engine’s traction drive screaming dangerously and extremely hot to touch, the twins were both asleep again. Perry had burrowed down into the bed next to her sister. There was, of course, no sign of anyone else in the habitation.

  “Damn,” Cam whispered again.

  She would have to disassemble the climb-drive of the car and replace the gripping wheels before they made another ascent to Station. The body would be left to its own devices in the attic until then, though it should not wake, even with its stasis fluids drained. But there were only days before resupply arrived.

  She was trying not to think of what Perry had said about her dream and what it might mean. The girls couldn’t have known anything about the body in the attic, unless they had been questioning Station about its manifest. Cam was sometimes surprised with the things they had been able to figure out or access. She assumed it was because they were driven by their curiosity and apparently natural inclination to understand and decipher informational systems. They sometimes as
ked questions regarding the day-to-day operation of the plantation or the terraforming equipment outside.

  So it was possible that they knew there was a dead body in the attic.

  She would have to ask them when they woke up.

  Cam paced along the windows that ran the eastern edge of the habitation. It was still several hours until dawn.

  That would explain the dream. That was all it was-a dream. It didn’t have to be anything more than that.

  Cam sat, wide awake, waiting for the sun. She told herself her daughter had simply had a nightmare. She told herself that it was not her own past catching up with them at last.

  She told herself that, but she did not believe it.

  Fifteen

  The bodies had stopped coming to the unnamed lab in the shipyard. Beka didn’t question it. It meant that Davis must have taken what she said seriously, that it would do them no good to dump naked memories from the Brick into a blank mind. Part of her was relieved. She never got to be as good as Davis and Tsai-Liu apparently did in tuning out screams, and she suspected that it was best not to ask where the bodies had come from.

  No matter what they tried, the blanks all died screaming.

  Beka focused on her equations instead, and on her attempts with Aggiz to extract memories directly from the Brick without bringing along the rest of a ghost personality. It was like trying to trace a single line in the whorls of a psychic fingerprint. As the days progressed and her simulations with Aggiz grew more complex, she started to become more confident that it was indeed possible - though still futile. Even if it was theoretically doable, Beka didn’t understand why Davis would push them to continue pursuing that approach. Not only would the procedure destroy the mind from which the memories were extracted, as Beka had explained to him several times, there was no way to integrate the memories into any system in which they could be usefully accessible or comprehensible.

  Beka had pestered Aggiz about it for a while. “What does Davis have in mind? There’s no artificial system that could process these memories. Once we pull them out, what are we supposed to do with them?”