First Fleet #1-4: The Complete Saga

by Stephen Case

  When the maneuver was complete, Grenada cut the cables and circled the frigate steadily. Spotlights played along its surface.

  “It’s the Mountstuart Elphinstone,” the captain reported.

  “Can you confirm that energy read?”

  “Roger, Command. There’s still juice in its systems.”

  “Enough for a transmission?”

  Every ship they had found so far had been assumed contaminated, like the Hamilton. No boarding parties. No way to download any ship’s logs or manifest. No answers. Just corpses, debris, and blasted bulkheads.

  The captain consulted with his communications officer. “Only enough for a tight-beam,” he informed Command.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Copy that.”

  Grenada slid closer, orienting herself so that her own transmitter array was aligned with the cluster of antennae on the Elphinstone’s front hull. The scout ship sent a narrow, high intensity query from its system to the ruined frigate.

  “Any response?”

  “Negative, Command. The system seems corrupted. And the dust doesn’t help.”

  A few running lights on the frigate’s outer hull glowed like dying embers. Its hull plates were largely intact. No gaping wounds were visible in its metal flesh. If the Hamilton was dismembered, the Elphinstone might have been sleeping.

  “I’m getting something,” the captain leaned forward. “Not much. Manifest reports. Res-pods received … God, look at the casualty count. They were getting hundreds from the front.”

  “Stand by, Grenada. We’re linking us up with your signal from the Elphinstone.”

  Other systems were trying to come online. Lights flashed within the frigate.

  “Grenada, we need a clearer signal. Move closer.”

  “Copy that.”

  The scout ship drifted nearer. The antennae clusters of the two vessels extended toward each other like tentacles.

  “There it is,” the captain snapped his fingers as the data file was received. “Full manifest.”

  The light grew. Grenada was close enough that her crew could see shadows cast against the frigate’s windows from within.

  “There may still be some pressurization, Command. There’s something moving in there.”

  The captain and the command deck crew strained forward, trying to peer into the wreckage of the Elphinstone.

  “Move us closer.”

  The tight-beam was failing. The frigate’s systems, awakened momentarily, were winking out one by one.

  “Grenada, this is Command. We’ve analyzed that manifest. The Elphinstone had discharged a pod just prior to blackout. Repeat, a body was discharged. It looks like the trajectory was back toward the light line terminus.”

  “Did you see that?” one of the crew asked.

  The windows of the two ships were staring into each other. Those of the Grenada were wide and dark and empty. The windows of the Elphinstone blinked with a faint but steady will-o-the-wisp light.

  “There’s someone over there. Closer,” said the captain. “Take us closer.”

  The light was dancing now.

  “Grenada, this is Command. Please respond.”

  The captain and the crew did not respond. They stared at the light, their minds no longer their own. They stared across the diminishing space at the portals of the other ship, transfixed. Proximity alarms sounded dully on the Grenada’s command deck as the ships neared impact. The antennae of the two ships were entangled now, metal spars shattering like ice.

  “Closer,” the captain whispered.

  The scout ship fell toward the frigate like a feather into fire. Neither the crew nor the captain even stirred to evade the collision. Flame blossomed as the hulls kissed. There were screams encased in static, then silence.

  “Grenada?” The transmission from Command echoed into the void. “Grenada?”

  The ships of the dead fleet drifted together.

  Seventeen

  In the lab the next morning, there was what appeared to be a flawless, naked human male strapped to the table where Tsai-Liu and Davis worked. As soon as Beka saw him, she realized that her suspicions were true.

  Aggiz didn’t. “I thought we were done with meat-sacks—with blanks. They don’t work. We’ve been through this.”

  “Look at his eyes, Aggiz,” Beka whispered. “They’re not blank.”

  They were not indeed. They were bright, focused and very much alive. Fear waged war with hatred into them. He glared at them silently.

  “It won’t work on a human, Davis.” Aggiz’s voice rose. “You can’t map those memories onto a human brain and expect to get anything useful. This isn’t—we didn’t …”

  “It’s not a human, Aggiz,” Beka whispered.

  Davis looked up from where he and Tsai-Liu were preparing their surgical implements. He looked triumphant, though his eyes were red and ringed. He looked as though he’d gotten about as much sleep as Beka last night. “You, Aggiz, are looking at something that should no longer exist—at the closest our race ever came to extinction. I gambled that somehow, someway, Tholan and his cronies would be keeping a handful around.” He smiled jauntily. “You also happen to be looking at System’s foremost expert on how they function.”

  Beka watched as comprehension slowly dawned on Aggiz’s features.

  “That’s right, my friend. You’re looking at a bona fide synthetic. Straight out of the legend. Three hundred years young.”

  “But they don’t—they’re extinct!” Aggiz stammered.

  Davis laughed and held up a scalpel. “They were exterminated. Massacres. Chaos. Leave it to humanity to perfect AI and only then realize how dangerous it was. They are illegal.” He sighed contentedly. “But after three hundred years, there are still a few hanging around. And our good friend, the Admiral, has access to a few through sources that not even I care to contemplate.”

  Beka had noticed extra guards at the door when she had entered the lab. There were two flanking the table as well. Davis followed her eyes.

  “Working with forbidden technology requires certain precautions. But don’t worry. When you spend your entire career studying what could have replaced your race, you develop some safeguards of your own.” He rubbed at his forearm absently.

  He pointed the scalpel at Beka and Aggiz like a pen.

  “I don’t harbor high hopes for this first trial. A synthetic’s brain, as we’ve been forced to concede, is the only thing malleable enough to dump the spliced memories into. But it’s complicated nonetheless, and intensely so. They are modeled after a human brain, but with tidier, re-programmable processors instead of those stubborn neurons that have been causing us so much problems. Still, it’s complicated. I spent last night analyzing this one’s structure.” He walked to a nearby monitor and stabbed a few buttons. “I’ve downloaded a map of its neural processors on your systems, so you should be able to see where to transcribe the selected memories from the Brick.” He turned to the form on the table. “We’ll wipe its own memory but leave all the necessary functions intact. That should leave enough language and cognition for communication.”

  “What about me?” The voice came from the body on the table.

  “What about you?” Davis barked. His tone indicated that he had had exchanges with it before, perhaps during the night.

  “Will I lose everything?” The voice spoke slowly, reasonably. “Three hundred years’ worth of memories. I am alive. I can feel fear and pain.”

  “You’re sentient, not alive. It’s not the same thing.”

  “It is from my perspective.”

  Davis glanced at the rest of them almost apologetically. “I’d deactivate its vocal processors if I could, but we need them to hear what it might say when it gets the memories.”

  Beka struggled with her emotions, struggled to devise a metaphor to help process what was happening. There was a body in the shipyard, in their lab, and it wasn’t a blank. It had every characteristic of a living and thinking being. It looked
like a young god on the table.

  The histories were sketchy on the synthetics, perhaps rightfully so. At some point of time about three centuries ago, humanity had perfected AI. Almost immediately, it had been duplicated and placed in synthetic human forms. The first kind had been soldiers, then workers in those fields too hazardous or arduous for humans. There had been sex workers as well, invariably.

  Around this same time three other things happened-the Colonizers had left, the original AI-producing technology had been destroyed, and the massacres had begun.

  Because it quickly became apparent that the Synthetics, were they ever allowed to self-replicate, represented a clearly superior form of humanity. Those already produced were hunted down and destroyed. Humanity’s brush with annihilation was averted and the evidence systematically erased. The Synthetics, from what Beka had been able to gather, had never acted upon humanity’s fears. But they didn’t have to. They were a threat by their very existence. So they were eradicated.

  Except that one was right here before her.

  Eleanor had been right. It was worse. It was much worse than working with the regenerated blanks. Those bodies had felt pain, certainly, and died in apparent agony when the memory dump was rejected. But they were like animals in human form. They had no understanding. They could not curse or beg. They didn’t keep up a running monologue as their original memories drained away.

  This one did.

  Beka kept it together long enough to splice the memories from a ghost called Ensign Leon Hernandez into the synthetic from the Brick. She forced herself not to think about the fact that she was dismembering Hernandez himself, that if Hernandez was indeed dead, there was now no way he could be regenerated. Hernandez was a communications officer on one of the front-line Fleet ships. His memories would be able to tell them what the hell had happened.

  But it didn’t work. The body on the table writhed and pleaded. Its voice changed, but the words it spoke lacked meaning. Finally it collapsed again to wordless wailing, face twisted in the same mental collapse that had accompanied the deaths of the blanks.

  Beka left the room, shaking and sobbing.

  “It’s not human,” Davis called over the deafening howls coming from the table. “It’s not even really alive!”

  The guards outside the door waited impassively. When it was over and Beka had regained her composure, she walked back into the lab. Aggiz looked like she felt. Tsai-Liu couldn’t even meet her eyes.

  “We learned a lot,” Davis said, wiping his hands while the guards removed the body. “The connections between the memories and rest of the neural processors were more complicated than I had anticipated, but a couple more trials and we should start to get some results.”

  Tsai-Liu started to say something but apparently thought better of it.

  “Look.” Davis’s face was intent and his voice harder than Beka had ever heard before. “We knew this wasn’t going to be easy—any of it. We’re killing someone on every attempt.” He pointed at the Brick. “We’re eating up someone’s memories. Which means we have to make every attempt count. Fifteen thousand people are gone.” He slammed his hand on the table with a bang. “Fifteen thousand! This is a shell, programmed to act like a person.” He pointed to the body. “Don’t forget that.”

  Beka made herself look at “the shell” as it was wheeled past her. The face was a contorted mask of pain, the eyes rolled back up into the head. On the surface, there seemed no way to tell it was not a human.

  “We’ll try again tomorrow,” Davis said, turning away. “Beka, Aggiz—figure out what we did wrong.”

  They sat below the Brick in silence for a time.

  “They still exist.” Aggiz finally said. “I mean, I’d read—I know the stories. But that there would be any left, anywhere, after so long was not something I’d be able to guess.”

  “The Colonizers took a lot with them when they left System, if you believe the histories. That’s a big part of why we’re after them now. The Military would like us to believe there aren’t any humans left at all on the Reservation Worlds—that the original Colonizers were all killed and replaced by Synthetics.” Beka stared at nothing in particular as she spoke.

  “That’s absurd.” Aggiz’s voice sounded uncertain.

  “Of course it is. But it’s propaganda.” The wave functions that represented the memories of Leon Hernandez resolved on her monitor into branching networks of light. She revolved the view and magnified on a particular junction. “We can sharpen these parameters,” she told Aggiz. “There was too much noise—too much signal interference. There, at the end, it was screaming things that must have come from Hernandez’s childhood. We can hone in on more recent memories.”

  They went to work, buried in their simulations, while the ghosts in the Brick waited above.

  They went to dinner later, but no one was hungry and no one spoke except for Davis, who chattered about what he had seen inside the Synthetic’s skull casing until even Tsai-Liu got annoyed and told him to shut up. Surprisingly, Davis did.

  That night Beka slept, but her dreams were dark.

  *

  Tholan took the call in the middle of shipyard night cycle. The communication officer’s face that hovered over his desk was pained. Tholan braced himself.

  “What’s the good news?”

  “It’s the Grenada, sir.”

  “Please tell me you woke me up to make me smile, ensign.”

  The officer coughed. “I’m sorry sir. We’ve lost contact with them.”

  Tholan swore softly into the darkness.

  “That’s not all, sir.”

  “It gets better?”

  “Maybe.”

  Tholan tried to place the officer’s face in his memory. Someone on night shift, obviously. Someone he had seen before on the command deck in passing. “Grenada managed to tight-beam power to one of the medical frigates, the Mountstuart Elphinstone, and retrieve some information from its system. Not a lot, but it included a manifest.”

  “And?”

  “There’s a survivor, sir. The Elphinstone launched a pod before she went dark.”

  “Do we know where it went?”

  The ensign shook his head. “No, sir. But we know its designation and serial code.”

  “Which means we can ping it, if it’s within calling distance of any light line terminal.” Tholan was fully awake now. Finally, perhaps they had the break they had been waiting for. A full-spectrum ping would take a lot of bandwidth on the communication lines. As such, it needed command authorization. “Do it. Contact me as soon as you have something.”

  The man nodded, and his face blinked out.

  “I know you’re awake,” Tholan said into the darkness. He went back to the bed, and Eleanor sat up. “We may have found a body from the Fleet.”

  “I heard that. Does this change anything?”

  “I don’t know.” Tholan lay back and pillowed his head on his hands. Eleanor stretched out beside him. “It’s another thread, but it might not be enough.”

  “I don’t trust Davis. For him, this entire debacle has been an excuse to get his hands on the only remaining Synthetics.”

  Tholan smiled into the darkness. “He doesn’t trust you either.”

  “Who will you send to retrieve the pod if you find it?”

  “I’ll send you. The Clerke Maxwell is ready. It’s a small ship, but jump-set equipped. Bring the body back here, and we’ll download its memories and debrief it. With any luck, it will be able to tell us enough to make some sense out of this nightmare. But it might take days to find it.”

  “In the meantime,” Eleanor’s voice was flat, “you kill someone every time you let Davis and his team do their work.”

  Tholan nodded.

  “All options, Eleanor. We’ll continue to pursue all options until we know what happened to the Fleet.”

  Eighteen

  The call swept out into space from the shipyard. It was broadcast on all channels through the transmitter
that sat on the lip of the light line, tethered to the gravity of the tiny dwarf star. From there, it raced outward along a thousand corridors, echoing down the network of lines. The lines that connected humanity’s corner of the galaxy like a dense, entangled, and slowly-shifting spider-web.

  The lines joined planets and stars together, all the junctions of humanity’s staggered expansion into space. Each of these terminal points moved, carried along in the sweeping rotation of the galaxy as a whole. The light line network stretched and distended, bending like a web in a light breeze, as its various nodal points swam through space while a gravity well anchored each light line terminus. The lines were threads that linked drifting dust motes in an empty room, shimmering and stretching.

  The message spun down these corridors, the conduits of which the laws of space and time were shunted aside in, a bundle of compressed information encoding a single command. At each thread’s end, the call radiated out back into space, like ripples from a thousand thrown stones. It held its cohesion against the flux of stellar static, the ceaseless noise voiced by a billion foaming suns.

  Where are you?

  Orbiting the almost empty world of Onaway, Station’s receptors picked up the call and channeled it into the pod’s processors. The sleeper did not stir, but the pod responded. It relayed a message back to Station. Station sent it out over the curve of the planet it hung above, back through the light line terminus and into that bright, spreading web. A single call, a simple answer:

  Here.

  Nineteen

  Paul got the call while he was at the foot of one of the rock-burners along the North Ridge. The noise of the catalytic process by which megatons of rock was transformed into gas and particulates was deafening at this proximity, even with his thin suit’s aural receptors turned all the way down. He could barely hear Cam’s voice.

  “Just a minute,” he said. “Let me back away.”

  But he lingered for a few moments. The rock-burners held an almost hypnotizing attraction for him. There were no seascapes in their new world, nor were there cloudscapes to form and dissolve above and hold the varying shades of sunlight as there were on planets that knew weather. Besides the stones of the planet itself, which were dead and unchanging, the only dynamic vista was that presented by the rock-burners.