First Fleet #1-4: The Complete Saga

by Stephen Case

  “Davis, what are you—?”

  Eleanor screamed. It was so abrupt and unexpected that Beka nearly screamed herself. The scream did not cut off, but instead rose higher. Eleanor was pressing her palms against her eyes and then her ears. The officers that had accompanied her were screaming as well. Beka held her own ears against the bloodcurdling screams.

  Davis had risen shakily to his feet. He was silent now, but there was a glow coming from his right forearm, and Beka remembered it was the arm he had cradled when he spoke earlier about “precautions.” Bands of light under the flesh were pulsing, racing like luminous bracelets down his arm, over and over, to a circle of light on his palm, which he now held extended toward the screaming officers before him.

  They were on their knees. One had fallen to his side and was kicking feebly, like a poisoned animal.

  “Stop it, Davis!” Tsai-Liu bellowed. “You’re killing them!”

  It took Beka a moment longer than it had Tsai-Liu to realize that no one else in the room was affected and what this meant.

  “They’re not alive!” Davis’s face was twisted, either with pain or triumph, it was impossible to tell.

  Beka moved. Eleanor was dying. A liquid that looked something like tears was running from her eyes and nose. Beka moved to the officer that had pushed Aggiz from the monitors and dropped down beside him. He was twitching feebly, his face a wet, writhing mask. He no longer looked human. She pulled the sidearm from the holster at his waist, drew a bead on Davis’s arm, and pulled the trigger.

  Nothing happened.

  Davis was standing over Eleanor now. Her screams were fading away.

  Aggiz reached for Beka’s shoulder, but she pushed him away and fumbled with the weapon’s safety.

  She had gone shooting with Jens once before, a lifetime ago. Her sister had teased her about being a bad shot, about flinching from the concussion of the weapon and worrying about ricochet even from an energy gun. Jens had forced her to train with pulse pistols on the open slope of ground behind her parents’ home, stunning the squirrels that were forever stealing seed from the feeders.

  She aimed again, hastily, and her finger touched the trigger.

  Davis’s arm erupted in a blossom of green light, and Beka was momentarily blinded.

  As soon as her vision cleared, she dropped the weapon and ran to him. Davis’s arm was gone, and burns covered most of his body. He lay on the floor at the foot of the Brick, several feet from where he had been standing.

  “I’m sorry.” Beka fought for breath enough to speak, unable to tear her eyes from Davis’s ruined features. “I thought it would be dialed lower—I had no idea the gun was set so high.”

  “It wasn’t the gun.” Davis’s voice was harsh through his ruined lips. “It was the kill-switch. My implant. Your shot. Exploded it.” He coughed. “I was right about her. About them.”

  “You were killing them.”

  Davis had been staring at the ceiling, but his eyes found her. “Yes. You picked the wrong side. Stupid.”

  An unfamiliar form leaned across her view and felt the charred flesh of Davis’s neck for his pulse. “He’s going into shock. He’ll be dead in a few minutes. I assume this ship has a full complement of res-pods?”

  “It won’t do him any good,” Tsai-Liu said. “He wouldn’t ever get memory scans.”

  “We’re civilians,” Beka put in. “Contract doesn’t extend to us.”

  “Help me get him into that pod anyway.” the man said. “I want to see if I can make some sense of that thing in his arm.”

  Beka looked up to see who was talking. It was him. The body from the pod was awake.

  Twenty-Three

  Tsai-Liu and the revived medic wrestled Davis’s now unmoving body into the res-pod.

  “Will it save him?” the older man asked.

  The medic shrugged. “It’s made for dead bodies. But I certainly can’t help him in his state, and it won’t hurt him anyway. Given enough time, he may revive.”

  Beka knelt beside Eleanor. She lay on her side, looking strangely like a fish, back arched and skin smooth, beached and suffocated. Her eyes were wide and blank, and a line of clear fluid ran from her mouth.

  “They were all …” Aggiz whispered beside her, trailing off.

  “Synthetics?”

  He nodded.

  “I don’t understand, Aggiz.” Beka ran her fingers through her thick tangle of curls. “It explains why she wanted to stop Davis’s experiment, but I had no idea there could be so many. A ship full of them, maybe.”

  “All dead?”

  Eleanor stirred slightly. “Not dead.” Her voice sounded like it came from far away, from deep underground, though Beka saw her lips working. “We have not been hunted such in centuries. I need …” Her form shuddered. “Time.”

  Her eyes closed, and nothing Beka could say would rouse her.

  Donovan held up his hands in answer to Beka’s questioning stare. “I only know human bodies, and even then I mainly know how to stitch them back together after they’re already dead. I didn’t even believe any of these still existed until two minutes ago.” He waved his hand vaguely at the unmoving forms laying about the bay.

  “We need to get up to the command deck,” Tsai-Liu said. “If this ship was indeed manned entirely by Eleanor’s … by her allies, then we may be flying blind. We’ve no idea the range of Davis’s weapon.”

  “We need to know what happened to the Fleet,” Beka answered, turning to stare at Donovan. He was watching her with a mild curiousity.

  “There will be time for that,” Tsai-Liu said. “Give him time. Fetching fresh memories up after a dump can be disconcerting.”

  “He seems fine.” The events of the past few minutes were catching up with her. Beka was suddenly angry—angry at Davis for his fear and his evident hatred, irrationally angry at Eleanor for what she had turned out to be, and angry at this man standing before her, mild and unassuming in his white medical uniform, representing the key that they had been struggling to find for so long, the possible window into the Fleet’s fate and their only link to her sister. The memories that he held—

  Beka glanced at the Brick.

  Tsai-Liu followed her gaze and nodded. “If Eleanor was right, it will drain as soon as we leave the line. Which might be at any moment. We need to get to the command deck and find out what’s going on.”

  *

  Paul, he reminded himself again that his name was now Cam, studied the group from across the room as they talked. Pain lanced up his arm, from the wrist to the elbow. One of the officers had been holding him, pulling him back from the pod, when the scientist had triggered whatever weapon he had stashed under the skin of his forearm. The officer—a Synthetic, Paul marveled to himself, turning the word over and over again in his mind—spasmed when the weapon was activated, wrenching and twisting Paul’s arm until he fell away unmoving.

  Paul tried to flex his fingers and winced.

  The sleeper—the body in the attic that was a medic named Donovan—was remembering things. Paul could tell by watching his face. His eyes grew deeper and his face pale. He took a few hesitant steps back and leaned against the row of monitors below the Brick.

  The old man and the young woman stopped talking and stared at Donovan.

  “I do remember. Oh God, I remember.” Donovan put his hands on his face covering it for a moment and took a long, shuddering breath. “He’s right. We need to get upstairs and figure out what’s happening.”

  “What happened, Donovan?” The woman was not going to let it go. She wanted answers immediately. “Where is the Fleet? Where is my sister?”

  The old man started arguing with her again. So much indecision. So much arguing.

  Cam would know what to do. She would find answers and make a quick decision if she were here in the flesh, instead of Paul standing here wearing her name.

  Paul looked around the room. His eyes rested on a familiarly-configured panel beside the entry to the bay. He walked
over, ignoring the pain in his arm, and awkwardly punched some buttons with his good arm.

  “Command deck, this is the, ah, the science bay. Is anyone up there?” Paul licked his dry lips, waiting for an answer. None came, so he spoke again, more loudly this time. “There’s been an accident down here. We have injured crewmen. Is anyone up there?”

  A crackle of static washed back through the intercom.

  “There’s no answer,” Paul said to the others. They had now fallen silent, staring at him. “Let’s go.”

  They all followed except for the young, dark scientist nearest the Brick.

  “Aggiz?” the woman asked.

  “I’ll stay here, Beka. I will monitor—I’ll watch—the Brick, look for a way, maybe … I’ll watch the Brick.”

  She nodded, and they turned to leave.

  “Wait. We have to bring Eleanor. She might wake up. She said she … I don’t think she’s dead. And we might need her help,” said Beka, wheeling around.

  Donovan stooped down and lifted her spare, unmoving form, and they left the bay.

  *

  When they were gone, Aggiz cast a glance around the room at the scattered, unmoving forms of the officers and shuddered. Then he sat down, worn out by everything that had happened. He stared at the monitors and watched the play of light and signal on them as they spelled out the status of the memories that, for the moment, lay still, stored within the Brick.

  *

  The command deck was littered with unmoving forms. Whatever Davis had detonated down in the bay, it appeared to have had a long range. But the effect up here must have been diminished, Beka amended, because the officers were only stirring feebly, as though they had been cast into a deep sleep at their posts.

  “So many of them,” the man called Cam whispered as they stepped onto the command deck. He bent down and touched the face of a young man slumped beside a navigation panel. “I had no idea they still existed, let alone in such numbers. I suppose I should be terrified.”

  “Eleanor must have been working for years, rescuing and planting Synthetics under her command.” Fears of a Synthetic uprising, of the worst of Davis’s suspicions, rose for a moment in Beka’s mind. “Does this mean Davis was right? That they’re everywhere?”

  “They’re an endangered species,” Donovan said, stepping over bodies to the central piloting console at the deck’s center. “They have no way to reproduce themselves. This might be all that there are left, on this ship right now.”

  He stabbed some buttons and stared at the display, frowning.

  “We have control,” he said. “We’re on the light line for now, not far from the drop that was keyed into the system. And we have a few minutes, I would guess, though I really have no idea, before these wake up to decide what to do.” He nudged one of the bodies beside him with a foot.

  “We should take you back to Admiral Tholan,” Tsai-Liu said, “so you can be debriefed regarding what you know of the Fleet and what happened to it.”

  “I should be.” Donovan had obviously made a decision. He nodded his head slowly. “I know what happened to our ship, to the Elphinstone, and I have a pretty good idea what happened to the rest of the Fleet too.”

  Beka leaned forward. Here were the answers they had been looking for.

  “But you shouldn’t take me to him. You should take me back to the last coordinates of the Fleet.”

  “Why?”

  “So we can collapse the light line. So we can maroon the Fleet.”

  There was silence. Beka stared at Donovan, but his eyes seemed clear. He wasn’t confused from the dump. He didn’t seem angry. There was a tautness about his mouth that might have been either fear or determination.

  Eleanor’s eyelids flickered when Donovan spoke.

  “Maroon the Fleet?” Tsai-Liu was incredulous. “We have been working this entire time to figure out what happened to it, so we can perhaps do something to bring it back.”

  “Maybe you should tell us what happened, in detail.” Beka said, struggling to keep her voice even.

  Donovan squared his shoulders, as though readying himself to speak. “It was …” He paused and stared down at the navigation panel before him, as though his story was written on the display there. he took a deep breath. “The Colonizers attacked the first wave. We—the medical frigates—held back near the singularities where we had tethered the light line terminus. We thought it was the Colonizers. We started getting bodies back from the front, res-pods launched by the heavy suits that went down in the first wave.”

  That would have included Jens, Beka thought, encased in one of the combat suits that she had always imagined surrounding her sister like a giant coat of armor.

  “There was ETI,” Donovan continued, “on the worlds, the mining colonies, where the Colonizers had dug in. Did those transmissions get out? The caves, the cities, that we were finding?”

  The others shook their heads mutely.

  “Something had been there before us, something old. Some of the specialists in the first assault had tried dating methods, but they came back … they came back dating billions of years. And the bodies kept piling up.”

  “The Colonizers don’t have those capabilities.” Paul spoke up. He knew this from conversations with Cam. “They don’t have enough weapons or manpower to hold off a fleet. And it would take years for them to send reinforcements. They don’t have any light lines.”

  Donovan nodded in agreement. “I don’t know how they did it. But the caves themselves helped. Our soldiers were coming back from them … with stories. They said things that didn’t make sense. But listen,” He leaned forward and gripped the edges of the navigation panel. He whispered, barely audible. “That’s not what made the Fleet go dark. They used a Trojan horse.”

  “A horse?”

  “Trojan horse. They sent back a weapon hidden in our own res-pods. At least they did on our ship, and if what you say is true and we have lost the entire Fleet, they must have been doing it to the others as well. They found something, the Colonizers, on those worlds. Something dead or something preserved, I don’t know. The res-pods only need a sliver of genetic material. They cultured them with something and sent them back to us.”

  Tsai-Liu stepped forward. “What kind of something?”

  The blue wash of the light line continued to hiss by on the exterior displays as they spoke. Beka had moved beside Donovan and glanced down at the navigation panel, trying to make sense of where they were and where they were going. They had passed the junction for where they would have dropped off the light line to return to the shipyard. They were continuing onward without a known destination.

  “Something alive,” Donovan said. “Something not human. Something …” He paused again, looking for words. “Something that drove us mad. That something bent thoughts around it like a hole, like an empty, gaping spot in our minds. I saw it.” He started shaking and braced himself on the console again. “But no one else did. They heard her voice though. She started calling, and it was like she was pulling the entire ship toward her, like she was the sea, the darkness lapping at the hull, and the whole ship was sinking, and she was singing us down into her depths.”

  They waited for more, but Donovan was done. His face was white.

  Beka finally broke the silence. “And you want to go back? Why not just return to the shipyard, tell command what you just told us? They’ll send reinforcements. There might still be some people alive,” she forced herself to add. “If what you say is true, then maybe others got away as well.”

  “Maybe. You can transmit all this information to your commanders, fine. But those things are alive, and they’re learning. They’re probably spreading. If they found their way into the light line, they could be anywhere. The first thing we have to do—the first thing anyone has to do—is prevent the spread of the infection.” He paused. “I’m a doctor. I should know.”

  Beka thought suddenly of the Bricks. It was impossible, even inconceivable, that they would be erased
, that someone could have broken into their structure and wiped out all the information. But the First Fleet had carried dozens of these Bricks, and if the Colonizers had not taken control of those and somehow broken through the safeguards protecting that data—which was doubtful, considering the Colonizers’ antiquated technology—then what did that leave?

  “He’s right,” she said.

  Tsai-Liu and Paul stared at her.

  “Look at him. You know he is. And we all know that command would take at least a week to figure out what to do next.”

  “How do you collapse a light line?” Paul asked. “Is that even possible?”

  “It is.” It was Eleanor. Her eyes were still closed. Her voice still sounded a million miles away, but she sounded coherent. “I can tell you how. Complicated. Difficult. Need thinsuits.”

  “Good.” Donovan touched a series of buttons on the console before him. The blue glow of the light line interior fell away, and the stars reappeared. “Because we’re here.”

  Twenty-Four

  Aggiz felt the barely-discernible lurch as the ship dropped off of the light line back into normal space. It always came several moments before the ship resumed its spinning and centripetal gravity pulled everything slowly back to an up-down orientation. Sometimes he missed it. But he was waiting this time. His stomach was as clenched as his hands, which were knotted and intertwined in front of him.

  He stood before the Brick.

  Even if he had missed the tiny lurch, he would have known that they were back in normal space, because the monitors immediately started squealing alarms. He knew it was coming. They had heard Tholan’s warning, that all the Bricks throughout space were being wiped. No, Aggiz amended himself silently. One Brick only. Only one somewhere was somehow—impossibly—being wiped. The rest of them were busy, and there was nothing they could do anyway. But Aggiz had to see it by himself.