First Fleet #1-4: The Complete Saga

by Stephen Case

  Cam wanted to be a materialist. She was comfortable in that.

  The difficulty of materialism came with living on more than one world. The problem, Paul had explained to her in one of his many flights of half-ironic eloquence, was the quality of light. Anyone who had lived on a world not circling within System understood.

  Theoretically, the quality of light on a planet should have reduced to a matter of atmospheric constituency, weather patterns and the spectral properties of the parent star. But it was clearly much more than this: the color, texture and feel of light itself varied from world to world in ways impossible to quantify. It was like trying to describe a smell.

  It could only be felt.

  Paul had talked like this. It was an indication of the role his absence played in her own mind that Cam found herself pondering these thoughts at length, that she found herself trying to describe the dying evening light of Onaway.

  The light was pale and grainy, like an ancient photograph. Paul called it “a speckled fog of light.” But Cam knew that rationally, it should not have had any quality like this— their world’s atmosphere was still too thin.

  Cam pulled herself from useless aesthetic considerations and turned back to the military feeds on the display before her. She checked and rechecked them each day. Though her initial plan of exchanging Paul’s freedom for her own had been successful, she had found no indication in the military networks of a court martial, nothing that gave her any clues at all about Paul’s fate. He would not contact her, Cam wascertain, for fear of attracting the attention she had gone to such lengths to avoid. But he seemed to have disappeared completely.

  Cam signed in frustration and turned back to the windows.

  There was something moving on the crest of one of the distant hills, a long shadow against the glare of their slowly setting star.

  She squinted, the rapidly-dimming light no help.

  The motion was not the mechanical lurching of a treaded crawler. In the growing darkness, it would have been foolhardy for any of their distant neighbors to venture so far afield without one of those. There was nothing alive on the surface.

  She leaned against the glass. It was difficult to make out any exact shapes among the jagged hills as Onaway’s tiny sun inched downward and threw long shadows across the valley.

  It was her imagination. Or a slide of stones.

  The light continued to die.

  Cam wished Paul was home.

  *

  Agnes found her sister Perry already asleep, curled on her side with the sheets twisted around her. She had been crying.

  Agnes glanced at her own empty bed. Tonight she would sleep with her sister. She lay down beside Perry and closed her eyes. She found Perry after she fell asleep, as she always did, in her dreams.

  In their dreams, the twins were taller, with dark hair, solemn eyes and a narrowness of face that hinted the presence of the long features they would grow into in adulthood.

  Their combined consciousness crafted their dream bodies in a way impossible for a solitary dreamer. The twins had assumed that when their mother or father dreamed, neither wore a body shaped by outside observation. Who would look at mirrors in dreams? And if they did, what did they see?

  Agnes and Perry had each other. Their own mutual observations stabilized their dream-appearance.

  “It’s not her fault,” Agnes told her sister.

  “I know,” Perry answered. They were walking through the habitation, where they most often found themselves while dreaming.

  “She’s afraid,” Agnes said. “She misses him too.”

  “I know,” Perry repeated. “Do you think she knew the ghost? From when she was a soldier?”

  Agnes knew her sister was talking about the man who had appeared in their dreams, who was also the man whose body had been in the res-pod that had come to Station shortly before their father left.

  “He didn’t look like a soldier,” Agnes said. “He looked like a doctor.”

  “The soldiers have left,” Perry whispered, looking out over the empty landscape beyond the windows.

  The habitation was larger in their dreams. It stretched out in a hundred directions and branched corridors until it seemed to be a city sprawling across their barren world. Outside all of the windows, though, there was always rain.

  “All of them are gone,” Perry repeated.

  Because they wanted to see him, they found their father in one of the wide glass rooms along the southern stretch of the habitation. This pleased them, though the twins were certain that wherever he was, he would remember nothing of their time in these dreams together when he awoke. They had learned very early that people they saw and spoke to in dreams were not truly present the way that Perry and Agnes were to each other.

  Still, it was good to see their father.

  They played games, passing through the wide, empty hallways of the habitation. There were rooms in their dreams that were filled with strange furniture or toys as large as buildings. There were others that held jungles or forests or row upon row of musty books. Throughout their time together, the steady drumming of the rain on the walls and windows of the habitation did not cease. Slowly though, Agnes became aware of a new sound.

  “What’s that?” she finally asked her sister.

  Perry paused and frowned. Their father’s image, ignored for the moment, faded. “It’s a tapping. A knocking,” she said finally.

  The light had begun to fade outside the wide windows. Their planet’s star was setting behind clouds. That had not happened before.

  “I’m scared, Perry.”

  “It’s okay.” Perry drew herself up to her full height. “I’m here.”

  The tapping continued. It was hard to tell where it was coming from. The twins moved cautiously through the corridors, unsure of whether they were moving toward the sound or away from it. It grew louder.

  Now it was too dark to see anything beyond the windows. The girls held hands as they walked through the empty rooms. There were windows everywhere.

  “I want to wake up,” Agnes whispered.

  The tapping grew in volume. Around a bend in the corridor, they froze. There was a hand, huge and distended and with far too many fingers, tapping against the glass outside. It was hard to see any details about it in the darkness other than its size and inhuman shape.

  “Who’s there?” Perry’s voice frightened them both.

  The hand withdrew. A moment later it was replaced with a face.

  The girls screamed and awoke.

  Thirty-One

  “Our bones are not hollow, you know.”

  Rine felt like a scarecrow, thin and angular beneath the folds of his dusty robes. He smelled of rust.

  Jens’ face was pressed against his sharp shoulder as he helped her walk slowly across the chamber. As thin as he was, he supported most of her weight. Her legs felt as weak and stiff as though she had indeed been re-grown in a res-pod. But they did not feel fresh and new. They hurt so much that it was all Jens could do to not bury her face in Rine’s shoulder and scream.

  Instead she focused on shuffling one foot before the other.

  “Not hollow, you understand,” he continued. He was making conversation to distract her from the pain and keep her walking. “I hear that is a common misperception about us. That, having been raised in space, we have hollow bones. We don’t.”

  Jens still had difficulty following his speech patterns. He came at topics from the side or began speaking as though they were in the middle of a discussion and expected her to follow.

  “I was born in space, of course,” he went on, not waiting for a response. “We all were. But I was born in transit, and in transit there was plenty of acceleration. The gravity for most of the journey there was actually over Earth standard.”

  He glanced down at her. “Keep moving. Just a little longer.”

  She groaned. She felt she hadn’t worked so hard since basic training. If this was what happened to them after Colonizer soldi
ers were injured, she wondered how they were ever brave enough to keep fighting.

  “My parents were from System, though,” Rine continued.

  Glaucon had not accompanied him today. Rine explained his absence with a vague allusion to him having business to attend to, somewhere deeper in the mines. “Of course we didn’t call it System then. We didn’t consider ourselves part of System. We were the Outlier Hetmantates.”

  “But you left,” Jens said.

  The shoulder rose and fell against her cheek as the doctor shrugged. “My parents did. The generation before me. You have read the history books, I’m sure. At least, the ones that your people wrote. They probably gave you reasons for the exodus.”

  They had made it to the far wall of the chamber, which meant that Jens would be forced to walk all the way back. Rine pulled away slightly, making her put even more of her own weight on her protesting legs.

  “They did,” Jens grunted. “It was the Synthetics. You didn’t want to destroy yours.”

  “That and a hundred other reasons,” Rine said mildly. “It may be ancient history for you, but it’s a single generation ago for me.”

  She was halfway back to the cot, which still seemed a light year away.

  “We had a planet.” His voice had taken on a different tone, quiet and almost reverent. “I remember the first time I saw it from our stone-ship. We had waited for decades. I had never seen a world like it, green and soft under its atmosphere.”

  “What was it called?” She was almost there. Just a few more steps.

  “New London,” he sighed. “It was going to be ours. A place to start over. Our own system. Distant. Isolated. Free. We hadn’t even reached orbital insertion when we saw your picket ships in formation.”

  Jens knew this part of the story, or at least one side of it. The cot was right in front of her now. Her legs shook. “They were peace-keepers.”

  “They were there to make sure we kept our place. Can you imagine what that was like, to find you waiting for us there after decades of traveling? There were three other planets in the system, and all of them were already inhabited and well on their way to full terraforming. You had already been there for two centuries. New London had two moons, and you had taken those as well. One of them was already half-carved for its raw minerals.”

  “We left you your damn world,” Jens said. She started to sit down.

  “Once more,” he said, his grip firm on her arm. “You need to strengthen those muscles.”

  She swore softly, but rose and leaned against him again.

  “A reservation, my survivor,” he said. If there was anger in his voice, he hid it well. “We found ourselves on a reservation. Hemmed in. We thought we were getting a frontier, and we found ourselves surrounded by the very sweep humanity we had sought to depart from. And what’s more—” he laughed, mainly through his nose. “What’s more is that you wouldn’t even give us the technology to go any farther, to push on to new worlds, to more distant horizons. We were trapped.”

  Something about his story was itching at the walls of her mind, but Jens was still too sluggish to catch it. She felt it picking at her though as Rine continued.

  “There were two moons, as I believe I have already said, two companion satellites to our new planet. One was simply a captured asteroid, but the other was large enough that we had detected it in the initial surveys from System,” he chuckled sadly.

  Then he continued. “We used to argue about what we might name it when we arrived. This was the moon that had already been staked and mined. You were pulling it apart, piece by piece. It was tidally locked, you understand, with New London. It hung in place above the major continent, like an unmoving eye. But it was mocking us. You were dismantling this moon bit by bit, stealing it away out of our sky—and we were to simply watch?”

  There was anger in his voice now, but it was an old, tired anger.

  “I have spoken too much,” he finally said. “You don’t want an old man’s stories. I only wished to say that it was why we fought—it was against this hemming in, against this being consigned to planetary ghettos we had worked so hard to reach, without the technology to leave them.”

  The itch finally broke through. Jens pulled away.

  “You’re lying,” she said. “You have to be. If you were at New London, how could you be here now?”

  “I was a very young man then.”

  She shook her head stubbornly. “It doesn’t matter. That Reserve World is dozens of light years away. It would take another generation for you to reach it from here.”

  “Perhaps it is nearer than you think.” Rine helped her back to the cot. “You need to rest now.”

  When he was gone, Jens tried to pull from her memory as much as she could about the spatial distribution of the Colonizer worlds. Something about Rine’s story was not adding up, and it had to do with how Colonizers could be on the Grave Worlds to begin with.

  The fact that the Colonizers were not among the planets that they had originally traveled to, that they were off the Reservations, was what had brought the Fleet here in the first place. There were not supposed to be Colonizers here.

  And yet here they were, apparently with enough force that they had repulsed the Fleet’s attack. None of it made sense, least of all Rine’s story that he was part of a ship that originally arrived from System at an entirely different world.

  How did he get here without light-line technology? How did any of the Colonizer soldiers, miners and scientists arrive at this dead cluster of worlds?

  The question kept Jens awake long into the night.

  Thirty-Two

  Donovan tried to remember dying, though he realized logically he should not be able to. His memories had been scanned before he was killed, from what he could tell of the res-pod records, by severe head trauma. And though he could not remember, he was not able to keep himself from imagining it, from picking at bits of thought in his own mind and trying to put them together into some semblance of memory.

  It was this chore of working at what he could not remember that kept his mind off what he did recall of his final moments aboard the Mountstuart Elphinstone.

  But now he needed focus.

  They still drifted among the poisonous wreckage of the First Fleet. Donovan had awakened perhaps an hour before he was due to take the helm of their nearly-abandoned ship.

  He had slept poorly. There had been several alarms followed by injections and then waves of pain only to be called off by the dizzy dullness of the painkiller that he had synthesized and distributed to take for the crew, following the pain treatments.

  They could not keep this up. They needed help.

  They needed the Synthetics.

  Donovan was a doctor, but he didn’t know the first thing about repairing synthetic life forms. He had believed them extinct along with everyone else until he woke to find several Synthetics surrounding him and Davis in the process of trying to destroy them. By doing so, Davis had robbed the ship of a crew and perhaps taken from them the only defense they had against the creatures on the Fleet.

  Donovan stared down at the curving glass of the res-pod within which Davis lay suspended. He tried remembering his early days of training and the few actual live bodies he had treated. Living cells were more stubborn than dead cells. It was easier to regenerate necrotic tissue than it was to repair damaged tissue intent on doing its own slow healing.

  “Cell growth … glacial.”

  Donovan spoke to himself as he scanned the small display alongside the clear canopy. He glanced at where Aggiz was working hunched on the far side of the science bay, but the scientist ignored him. Aggiz was chasing after his own ghosts.

  He adjusted a few levels, experimenting with nutrient mixes that he hoped would catalyze cell regeneration. The white of scar tissue spreading across Davis’s burned features was clearly visible through the glass. He needed cell regeneration to go faster. If the mixes went too high though, he risked propagating cellular malignancies.<
br />
  Of particular interest was the bionic implant at the center of Davis’s shattered forearm. It looked like it had replaced or been grafted into the entire midsection of the ulna. Or was that the radius? Donovan couldn’t remember. Only Davis would know what the implant actually was and how to reverse its effects, but right now Davis wasn’t talking.

  The ship rocked gently.

  “Beka,” Donovan asked, pushing an intercom key on the wall near the pod, “do we have company?”

  “No company,” came the terse response. Donovan saw her in his mind’s eye—her sharp features fired and polished by lack of sleep and recurring pain, bent over the holographic model of the Fleet that she studied like scripture. “I’m trying a new algorithm. Attempting a pathway.”

  Donovan felt a flicker of annoyance, though he immediately quelled it. He was not in command. If she thought she had a new theory, let her try it. He certainly wasn’t doing anything more useful.

  Beka fascinated him, he admitted to himself. She had features that were almost striking enough to border on beautiful. On a sterile ship like this, to a strained mind in a recently regenerated body such as his, her dark eyes and tangled hair took on a fevered intensity in his mind. He often found himself glancing down the twisting corridors, hoping to see her approach as he passed between his quarters and the command deck.

  He shook his head again to clear it.

  “Do you need something?” she asked when he did not respond.

  He flexed his fingers, feeling the dull ache from the drug-induced arthritis. Soon he might risk removing Davis from the pod and taking him to one of the full surgical suites on board. It would be a more active and invasive form of regeneration. He needed to analyze the weapon, at the very least, but he was not sure he could remove it from Davis’s body without serious damage. It seemed, even in the wreckage that was his arm, to be wired deeply into a cluster of nerves.

  “I need answers, Beka,” he muttered.