First Fleet #1-4: The Complete Saga

by Stephen Case

  “Yeah. Me too.” She was silent, and he assumed she had clicked off the line. The motion of the ship felt like it had stabilized.

  Donovan did not like indecision. Aboard the medical ships he had served on—and the Elphinstone was only the latest in a long string of assignments—he had been in charge of regeneration bays three or four times as large as this room with rows of hundreds of res-pods. There were always bodies in multiple stages of regeneration. Here, having only a single patient seemed excruciatingly exacting. Before, he had been a cultivator: watering, feeding and keeping the bodies growing, pruning the rare regeneration gone awry. But this was more like sculpting, trying to put a single living body back together, trying to get at the answers within its skull.

  Donovan’s gaze moved to Aggiz again, still unmoving at the base of the Brick. It was what this crew had been doing all along before they woke him, wasn’t it? Trying to extract information. Before, it was buried in the Brick, waiting for the key—waiting for him, his body—to unlock it. And now he was on the other side of the glass, trying to do the same.

  “It’s not working.” It was Beka again.

  He rose from beside the pod, feeling his joints groan in protest. “What isn’t?”

  “My path. My algorithm. It’s closing up.”

  “They’re netting us?” He walked haltingly toward the bay door, trying to decide whether he should attempt more sleep or ascend to the command deck. He decided on neither. He would look in on his other patients-the Synthetics.

  “They’re not—”

  The ship dropped slightly beneath him as the gyros shifted and his stomach sank with it. “Hold on.”

  She was getting better at this, he admitted to himself as he worked his way back through the empty corridors. Though they had not broken through, she was staying ahead of them, just out of their reach. No alarm came, no call for the ever-present pain injections, though he kept the channel open and her audio feed followed him as he made his way to where the Synthetics lay.

  “We’re back,” she finally said when he reached the barracks where they had transferred the inactive Synthetics. “Donovan, are you there?”

  “I’m here, Beka.”

  “We’re back to square-fucking-one.”

  The barrack was identical to the one that he and Paul shared one deck above. The lights here were kept dimmed, though, so it had the feel of one of the cavernous medical bays on a frigate.

  But instead of pods, there were rows of beds like an ancient hospital. They held synthetic humanoid counterparts instead of flesh-and-bone bodies. These were Donovan’s patients, though he had no idea how to even begin to treat them. They had remained catatonic since the detonation of Davis’s weapon.

  “It didn’t work, huh?” he asked.

  He walked down the rows of apparently sleeping forms. Some had their eyes open or half open, but they did not follow his movement. Many appeared to be breathing—a preprogrammed and purely cosmetic effect that Davis’s weapon had not overridden.

  Donovan was a doctor, but unless he had seen the effect of Davis’s weapon with his own eyes and the resultant state, he would have been hard-pressed to identify any of these forms as non-human. They had pulses and, in addition, they had perfectly articulated human features. They had every facsimile of life. Every non-invasive scan showed healthy human physiques all the way down.

  “It didn’t work, Donovan,” Beka sounded close to tears. “I don’t understand.”

  He wanted to be near her. He pushed the thought away. There wasn’t time.

  “Did they see you coming?” he asked.

  “They didn’t react like … I can’t put my finger on it. The whole thing feels organic.”

  “They move as one?” He paused near the end of the last row, before the body of the Synthetic known as Eleanor. If the rest were submerged deep below consciousness, she was the one closest to the surface. He touched the side of her neck, feeling for the pulse he knew was only programmed similitude.

  “It’s not that. It doesn’t feel like that. It’s something else.”

  “Eleanor,” he whispered. Her eyelids flicked as though she was fighting to awaken, but she had responded like this before.

  Beka heard him over the channel. “Are you with Eleanor? How is she?”

  “Unchanged.”

  The sigh was audible. “And Davis?”

  “Too early to tell. I don’t want to crack the egg too soon.”

  He heard her snort and imagined her blowing the short curls off her brow. “You wait much longer and there won’t be anyone left outside that res-pod. We’re out of step.”

  “Out of step?”

  He felt the ship lurch again. “The graveyard dance, Donovan. Grab your needle. We’ve got company.”

  He did, but even in the pain his thoughts drifted back to Beka. What might things have been like had they met back in System? He found her presence comforting in a way he could not quite explain.

  From the pack at his side, Donovan took a scalpel. He stood over the last Synthetic in the long row, a nameless soldier with a flawless face. He had no idea how to resuscitate them, and he wasn’t going to figure anything out by staring at their outsides.

  He was sure, on some level, that Beka would be displeased.

  It was a big ship though. She did not have to know.

  He made a long, clean incision and bent to his task.

  Thirty-Three

  There was not much to do in the empty chamber in which Jens Grale slowly recovered.

  She flexed each muscle and limb gingerly between her frequent and enforced walks up and down the length of the room. She stared at the stones above and around her. She would have perhaps gone mad, there in the flickering shadows and among the whispering voices, were it not for Rine and Glaucon.

  They came often and were—Jens finally had to admit—a reassuring presence. The doctor, with his clean-shaven orderly nearly always in attendance, had never pressured her to divulge secrets, nor had he ever threatened her with the possibility of interrogation or the promise of release. He did his job, coaxed her to walk, complained occasionally and insulted Glaucon often, but Jens came to have a grudging respect for him.

  Through all his crusty bravado though, Jens sensed that he was frightened.

  She had to work to keep her own fear in check. The walls of the chamber seemed at times to grow as thin as paper, and she thought she saw shapes moving beyond. The stones gave off a grey radiance that grew and dimmed fitfully, without regularity, cut off from any reasonable cycle of night and day. She knew that this world had no star, so there was not even the semblance of a diurnal cycle on the surface either.

  Jens saw no one other than the doctor and his assistant. The voices came and went in the darkness or the grey light, but no one else ever entered her chamber. She had lost track of days or weeks. The only thing she had to measure time against was her returning strength. She had gotten to the point where she could walk unaided, when one of Rine’s sudden appearances startled her from a shallow and troubled sleep.

  “Jens.” His eyes were wide. He looked more frightened than usual. “Are you awake?”

  Usually he made jokes or began with rambling stories from his past. But today he seemed dazed and distracted, as though he had seen something he was still trying to process.

  “What is it?” she asked. “What’s happened?”

  “You were right, it seems.” He tried to smile. Glaucon entered behind him. “We Colonizers are savages. Barbarians. Imbeciles, certainly.”

  Jens rose from the cot and stared at them both. “What are you talking about?”

  “The truth.” Rine waved Glaucon back and lowered himself beside her on the cot.

  “I was summoned here as a medic, you understand. I treat patients. I don’t make policy.” He coughed. “I certainly don’t make strategy. But I tend to … poke my nose around, occasionally. I’m the curious sort.”

  He shrugged. Something of his florid nature was returning, albe
it slowly. He spread his hands expansively before him. “Your attacking Fleet was decimated, no? After speaking with you and some of the other patients, I became curious as to how exactly our counterattack was carried out. We had the element of surprise, certainly, more resistance than you were expecting. But that could not be the whole story, not enough to hold off hundreds of ships. I could not get a straight answer from any of my compatriots here as to how this feat was accomplished.”

  Rine’s eyes narrowed, and he leaned forward. “So I looked. I—if you will pardon the nomenclature—snooped.”

  He leaned back on the cot.

  “Do you know why I came to the mining colonies?” he asked suddenly.

  Jens was taken aback by the sudden change in subject. “I asked you about this before,” she said. “When you talked about New London. I assumed you were lying and you had been here all along. That you were part of the original settlement. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  “There was no original settlement,” Rine said, leaning forward again. He held up a finger. “Secrets, see? I have asked you to reveal none, but I am sharing one with you right now.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Of course you don’t,” Rine clucked his tongue, and Glaucon grinned. “Because you are certain that the Colonizers are dinosaurs. Fossils, I believe you put it. With no way to travel through space except by crawling at relativistic speeds. But this was not an original settlement,” he said again. “We came here. Some of us quite recently.”

  Jens shook her head. “That’s not possible. The nearest Colonizer world is too far away for you to reach it in less than a decade, relative time.”

  “We found what you now call a light-line network, my survivor,” Rine said slowly. “The Sinks, as we call them. They brought us here, but they won’t let us leave.”

  He went on. “You would have never noticed them. You move too fast, skimming over and under the skin of space. But they were there, not far from the worlds we arrived at. You had all missed them, but they were there for anyone slow enough to look, anyone crawling through space. It’s a one-way trip, from our original worlds to these mining colonies via the Sinks. But they let us bring in an immense amount of weapons and firepower when we realized you were attacking.”

  “What do you mean, you found a light-line network?” Something cold was trying to climb up Jens’s throat.

  “Found it,” he said again. “As in, stumbled upon it. As in, ships slipped into the Sinks and found themselves here. Messages—information—can go both ways, but once you travel to these planets, you’re here to stay.”

  “It was an artificial network,” Glaucon put in softly. “Someone built it.”

  “Likely the same things that built this place,” Rine gestured to the stones above, which were a sickly pale at the moment.

  Suddenly Jens realized what had transpired-she had been given information about the Colonizers that she would not ever be allowed to leave with. They must have decided there was no use keeping her alive any longer, so they did not think it a liability to tell her these secrets.

  “You’re going to kill me,” Jens said slowly.

  Rine and Glaucon stared at her for several seconds. Then Rine laughed slowly, a deep, hollow tone.

  “We’re all going to die, my dear survivor,” he said. “That is just exactly the point. Things are falling apart up there.” He pointed to the chamber doorway. “They have been falling apart since I arrived, though it took me some time to realize it. And it took me even longer to realize why.”

  “He found the bodies,” Glaucon said.

  Rine shot him a look of annoyance. “I found evidence of bodies. I found …”

  He trailed off and sucked his lips. Voices were growing outside the corridor again. Rine rose. “You’re safe here for the time being, and even if you weren’t—there’s nowhere to escape to. But I needed to tell someone.”

  Jens grabbed his arm. “But you haven’t told me anything.”

  “Glaucon and I will be back as soon as we can,” Rine said, disengaging himself and leading Jens back to the cot. “You need to rest. We’re getting you out of here. All of you. We’re going to …” He trailed off. “Tell her where we are going Glaucon.”

  “To the Crèche, sir,” Glaucon said.

  “That’s right,” Rine nodded and turned back to Jens. “It was supposed to be a tomb. A crypt. But they turned it into…”

  He trailed off a second time, pausing and looking upward as though he could see through the stones to the surface. “It won’t be safe up there for much longer. We’ll need to go deeper. And you need to see what they did. What happened to your ships.” He shook his head. “You deserve to know, before you die.”

  Before she could respond, they were both gone and the voices were echoing all around her. She wanted to run after them but did not yet have the strength to follow.

  Thirty-Four

  Cam was uneasy. And because she was uneasy, because she was worried she had begun seeing a form moving against the backdrop of an empty world at sunset, she did something she had told herself she would never do: She integrated Station’s audio processing units into their habitation’s systems.

  “Station?” she said, when it was complete. The twins were once again in bed. “Can you see me?”

  “I have access to the full range of the habitation’s scanning units, Cam,” it answered. Cam had corrected her earlier alterations to its programming so that it once again recognized her as herself. She had also discovered the message Paul had left before he was taken, which had filled her with a fresh wave of guilt at her deception and betrayal.

  “Good,” she said. “That means you should be able to pipe into the sensor arrays outside as well.”

  “That is correct, Cam.”

  She had scanned the sensor data herself already, but there was only so many ways a human could parse the influx of information.

  “Is there anything out there, Station?” she asked.

  “I do not understand the question.”

  Cam paced in front of the wide windows. She was being unreasonable, and she understood that. But something was happening. Something was itching at the back of her mind, under her skin. The girls had awakened last night screaming about something outside the windows. She had activated all of the exterior floods but had seen nothing. It took her hours to get them calmed down and back to sleep.

  And now she was looking for reassurance from a machine.

  “Are there any life forms out there, Station?”

  “Scanning, Cam.” There was a pause. “I can pick up residual heat signatures along the farthest sensor arrays, but these correlate with the inhabitants of the neighboring habitations.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “No, Cam.”

  She stopped pacing and dropped into one of the two seats at a low table in the habitation’s front room. This was where she and Paul used to talk late into the night after the twins had gone to bed. She wondered where he was right now.

  She and the twins were tired. Maybe Agnes and Perry were still picking up something from the Brick. There could not be anything moving around out there on the surface of their world. The atmosphere was still far too tenuous.

  “Cam.”

  What was it that Paul used to say about the night? That it was only the absence of colors that let you truly see shape and texture. He used to say that about the rocks, but he used to say it about her body as well, whispering to her in the pale starlight that filtered through the skylight above their bed.

  “Cam. There is something moving outside.”

  She stood and reached for the rail-pistol she had placed on the table beside her. The floodlights outside the habitation showed only naked stone.

  “Where?”

  Station was silent.

  “Where, Station?”

  “I’m sorry, Cam. There was momentarily motion on several of the sensor arrays simultaneously. This is indicative of a systematic malfunction
, not an actual moving body. I am running the requisite diagnostics.”

  “A sensor ghost?” she demanded.

  “It appears that way, Cam. I am sorry to have startled you.”

  Cam massaged the sides of her brow with her long index fingers.

  “But you don’t sense anything now?” she asked.

  “I do not believe so.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The voice was silent for several seconds. “I am still receiving anomalous readings from a single array of sensors.”

  “Nearby?” Her grip tightened on the handle of the pistol. Outside the windows, beyond the range of the floods, the black was sweeping and uninterrupted. Anything could be moving out there and would never be seen.

  Agnes mumbled something in her sleep in the next room.

  “No, Cam.” Station’s voice was even and maddeningly calm. “It was to the south, at the perimeter of my range, near the rock-burners.”

  “Show me on a map.”

  There were other, heavier weapons in the habitation, broken up and stowed in pieces in various storage lockers throughout the rooms.

  Enough.

  Cam was not about to sit around jumping at shadows and sensor ghosts.

  Come light, she told herself, she would go hunting.

  Thirty-Five

  Paul sat on a low bunk in one corner of the barracks he shared with Donovan aboard the Clerke Maxwell. There should have been dozens of other soldiers bunked here, waiting perhaps to climb into the heavy suits racked in the assault bays nearby and launch into space.

  But now, there was no one. Even Donovan was gone, either on duty in the control room or bent over the sleeping form of Davis.

  Or perhaps developing new pain treatments.

  Paul shivered with pain. He gripped the tiny pen-needle and vial in his hand. His arms and legs burned.

  The ships were passing more often. The cramping in his extremities had only just worn off before the most recent alarm had brought him to his feet once again.

  Paul had chosen this corner of the barracks because it held a window that seemed to look out into the darkness. Even though it was simply a projected view, it didn’t matter to Paul. It was something, at least. The view, however, held no horizons and Paul felt adrift, ungrounded. There was no change in light, no play of shadows. There was no up or down.