First Fleet #1-4: The Complete Saga

by Stephen Case

  Cam nodded and moved the crawler down from the ridge. They drove on in silence. The trees receded back into the sharp line of the horizon.

  The girls did not speak again until they reached a long, parched valley near the southern edge of their plantation hours later. Station had remained silent as well.

  “It’s here,” Agnes whispered.

  The world appeared to end at the edge of the valley, at the lip of the immense crater that composed the rock-burners.

  The burners were huge manmade fissures, chasms in the planet’s crust carved by orbital bombardment years before any of the terraforming settlements were established. In their depths, catalytic processes dissolved rock and minerals, belching greenhouse gases and particulate matter high into the atmosphere.

  They were enormous artificial calderas, venting clouds of grey and white smoke upward in a curtain that hid the landscape beyond.

  “Nothing could be in there,” Cam said doubtfully.

  “The sensor readings were in this area, Cam,” Station said.

  “Where?”

  Station indicated a particular sensor cluster, and Cam steered the crawler to investigate. It was an array of pressure sensors and solar panels, like one of hundreds of others scattered across the plantation, perched on a low outcrop of rock within a hundred meters of the rock-burner’s edge.

  “Can you run a system diagnostic from here?” Cam asked Station.

  From within the crawler, the sensor array looked normal. There was no evidence of rockslide or any other disturbance in the surrounding landscape of stones.

  “The sensor array appears to be functioning within normal parameters,” Station answered.

  She turned to the girls. “I’m going to step outside and take a look at it. Maybe there’s something Station can’t tell from here.” She pulled on her thinsuit mask. “Put your masks on. The crawler will re-pressurize as soon as the canopy is shut behind me.”

  When they obeyed, she opened the crawler’s canopy with a hiss and slipped outside, lowering it back into position behind her and giving the girls a thumbs-up through the glass.

  The sensor array was only a few meters from the crawler. She covered the distance quickly, scanning the landscape in all directions.

  Perceptions from her military days resurfaced easily: this was a relatively unshielded position, but likewise the ground was clear and open in all directions away from the rock-burners. There was no place for an enemy to be hiding or approach unseen. Besides the smoke continually billowing up from the crater’s lip, there were no signs of motion.

  Cam quickly saw that the sensor array was undamaged.

  She detached the small box that housed the array’s central recording unit from where it was anchored under a solar panel. It would give her something to do tonight, she reflected, when she couldn’t sleep.

  Everything else checked out. She could spend a few hours disassembling its components, but she doubted that she would find anything. The sensors probably had simply detected an unusually large belch from the rock-burner’s catalytic digestion.

  She wiped a thin layer of soot from one of the sensor’s solar panels. She had been foolish to come. What did she think she would find? Is this how life was going to be now with Paul gone, with her jumping at every sensor ghost?

  Agnes’ voice came through the channel in her thinsuit mask. “It’s here.”

  Cam turned. The twins were seated beneath the crawler’s glass canopy, still wearing their masks. One of them pointed past Cam, toward the wall of cloud.

  “There couldn’t be anything in there,” Cam radioed back.

  She looked back over her shoulder toward the rising smoke. The rock-burners were an inferno. Even Paul rarely ventured this close in his maintenance tours. The processes taking place within those burners were monitored and regulated from space, with orbital platforms occasionally dropping whatever ingredients were needed to keep the catalytic processes burning far below.

  The fires were seeded from space …

  Cam stared at the billowing curtain of cloud. The sleeper—the body in the attic—had found its way here. What were the chances that something else would have found its way to their planet as well?

  What were the chances something would have found its way to them?

  “Mom!” Perry added her voice to Agnes’. “It’s there.”

  Cam walked back to the crawler. “Stay here,” she told the girls through the glass. She pulled the rail-gun from the cargo stowage at the crawler’s rear and braced it against her shoulder.

  “What are you doing?” Agnes asked.

  Cam felt small and ridiculous, as she always had with this particular weapon. It was too large for her, though it was lighter than it looked and it packed a huge punch. She had used one much like it to bring down several Colonizer walkers on the Shore Worlds.

  She walked toward the wall of smoke.

  The atmosphere this close to the rock-burners was thick enough to carry sounds weakly. She heard the hiss of the rising smoke and the whisper of her own feet crunching on the stones.

  “Whoever you are,” she said, “whatever you are—I’m here.”

  The smoke broiled.

  “What do you want?” she hollered.

  There was no answer. What had she expected? She waited for several seconds more and then turned back toward the crawler, feeling angry and foolish.

  The twins’ voices rang into her ears in the mask. “Mom!”

  Cam stopped and turned back to the edge of the rock-burner, raising the weapon to her shoulder.

  A face, impossibly large, parted the clouds like a curtain.

  Her finger froze on the trigger.

  It was the color of the smoke, pale and grey, and moved like the smoke as well, waving in and out like a serpent’s head or a tongue of fire. Billows of ash rolled over it like clouds passing before a moon. It seemed as huge and ancient as a moon, staring down at Cam and her weapon far below.

  Cam’s mind struggled to take in the half-visible features: eyes wide and black as those of a squid Cam had seen once in the seas of an outer System moon, but metallic and sheened like an insect’s.

  If there was a mouth, it was hidden in a mass of hair-like tentacles that covered the lower face. Beyond that it was impossible to tell more.

  There was a pressure behind Cam’s eyes. She felt it building but could not blink or turn away. The creature swayed above her, and Cam recalled images of mythical dragons, things huge and ancient crawled up from the underbelly of hell.

  She might have stood like that for hours, with the clouds all the time rising up into the dead sky, but after a time she felt a pressure, a hand against her side through the skin of her thinsuit.

  She looked down to see Agnes standing beside her.

  In the same instant that Agnes touched her, the buzzing pressure in Cam’s skull fell into a steady cadence of words. Agnes’s mouth did not move—the voice was not hers—but it was as though she was an antenna, channeling the voice of the creature not through Cam’s ears but through her skin and teeth and into her bones.

  “You are Cam Dowager—you are not alone—you are Cam Dowager—you are.”

  “Who are you?” Cam shouted.

  “I am alone.” Perry had joined them and stood on Cam’s other side, her hand on her mother’s arm. “I am the vestige.”

  Each word exploded in Cam’s skull like a firecracker.

  “What do you want?” Cam let the rail-gun fall behind her and sank to her knees on the jagged stones, wrapping her arms around her daughters. She was drained, empty and beyond fear.

  She was trying to protect herself and the girls from whatever was seeking them, only to realize now with a failing resolve that they faced something as immense and inexorable as a cyclone, a force of nature rearing up before them. She might as well raise her weapon to shoot a moon out of the sky.

  “To speak—searching a method of communication—having found resonance in these minds.” A rising wave of ste
am hid the face completely. The rest of its body was still invisible in the fog.

  Cam waited. The girls stood on either side of her, their hands on her shoulders as though supporting her.

  “You are a multiplicity,” it said. “I resonate with them—have sought them in the past—speak to them through you—you will not perhaps die—as do the others—but you will not understand without them.”

  It was speaking of her and the twins, but what did it mean about dying?

  “It’s ETI,” Cam said to herself softly. “It’s ET-fucking-I right here in our backyard. How did we miss it on the surveys?”

  Cam’s mind scanned back through her first contact training from her military days. Every recruit sent out on any deep space assignment had been forced to endure it, a hodgepodge of anthropological, evolutionary and linguistic nonsense that a bunch of academics in System who had no idea what they were talking about had put together. How could they have any idea what they were talking about? No one had a clue what ETI would look like when or if it was encountered.

  “It needs us,” Perry said softly.

  Cam focused again on what the creature had said. “You found us because you could communicate with us?”

  “You are Cam Dowager—you are—you are not alone,” the voice in her mind repeated.

  “You’re right.” Cam gritted her teeth and rose. “I am Cam-goddamn-Dowager. And these are my daughters. What do you want with us?”

  “I must speak with others—with the many—of the vestiges shattered.” Cam felt a shade in her mind at these words and realized she was experiencing an emotion in the mind of the creature.

  Was that fear? Could the creature feel fear?

  “Why us?” Cam shouted.

  “You can speak—we can speak.”

  Cam’s head spun as fleeting images and scraps of knowledge flowed into her mind. She knew this must have to do with her own neurological quirk, her ability to hear voices through proximity with the Brick. Was it possible this creature used the same type of resonance or entanglement as the Brick did to communicate?

  “They are stones—I am alone,” came the response. It had heard her thoughts, though Cam did not understand what it meant.

  “We must go now” The voice was insistent, pressing on her mind. “You must speak.”

  The creature remained where it was, wreathed in the smoke from the rock-burners. Cam began to back away slowly, pulling the girls with her.

  “We must go,” it said again. “You must speak.”

  “We’re not going anywhere.”

  “We must make a path,” the voice bellowed silently, “a hole in the universe.”

  Cam’s grip on the girls tightened as the fringes of the world buckled. Something blue and twisting raced across her vision, shattering the landscape beyond like lightning.

  The margins of perception caved in completely, replaced by absolute darkness. For a moment all four of them were suspended in blackness, the suddenly revealed creature a writhing mass of color and light that made Cam’s gut twist.

  In another instant there was stone and cool light.

  “I—you—have arrived,” the voice said. “Now the death begins.”

  Thirty-Seven

  Rine raced into Jens’s room at a terrified run. Jens had been pacing the far end of the chamber, counting the trips she was able to make between the featureless stone walls before she became winded. She was stronger. There were still sharp twinges in her sides when she stood, but she could walk unaided.

  From the look on Rine’s face, she knew that she would not get any additional time to heal.

  “We’re leaving,” he said breathlessly, confirming her suspicions. Glaucon, as always, was right behind the doctor, his placid expression a contrast to Rine’s mix of fear and confusion.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Jens said. “Not until you tell me exactly what’s happening.”

  Now that she was standing again, it was easier to adopt the demeanor she used with unruly cadets and junior officers in her wings.

  Rine stared at her. “I’m breaking you out. Don’t you understand? I’m going to release you and the other prisoners.”

  “This might be a Colonizer ruse, for all I know,” she said slowly. “If I’m going to follow you anywhere, you owe me some answers. You said yourself that our attack failed and the Fleet was destroyed. You won. We’re your prisoners. What are you terrified of, and why would you release us?”

  “He’s terrified of how they won,” Glaucon said softly. Rine did not even spare him a glance this time.

  “You don’t have a choice! There’s no one left in charge up there,” Rine stabbed a finger toward the surface. “They’re killing each other, and in time they’ll come down here and kill you too.”

  “I do have a choice,” she answered. “I can wait here.”

  “You’ll die!” His eyes were wild.

  She took his shoulders firmly. “Who is killing whom? Explain it to me.”

  He stared at her for a minute as though he could not comprehend what she was asking. She watched him gathering all of his scattered thoughts behind his wide and watery eyes.

  Something was clearly happening in the corridors beyond. She had heard noises and shouts even stranger and louder than before. They were going on and off for hours now. Occasionally a scream would filter down through the chalky stones of the chamber.

  “Collateral infection,” he said. “We’re … We’ve …”

  He paused for breath and tried again. “In sieges, long ago, an army would throw corpses over the walls to infect those within with plague.” He licked his lips. “It’s what has happened here. We were under siege, you see. And we found bodies in the Crèche. Down there.”

  He pointed to the stones beneath their feet.

  “What bodies?” Jens asked.

  Rine’s eyes, if possible, got even wider. “We don’t know. Whoever—whatever made these chambers. I didn’t know this when I arrived. I didn’t realize it. They brought me here to treat miners who had gone deep into those caverns. The stones, the passages, the chasms—they play tricks on the mind, on the eyes. Miners would come back up to the surface claiming they had descended on a different world or that they had seen people who were supposed to be on the other planets. Some wouldn’t come back at all.”

  “It is difficult for the human mind to remain unaffected in these caverns,” Glaucon said.

  “You’re not human,” Jens said. “Rine called you a mechanoid earlier.”

  Glaucon nodded. “I am what you would call a Synthetic.”

  She turned back to Rine. “I’ll process that later. Right now, I want to know exactly what you’re talking about. These caverns poison minds. How? Through radiation? What do you mean, collateral infection?”

  “I didn’t know about the bodies until much later,” Rine went on. “But they found … they found remains in the central chamber in the deep caverns, in the Crèche. And then, when you attacked, they seeded your res-pods. They sent them back to the Fleet. It took time, but we knew that even if we defeated your ground assault, you would simply return to your ships and attack again. So we poisoned your ships.”

  Jens let her arms drop. “You found alien bodies and used our technology as a weapon to revive them?”

  Rine nodded. “We knew … that is, I didn’t, but those who made the decisions … They knew what the caverns—what the architecture—did to the human mind. It was like a disease. Only the indentured miners went into the deep caverns, miners and—” Rine glanced toward Glaucon, “and mechanoids. No one else was sent if we could help it. The majority of the settlements are just below the surface.”

  Jens glanced at walls of the chamber around them. “How far down are we?”

  “Not far.” Rine giggled suddenly. “Not too far. Far enough, I suppose, though now no place is safe. And we need to go deeper if we want to escape.”

  “So what happened to the Fleet …?”

  “Bodies. Dead bodies.” Rine had
grown quiet and spoke with a fevered, hollow tone now. “We didn’t know what they would do, but they were effective. They’re awake now on those ships.”

  He shuddered. “We sent a few spies up as well, in stolen suits. To check on them, make sure they were taking root in your res-pods. No one came back. The bodies woke up, and now the ships are falling.”

  Jens took his shoulders again and shook them. “Speak clearly. What exactly happened to the ships?”

  “We don’t know,” Rine said. “The things, the bodies, tear at the minds—the ships are adrift. We strewed space with corpses, and now our corpses are coming home.”

  “What’s happening on the surface?” she asked.

  “The infection … Those that were involved in the operation went first. Their minds are twisted. From going down in the depths to retrieve the bodies. Maybe just by being near them. But it spread. The command structure has dissolved. People are killing each other … And the ships—the Fleet—is falling.”

  Jens looked to Glaucon for more explanation.

  “We don’t have any confirmed landings,” the Synthetic said calmly. “Things are confused on the surface. The only individuals communicating clearly are those like myself, but we are scattered throughout the settlement.”

  “Okay,” Jens said. She limped past Rine toward the door. “I’ll come with you. Better than staying here, I guess. But where do we go?” She paused in the doorway. “You said going deeper led to madness.”

  “So does the surface, now that the ships are falling,” Rine moaned.

  At the doorway Glaucon passed her a plasma rifle. “We helped ourselves to some pieces in the armory. Neither the doctor or me know how to use them.”

  She checked the charge and the safety and grinned. Whatever was waiting for them, she felt marginally better with a weapon in hand.

  “Stay behind me,” she said. The corridor curved away in either direction. “Which way to the other prisoners?”

  Thirty-Eight

  “Who was Gordan?” Beka asked wearily, “and why should I care about his knot?”

  She was alone on the command deck with Donovan. They couldn’t remember who was supposed to be sleeping and who was supposed to be on duty. Donovan had brought her a meal not long ago, she vaguely recalled, so she must have been on duty then, but she could not remember what it had been or whether she had eaten it. There was a raw, red underlining to every thought that dulled both meaning and intent.