First Fleet #1-4: The Complete Saga

by Stephen Case

  Events were telescoping in Aggiz’s mind. He was unfolding like the dahlia. It became difficult to tell the past from the present and from the future. Had he already joined them? Was he still wandering the bucking corridors of the Clerke Maxwell? Was he in the shipyard, listening for the voice of his beloved in the heart of the buzzing Brick?

  There was a circular opening in the corridor before him, a hole in the side of a hill, a passageway. He felt presences moving in the darkness beyond. It was not pain. It was not death. It was a reordering.

  Aggiz tried to remember how to move his hand.

  The hole vibrated and began to slide away. There was a second hole beyond, with a window-like gash that looked out onto the stars.

  Airlock.

  Something inside Aggiz was pleased with the recognition. It was the last word his mind held, and then it too was gone.

  The final portal slid open and Aggiz felt the sudden embrace of something cold and eager, grasping at him like a million tiny hands. The pain blossoming up his arms cleared his mind for an instant. He screamed and tried to turn, tried to reach backward and catch the edge of the doorway.

  A white rime of frost had already covered his fingers. The hull of the ship slipped from his hands.

  He drifted, end over end, crackling with cold, towards where the dead ships danced in the night.

  *

  Within the ship, in the tiny, clustered heart of the command deck, a warning alarm chimed. “Unauthorized airlock release.”

  “No!” Beka screamed. “No, no, no! No one else! Who is it?”

  “Passenger Aggiz Magreb is attempting to exit the ship without thinsuit protection,” the computer answered.

  She and Paul had just injected. She had sent Donovan to find Aggiz.

  Beka reached for the console, trying to key in a manual override of the airlock, trying to seal it shut before the pain was too much. Her fingers seized as the familiar agony—magnified now almost beyond endurance—flared up along her arms and into her hands. Her jaw clenched so tightly it burned.

  There was no guarantee, Donovan told them, that this would not kill them.

  She pounded her crabbed hand on the controls, but it was too late.

  “Passenger Aggiz Magreb has left the ship,” the computer reported.

  Of the original team from the shipyard, now only Beka remained.

  On the holographic display before her, their ship traced a needle’s pathway through a haze of swarming light. They were within range of at least half a dozen of the derelict ships at any one time now, moving fast but not fast enough. They would pass by a dozen more before they cleared the edge of the Fleet.

  Beka sat sheathed in a private universe of pain. She couldn’t see. Her eyes ached in their sockets. Her face was wet with either blood or tears.

  There was no thought of maneuvering, no chance of piloting a pathway. She had simply chosen a direct course down toward the planetary cluster through what looked like the thinnest concentration of Fleet ships. Once the flight-path was set in, the engines engaged fully, and they rode the impulse all by themselves.

  It was inelegant. There should have been a solution. She should have found a solution. Instead, they were burning across the sky like a meteor, leaving Aggiz behind.

  *

  Paul was discovering entirely new landscapes of pain. Normally, he had experienced life in atmospheres of color and light. It was the thing that had drawn him to the frontier—or had allowed him to be drawn—with Cam.

  Part of his mind, even as it curled into one tiny corner of his consciousness and shrieked for it all to be over, could not help but pay some attention to the blooming of reds and angry oranges that tinted the edges of his vision.

  This is what an aneurism looks like, he told himself, a seizure, a flashing of the mind, a flailing of the senses against a hot web of pain.

  He felt his skin crackling.

  Beka had shut her eyes. Only Paul watched the projected vistas of space around them on the faux-windows of the command deck, seeing them through a sheen of tears.

  There was a broken world on the screens ahead. They were falling toward it, tipping down into it as though their ship was an ancient sailing vessel sinking slowly. The deck was pitching downward, where the broken stones of the planet below waited.

  “We’re coming in too fast,” he heard himself rasp out.

  They were through the Fleet. They had to be. But they were falling, spiraling out of control toward the planet below.

  “Pull up!” He pushed himself forward, wondering whether they were outside of the reach of the last of the mind-sheering consciousnesses. “Beka, you’ve got to pull us up!”

  She was moaning. He shook her arm, and she screamed. The eyes that opened were wild. She clawed his hand away.

  She’s gone. It was too much, Paul thought. I’m alone.

  He looked down at the system of controls that stretched out before Beka. He was not a pilot. He had learned a little of how to control vessels during his time in space, but now he could only make frantic, hypothetical guesses in his mind.

  The world on the screens was looming closer. It was crisscrossed with jagged fractures, as though the entire surface of the planet had been dropped and only haphazardly pieced back together.

  Sometimes you just gamble and then pray. That was what Cam used to say. At least, sometimes Cam did. It had been something he loved about her.

  Paul reached across the wilderness of controls and pulled a throttle.

  The lights on the command deck dimmed slightly. Outside the screens—as clear and crisp as windows—the features of the world below were becoming vivid. There were wisps of clouds as well, Paul noted. There was an atmosphere. Would that be enough to slow their descent, or simply something to lick them to flaming pieces as they fell?

  He kept his hand on the throttle or control stick or whatever it was. He could feel every individual bone in his hand and arm, glowing red-hot, outlined in a sharp silhouette of agony beneath his skin. Far below him, he felt something in the ship kick and groan, gyroscopes straining to hold the vessel at a constant orientation. Beka slumped lower in her seat as deceleration increased.

  Warning sirens went off around him. Part of Paul’s brain recognized them as proximity alarms. The ground—puckered and broken—seemed incredibly close below, drawing nearer each moment.

  “Beka,” he called, shaking her shoulder again. “We’re coming in too fast!”

  She stirred and held her hands against her head.

  The antidote. Donovan had prepared a dosage for each of them in the event that they survived their blitzkrieg through the Fleet. They had to be safe now. Paul’s pen-needle was in his pocket. He watched it tumble out as the ship slowed even further, landing on the far side of the command deck to wedge against a deck plate.

  There were still flames burning at each of his joints. Whatever reserves of strength he had were draining fast. He stumbled across the deck, bracing himself on whatever was at hand, to reach the pen-needle. His fingers felt like pieces of lead attached to his palm. When he bent to pick it up, he could barely close them around the thin vial.

  Beka was still slumped in the control chair.

  There was a rising whine coming from somewhere. Paul imagined that it was possibly the air rushing past the ship at a tremendous speed.

  His teeth ground against each other. He had only one needle, but the choice was clear. Beka knew how to fly the ship. He didn’t.

  He fought his way back to her, grabbed her shoulder and pushed the needle in.

  Forty-One

  Cam tried to go back as soon as she realized that the twins were gone, turning to run back the way they had come to search for them. When Jens and the other soldiers restrained her, it was all she could do to force herself to be calm and survey them and their weapons, calculating how hard it would be to break away and seek the girls on her own.

  “I told you,” Jens told her, “the caverns do strange things with your perception.�
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  “They were right here,” Cam said. “Someone must have seen them leave.”

  There was no place Agnes and Perry could have slipped away to without being seen. No side tunnels opening into their own cavern were explicit or even apparent. Beyond where they stood, farther in the direction they had been heading, the tunnel opened out and seemed, from the grey light in the distance, to terminate into a chasm or pit.

  “I don’t remember seeing them at all,” one of the soldiers grumbled.

  “Shut up, Claborn.” Jens shook her head as if she was trying to clear it. “They were there, I think. Two girls.”

  “Yes, two girls,” Cam hissed in frustration. “Agnes and Perry. My daughters.”

  “It’s the tunnels,” Rine whispered. “They split perceptions and distort them. There might have been two of them. Or one. Or four.”

  “There were two girls,” Cam shouted. “I don’t know how we got here, but they were with me.”

  Jens placed a hand on her arm. “He’s right,” she said softly. “We’ve been circling down here for hours, maybe days, since we escaped. We can’t … we can’t even keep track of how many are in our own party. We count off sometimes. Every time we count, we get a different tally.”

  Cam scanned the party. There were half a dozen soldiers in close proximity, in addition to the doctor and his young companion. Beyond that, Jens had spoken with two scouts at different times, one who had been following behind and the other scampering ahead, but it was hard to make out how many shapes waited beyond the circle of their lights.

  Right now, it seemed there were at least three figures waiting just out of view, one of which, at the corner of her eye—

  “Perry!” Cam called, turning toward where she had seen the shape.

  One of the soldiers moved to restrain her, but Cam spun and landed a blow to his stomach that left him doubled over, gasping for air.

  “Follow her!” Jens yelled. “We can’t afford to get separated.”

  The shape had appeared farther up the tunnel, toward where the grey light filtered down from a wider opening. But when Cam arrived at where she thought she had seen Perry, there was no one.

  Instead, the tunnel ended in a vast shaft extending downward and upward as far as Cam could see, larger than Cam would have thought possible for this deep in the planet. A metal docking spur ran from the wall to hang out over chasm. There were other spurs visible farther above. The rift was wide enough, Cam realized, to allow ships to carry what had been mined down here up to the surface of the world.

  “It’s a dead end,” Cam said bleakly when Jens arrived beside her. She stared out over the expanse of grey. It was impossible to tell whether the dull glow above her head was the sky or another expanse of stone. “She’s not here.”

  The panic of having lost her daughters was already starting to slide away, slipping off into whatever strange angles these caverns drew the human mind toward.

  Jens stared out at the emptiness and cursed slowly. “Circles,” she said, tapping her forehead against the rock wall with a pained and eloquent frustration. “We’ve been going in circles.”

  A few of the soldiers caught up with them. When they understood what Jens had just realized, they sank slowly to their knees. One held his head in his hands, completely dejected. Discipline was wearing thin.

  “Where are we?” Cam asked.

  “Where we were earlier this morning … or yesterday. We’ve already passed through this way.” She spun toward the doctor. “Damn it, Rine, I thought you said you knew where you were going, that it was always easier going down!”

  “Nothing is easy here,” Rine said.

  “It’s one of the low docking terminals for the mine,” Jens explained wearily. “This shaft goes all the way to the surface. We jumped down one of these in our initial attack.”

  “Are you sure it’s the same spur?” the doctor’s assistant asked. “They all look the same to me.”

  “It’s the same one. See that spent flare tracer over by the arch? I dropped that there hours ago. We’ve been ing in circles,” Jens said.

  “We’re going to die here,” one of the soldiers muttered darkly.

  “Maybe we already did,” another said.

  Cam turned to Jens, waiting for her to take command, to say something about no one dying and about being able to get them all out of this, but Jens simply stared into the chasm in front of them.

  “Fuck this,” Cam told everyone and no one.

  As usual, if someone was going to fix things, it was going to have to be her.

  She reached down and ripped a plasma-rifle from the hands one of the despondent soldiers, spun the weapon in her grip, and shoved the end into his mouth, which hung open in surprise.

  “I don’t care how long you’ve been walking around these tunnels,” she said in an even voice. “I don’t care what the Colonizers did to the Fleet or what kind of monsters they dug out of these caverns and brought back to life. What I care about are my daughters, and you’re going to come back with me down this cavern and help me find them or you are going to find out exactly what being dead feels like.”

  The soldiers stared at her.

  Cam walked forward, forcing her hostage backward into the tunnel the way they had come. “The rest of you can go to hell,” she said, without looking at them. “Or just continue wandering around in it. Whichever your prefer.”

  “Wait.” It was Jens.

  Cam glanced at her, but Jens was gazing up the chasm shaft.

  There was a whistling coming from above, growing in volume and pitch until Cam could feel the rocks under her feet vibrating.

  “There’s a ship coming down,” Jens said.

  A huge, white form punched through the mist of the chasm’s upper reaches. It fired stabilizing thrusters, slowed, and grated against an upper rock wall, sending down showers of dust and stone fragments that fell past the entrance of the tunnel in which they stood, watching.

  It grew larger as it approached, still hundreds of meters above. A hollow boom echoed down the shaft as it tore through one of the docking spurs above to ricochet off the opposite wall.

  “One of ours,” Jens added.

  She pushed the rest of the soldiers deeper into the tunnel as the vessel fell toward them, now near enough that its shape filled the entire shaft above. Cam pushed her hostage away and moved up beside Jens to watch it descend.

  The sound of metal scraping against stone filled the chamber. The ship fired its stabilizers a final time before slamming into the last docking spur that extended out from the opening of their tunnel into the shaft. The metal of the spur groaned and began to buckle, but the ship wedged between its supports and the opposite wall of the chasm and held fast.

  “Do you recognize it?” one of the soldiers asked.

  Rine tried to flee back up the tunnel, but two of the soldiers grabbed him.

  “Pull yourself together,” Jens shouted. “It’s not from the Fleet. It’s one of ours, but it didn’t deploy with us. They might be here to help.”

  “It looks like they need help themselves,” Cam said, stepping forward and studying the ship’s exterior closely. Jens eyed her warily but made no move to take her weapon. Suddenly, Cam’s eyes widened. “I know this ship.”

  It was immense, lodged between the stone of the chasm wall and the twisted metal of the docking spur. Its white hull plates groaned, either from the strain of gravity and its angle of repose or from cooling after its transit through the atmosphere.

  “How could you know it?” Jens asked.

  Cam pointed at the ship’s stenciled designation, visible in the grey light in large block letters that were a relieving contrast to the twisted runes of the tunnels. “It came to my planet, several days ago.”

  “What’s it doing here, now?” Rine stood beside them, trembling and peering upward.

  “I don’t know,” Cam shook her head. “But if there’s anyone inside, they’ll be in the command deck, in the center of the ship. It
will take them time to make their way out.”

  “If there’s anyone in there alive,” Jens said, emphasizing the word “if” in a tight voice.

  Cam’s stomach clenched, thinking of Paul. But anything could have happened in the days since this ship departed Onaway with him aboard. He might not even be on the ship now.

  Jens was scrutinizing the girders of the docking spur. “I wouldn’t trust these to hold for long. But if we could get inside and reboot the systems, we might be able to anchor it.”

  She tossed her rifle to one of the soldiers. “You wait here. I’m going aboard.”

  Cam stared up at the white bulk of the ship. Steam from the re-entry port billowed from it in thin wisps that made her think of the smoke of the rock-burner and the face she had seen. Paul could be inside, maybe injured, maybe dying.

  She looked back toward the tunnel. But the twins were still nowhere to be seen.

  “What do we do with this one, Sergeant?” It was the soldier whose weapon Cam had stolen. He held another now, leveled at her chest.

  Jens paused on the docking spur that now formed a twisted bridge between the face of the tunnel and the damaged ship. Below her the grey stones stretched downward until they were lost in a haze of distance.

  “Let her go,” she said. The white surface of the downed ship hung behind her like the face of a moon. “I’ve got a sister. If I were lost, she’d find me. Let her go.”

  A few of the soldiers glowered as Cam pushed past them. She raced down the stone corridors the way they had come, looking for some curving passage that they had missed, calling for Agnes and Perry. Their absence haunted her. Maybe this was what Karma felt like, she thought to herself.

  She remembered Paul in the same situation not long ago, calling their names as he passed through the habitation searching for them, with her and the girls hidden in the crawler. Were Agnes and Perry—and the thing that had brought them here—waiting just out of sight, refusing to answer, around some bend of the spiraling tunnels?

  Back above, on the docking spur, Jens Grale keyed in a universal open code into the panel beside an access hatch. The hatch hummed for a moment as though considering and then ratcheted open. There was a pair of magnetic boots in a locker just inside, which she slipped on, tightened, and used to climb up the slanted corridor into the bowels of the ship.