First Fleet #1-4: The Complete Saga

by Stephen Case

  Rine ignored the barb and rubbed his chin, pulling his angular features into an even narrower frown. “The Sinks. Our own light-line network. The means by which we brought reinforcements when you first attacked. We can send a message – a distress beacon – to our planets.”

  “You don’t think someone’s already done that?” Beka asked.

  “The Hetmantates would not have responded,” Rine said, then sighed. “Whatever began to affect the surface settlements and shallow mines after …” He paused and shuddered, then went on, “after we pulled the bodies up from the deep, it appeared at the time as an infection, and standard procedure across all the Hetmantates is to enforce a strict quarantine on any unknown pathogen.”

  “So what makes you think they would answer us,” Beka pressed, “especially if your light-lines – these Sinks – are only one way? Anyone they sent to help would effectively be as marooned as we are.”

  “We have information,” Rine said. He extended a long finger. “First, as you have pointed out, your passage through the Fleet proves that whatever the ETI effect on humans, it is not biological nor is it infectious. Second, we have determined that Synthetic organisms appear to be immune to the effects. We ask the Hetmantates to send Synthetics.”

  “You think they would?” Jens asked.

  The doctor shrugged his sharp shoulders, making the gesture appear somehow pained. “I do not know for certain they would. But at least they would know what had happened here.”

  Beka thought about their time at the shipyard, of Tholan and their attempts to pull memories from the Brick to determine what had happened to the First Fleet. The Colonizers were in a similar situation. They had lost an entire cluster of colonies.

  She nodded slowly. “How do we do it?”

  “We would have to reach the surface,” Rine explained. “The communication relays are there. From the surface we could send a message back through the Sinks.”

  Their eyes turned again to her, and once more Beka realized they were waiting for her to make the final decision. For a moment her response was anger. Why should she be responsible for them? She had come for one reason, and that was to find her sister.

  Now that Jens was safe, why shouldn’t she be able to go back to the sidelines, content to apply herself to problems of quantum entanglement and the finer points of encoding information into the particle condensates of the Brick?

  Jens had command experience, and Eleanor certainly had a better knowledge of their ship. Even Donovan was an officer in the medical corps. Any one of them, she wanted to tell them, would be better suited than her to lead.

  But then she glanced at Paul and Donovan, at their lined, weary faces. They had seen so much. They had followed her this far.

  She could try to take them a little further.

  “All right,” she said. “Jens, can the ship get back up this shaft and get us to a docking spur just below the surface?”

  “We’re almost ready to go,” Jens said. She pointed over her shoulder to where the Brick waited in the shadows of the science bay. “But before we do anything else, we need to get scanned into that. My soldiers have gone weeks without getting backed up. We’re all getting anxious.”

  Beka stared at her for a moment. “Jens,” she said slowly, “the Brick is dead. It’s drained. The creatures wiped it.”

  Jens face grew ashen. “We can’t …”She paused.

  Beka abruptly realized what this loss meant for soldiers who depended on regular scans into the Brick as insurance that, whatever happened, their personalities and memories would be saved.

  They all waited for several moments while Jens visibly got her fear under control. “If the whole Fleet is gone and the Brick is too,” she finally whispered, “then it’s forever. No one is coming back.”

  “They’re gone,” Beka agreed softly. “We saw them go. But Aggiz found residual signals in the condensates. The creatures were using it to communicate, somehow, though they might not have even realized what they were doing. They may have resonated with it naturally.”

  “We’re entirely cut off,” Jens went on, as though she hadn’t heard her sister. “Whatever we learn here, whatever happens, we won’t be able to upload.”

  “All the more reason to send a message through the Sinks to the Colonizers,” Rine said.

  “There is one more thing,” It was Eleanor. She had been silent for most of their meeting, watching them, her eyes dark and wide.

  She had recovered from the damage inflicted by Davis’s device, but her voice was soft and strained. Like everyone else, she seemed to have aged. She pointed to the res-pod in the corner of the bay. “What about him?”

  “Davis?” Beka asked. “What’s his status, Donovan?”

  “Holding steady, but healing slowly.”

  “One of my men on the command deck says he’s getting a message on a System frequency,” Jens interrupted. Her hand was at her ear, cupping the tiny implant that allowed her private communication with the surviving soldiers of her platoon. “I’m having him patch it through down here.”

  They were all seated around one of the science consoles, the closest thing they had to a conference table. Beka sat across from Paul, so she saw his face when the voice came over the room’s internal communication system. It was the same expression he wore when the static output of the Brick had resolved into an image of his wife’s face. A mixture of disbelief and joy sprang to his ragged features.

  “Cam!” he stood, shouting. “Cam, it’s me! It’s Paul!”

  Somewhere, on a distant level of the ship, an alarm klaxon sounded.

  Forty-Seven

  The three ships were far enough from the Grave Worlds that the broken planets were little more than a cluster of bright shards against the night, bits of bronze glow as if someone had shattered an amber glass against the floor of the sky.

  Now that the worlds were actually visible in space before him, Tholan ignored them. He didn’t want the planets; he wanted his ships. He wanted to know what had happened to them, and then he wanted to make the Colonizers pay.

  It was clear the Fleet was gone. The approaches to the Grave Worlds were empty. There were no pickets. There were no beacons. There was no evidence at all that a major flotilla had passed this way in the recent past.

  The Mustafa Kemal had an armory of sensory nodes to rival that of any ship in the Second Fleet. It skipped in toward the Grave Worlds slowly with its two attendant vessels, popping in and out of space like a stone skimming across water. After each jump, it froze, dropping all of its own systems to the barest possible hush of EM activity, and listened.

  If the Fleet was out there, it was scattered or silent.

  Briefly, Tholan considered dividing his tiny force. Any approach to the cluster of planets would cover only a finite sweep of space. Yet he was hesitant to spread his force at all. The Grenada had been a single ship, and it was gone. No, they would stick together. They had jumped in well beyond where the Fleet’s light-line terminus had been, but now it was time to move closer.

  Tholan fed the coordinates of the Grenada’s last known location to the two companion ships. Their processors hummed. Equations spiraled outward in tight webs of probabilities and persuasion. Space tensed, strained and tore. The vessels blinked in and out of existence.

  The Grave Worlds were closer, but still tiny motes in the darkness. The Kemal’s array of sensors listened, sending out invisible fingers in all directions into the darkness, feeling for light and heat, for the whisper of energy signatures or the telltale radio chatter of System communiqués.

  Tholan furrowed his brow, bent over the display.

  “Should we send out a coded message on all military channels, sir?” an officer at his elbow asked. “See if there’s anyone listening?”

  Tholan motioned him to be silent.

  He waited. The quiet on the command deck echoed the silence extending beyond the hull, as though a voice raised at the wrong moment might wash out a muted signal in the darkness o
utside.

  On the screen before him, a single point of green light sprang up, a spark on the emptiness of the display. In an instant, it was mirrored by another, then another and another. The dots spread out – like a hundred tiny embers, as though someone had blown onto the ashes of a dead fire – a brilliant dusting of signals that gradually coalesced into a rough sphere centered on the Grave Worlds.

  Tholan snapped his fingers, the sound as sharp as a gunshot on the hushed deck. “There they are.”

  The ships of the Fleet were not in formation. They were still too distant to resolve visually, remaining for the moment only points of information on a map. The vessels were thousands of kilometers from where they should have been.

  Tholan tried to make sense of their positioning. Only the drop-ships and assault frigates should have been so close to the Grave Worlds, and even those should have been in orbital combat configurations, not drifting – aimless and disordered – as they appeared.

  It did not look like his Fleet. It looked like a debris field.

  “How many?” Tholan asked, his eyes scanning the information beginning to stream down the side of his display.

  “It’s hard to tell, sir,” one of the crew answered. “The signals for most of them are weak, and they’re so close together there’s a lot of overlapping.”

  “How many are active?” he asked. The sensors parsed and separated the gathered data, delegating it to the displays of the various officers on the deck with him. “How many have life signs?”

  A personnel officer beside him, studying his own display, shook his head. “None. We’re reading energy signatures from none of them. No life signs.”

  “It’s a graveyard then,” Tholan said slowly. “They were decimated.”

  It didn’t make sense. The Colonizers had nothing that could destroy such a force so thoroughly.

  The haze of green spots on Tholan’s display looked more like a minefield than anything else. The dead vessels were so close to the Grave Worlds that they formed fuzzy halo around it, like the buzzing electron cloud of a heavy element. Something had not only devastated the entire Fleet, it had then pulled it into a tight, chaotic cloud around the Colonizer planets.

  “Why are they there?” Tholan asked no one and everyone. “Did they drift in? Drawn by gravity?”

  The science ensign who pointed out the enigma of the Grave World’s arrangement shook her head. She sat at Tholan’s left, bent over a display with several more colors and unfurling equations than Tholan’s.

  “Not enough gravity,” she said, “or time. If the Fleet had simply been compromised, if the ships had gone dead, they would have dispersed through the entire system. Something pulled them or piloted them.”

  “The Colonizers,” Tholan said.

  They had a weapon, it was clear, capable of incapacitating an entire fleet, and they had pulled the ships into a loose orbit about their own worlds to cannibalize at their leisure. Tholan ground his teeth, imaging the military secrets and technology on those vessels now almost certainly in Colonizer hands.

  He turned to the communications officer. “The First Fleet has been compromised. I want you to calculate optimal positioning for the activation of Puppet-Master Protocol.”

  The officer nodded and turned to his display. In a few moments a bright orange marker appeared on Tholan’s, near the center of the Grave Worlds and the green haze of dots surrounding them. It was several light-seconds from their current position.

  “Can you calculate a jump to those coordinates?”

  The Puppet-Master Protocol had never been attempted, but it was in theory a way to deal with this very sort of situation, the almost unimaginable loss to the enemy of an entire fleet of vessels.

  Buried in the AI of each System military ship – and several lines of non-military vessels the military had a hand in creating – was a backdoor, a designed vulnerability allowing a command ship with the proper authorization to slave-drive it.

  From the Kemal, if positioned properly at roughly the geometrical center of the Fleet, Tholan could trigger the Protocol. From there, depending on the state of the ships, he could scuttle the Fleet or order an automatic withdrawal.

  Tholan glanced across the command deck to where the jump-set technician sat ensconced in a network of monitors dwarfing those of every other station. He asked again whether he could calculate the jump.

  The science officer answered instead. “There’s something wrong.” She chewed on her lower lip, still bent over her own display.

  “What?”

  “It’s the gravimetrics. I’m using microlensing of the background starfield,” she replied, then shook her head. “It doesn’t make sense, but there’s a lot of gravitational distortion going on within the Fleet.”

  “From the planets?”

  She shook her head again. Her eyes were bright and wide in the glow from her monitor. Her riddle had grown, and Tholan could read the excitement on her features. “Not from the planets. It seems to be from the Fleet itself, from the individual vessels.”

  “She’s right, sir,” the jump-set technician finally spoke up. “I don’t think I could calculate a jump through that. At least, not without a lot more time.”

  “How long?”

  He shrugged. “Hours, maybe.”

  Tholan leaned back in his chair and stroked his chin. First there was the inability to drive a light-line any closer. Now even his jump capability was hamstrung. He couldn’t regain control of the Fleet from a peripheral position, and he couldn’t fight his way to the center without running afoul of whatever Colonizer weapon had disabled the Fleet in the first place.

  “Sir,” the communication officer said, interrupting his reverie. “There is at least one ship active.”

  “Tell me it’s the Clerke Maxwell,” Tholan growled.

  “It’s impossible to tell from this distance. But unlike the rest, it appears to be on the surface of the nearest planet.”

  “Life signs?”

  “Inconclusive. The energy signature is clear though. It’s one of ours, and it’s not dead in the water.”

  “If it is on the surface,” Tholan said slowly, “then the Colonizers definitely have it.”

  The Clerke Maxwell was jump-set equipped. If Colonizers got their hands on a jump-set, the entire equation of power between them and System changed instantaneously. Whatever weapon they had put into effect here could spread practically anywhere. System itself would be in striking distance.

  Tholan might not be able to use the Protocol to control the entire Fleet, but he could keep at least one ship from remaining in their control.

  “Do we have a line of sight to initiate Protocol for that vessel?” he asked.

  “No, sir,” the officer explained. “It’s on the far side of the planet.”

  “Then get us in position,” Tholan ordered.

  The Clerke Maxwell might have answers. Eleanor might be aboard, along with the body they had retrieved from the Fleet. Perhaps Cam Dowager as well. But none of that mattered if it meant keeping the ship out of Colonizer hands. Once they had a line of sight for establishing contact, Tholan would initiate its self-destruct.

  He glanced at the science officer working beside him, her lips pursed as she studied her display unconsciously. A strand of blonde hair hung across her face in an arching curve.

  He would miss Eleanor.

  Forty-Eight

  “It was a ship jumping in,” Jens whispered to Beka when things calmed down. Rine and Donovan were still arguing with Paul, but they were no longer physically restraining him.

  “The alarms we heard earlier,” Jens explained, when her sister met her comment with a blank stare. “Our sensors detected a ship jumping in at the edge of range.”

  Beka’s heart skipped a beat. “Rescue?”

  “I don’t know,” Jens said, her voice low. “The signature of the energy spike was pretty clear, but we couldn’t get a bearing on location. Being this far beneath the surface is making things difficult
.”

  Beka’s mind raced. Jump signatures could only mean System ships were approaching. But even if they were here, they would face the same barrier the Clerk Maxwell had met: the Fleet itself. And if they were not warned about the danger, they might simply become the next in a long string of casualties.

  “This is another reason to get back to the surface,” Beka told her sister. “We can see what the situation is and try to establish contact.”

  “They won’t have Synthetics aboard,” Jens pointed out. “Colonizer reinforcements would.”

  Beka glanced toward Rine. He was saying something to Paul, driving home whatever point he was making with expansive gesturing.

  “Do you trust the Colonizers?” Beka asked. “They’re the reason the Fleet is gone.”

  Jens shrugged. “I trust him,” she said, inclining her head toward the doctor. “At this point I’m less interested in assigning blame than I am in pulling any resources that might get us out of this alive.”

  Beka nodded slowly and turned her attention back to the rest of the group.

  Moments before, the rest of them had listened to the conversation between Paul and Cam, knowing they needed whatever pieces of information might be provided. Cam explained about their encounter on Onaway and the disappearance of the twins. She also explained her own suspicions regarding why the creature sought them out.

  Paul shook his head, bewildered.

  “I’m coming to find you, Cam,” he finally said. “Stay where you are.”

  “Don’t, Paul.” Her voice was hard. “You would never find me. And then we’d both be lost. Stay with the ship in case the girls find their way to it.” Cam’s voice grew louder suddenly, and Beka imagined her face close to the receiver. “I’m running again,” she said. “Call me if you find my daughters.”

  Then, there was silence.

  It took them a long time to talk Paul down after that brief conversation with Cam. They finally physically restrained him, preventing him from leaving the ship immediately to find her.

  It wouldn’t do any good, Jens explained to him. Other than knowing Cam was down there somewhere, the scanners on the ship couldn’t penetrate any deeper into the caverns. They could provide no further information. Paul would only get himself hopelessly lost as well.