First Fleet #1-4: The Complete Saga

by Stephen Case

  You pulled in, dropped down, fell back.

  You let pieces of yourself die – and you survived.

  She thought that maybe finding Jens – realizing her sister was indeed alive and her mission had in some small way been successful – might revive the dying parts of her. And knowing Eleanor would survive as well had to count for something.

  But then Paul had looked at her and asked her – begged her, really – to break his mind down and feed it into the Brick.

  “I tried to explain it to him,” Beka said, without breaking stride. She was surprised at how steady her own voice sounded. “He knew it might not work. He knew the risks.”

  “You told him there was a chance he could find his daughters,” Rine said. Beka did not turn to see his expression, but his voice sounded incredulous. He went on, “I doubt that even now, even after three hundred years, there is anything a man would not do if there were even the slightest chance of saving his children.”

  “Lots of people would not have done it,” Glaucon pointed out, striding behind Rine, apparently oblivious to the anger seething across the doctor’s features. “He was brave.”

  “Idiot!” Rine hissed. Beka could tell without turning that he had whirled on the younger man – the Synthetic, Beka amended in her mind. “There was no chance of success.”

  He addressed Beka again. “It was a delusion, and anyone not deluded by ridiculous devotion to her own assumed-infallible and god-like technology would have seen that. It was your responsibility to have explained this to him, to have made him aware of how negligible his chances actually were.”

  He barely paused. “Not to have aided and abetted him.”

  Beka finally stopped, but only because the corridors were branching and she didn’t know which way they needed to proceed. Rine halted at her shoulder.

  “It was his choice,” Beka said, finally turning to the older man. Rine watched her under furrowed brows. “I did what I thought was right. He died doing what he thought was right.”

  She paused, waiting for Rine to indicate the proper direction down the corridors. When it was clear he was waiting for more, she went on, “Why does this bother you so much? You barely knew him. Is it because you’re a doctor?”

  Rine’s brows narrowed further. He muttered something under his breath.

  It was clear that the corridor in which they stood was a major thoroughfare in the network of tunnels the Colonizers had dug beneath the surface. Beka herself had not been in any of the deeper artificial tunnels, but she had heard Jens describe them.

  There were no perception-distorting lines here, no alien glyphs glowing beneath the surface of the walls. The only confusion was the common confusion of cramped spaces and artificial environs, of wires and low-fusion lighting. Yet, it seemed completely abandoned.

  “Yes,” Rine finally said. “And it is likely because I need …”

  For once, the doctor seemed at a loss for words. He sighed. “You must remember that you are, for me, from three centuries into the future. I am on your ship, and I am continually seeing things I do not understand. I see the way you talk to one another.”

  He frowned, and brushed his hand against the stubble on his cheek as though trying to wipe away dirt. “Most of all, I see your artifact – your Brick. I see the way Jens and her soldiers look toward it as though it is their key to immortality. I see the way you seem to think you can thread a line easily between the patterns that make up a human mind and the reality of a human mind itself.”

  Beka, for a moment, tried to gather some empathy. She tried to remind herself of the kind of social and chronological gap they were reaching across with Rine and his cooperation. She tried to imagine how the procedure – what they had done, what she had done to Paul – would have looked through his eyes.

  “The technology is complex,” she finally said. “I’ll admit that. Even to someone like Paul, someone who knows it conceptually but doesn’t know the physics behind it, it must look like magic. And I’ll admit again …”

  She paused and chewed her lower lip for a moment. “We were pushing against the theoretical limits of that technology. We were uploading an entire persona. It’s not surprising that we were unsuccessful. Maybe if I had more time, or Aggiz, we could have done it.”

  “But that is exactly the point,” Rine said, and the sharpness of his voice in the echoing chamber startled her for a moment. “A man died in agony, my dear. He died screaming as you pulled apart his mind piece by piece and attempted to put it into a mechanical device.”

  “And all the while you talk as if it was some sort of trial, as though it was an experiment that did not unfold the way you would have liked, but it might be successful in another trial or two or three or several.”

  Rine took a breath, then continued. “You do not talk about whether or not it was horrific or ethically repugnant. Rather, you speak of whether or not it was successful. That is what terrifies me.”

  He leveled an arm at Glaucon, who stood behind them silently. Beka noted Rine’s arm shook. “Three hundred years ago you attempted to exterminate Glaucon’s ilk because they were not human. Indeed they are not. They are tools. But now you’re here, three centuries later, and you seem less human to me than them.”

  Something inside Beka coiled and knotted so quickly, she thought she would be sick, right there on the long lines of metal rivets along the length of the corridor. She had not looked at Paul’s face once he was strapped down and the scanner affixed to his forehead. Her eyes had been glued to the same monitors Aggiz had watched for days as she worked to funnel a complete mapping of Paul’s neural pathways into the Brick’s dancing particle condensates.

  But she had not been able to close her ears to the screams as the scanner dug deep, as it peeled back layer after layer of neural tissue, erasing and destroying in the very process of recording. In her memory, the screams mixed with those of the Synthetics in the shipyard, and over all that, she heard a familiar voice berating her for her hesitation and pointing out how close they had come to success.

  She recoiled from the memory and lashed out instead.

  “What did you expect me to do?” she asked. “You’re the people who dug up these bodies, who destroyed an entire fleet. I don’t have to explain myself to you or anyone else, and I certainly don’t have to defend myself against a cave-dwelling fossil who feels he needs to lecture me on ethics.”

  She heard her own words match the tone of the recalled voice, a defensive anger with an undertone of self-justification.

  Who is it? Beka asked herself. Who do I sound like?

  I sound like Davis.

  She leaned forward against the curve of the corridor and placed her forehead on cold metal. For several seconds she remained like that, hunched, gripping her stomach against the sickness threatening to rise.

  Then she took a deep, shuddering breath, latched down hard, and killed it.

  “You can give me your moral dilemmas,” she said, her eyes clenched shut. “You can give me your guilt and your questions. But later, damn it.”

  She straightened and opened her eyes. Rine watched her with a curious hesitation. “Right now, there’s work to do. Tell me how we get to this communications relay.”

  “This way,” Rine said softly, indicating the tunnel to the left. “There’s a ladder to the surface. Not far.”

  They walked.

  “Where is everyone?” Beka finally asked to break the silence that had descended between them. “Why isn’t this place crawling with Colonizers?”

  “The infection,” Rine answered. “From the biological material they dug up from the Crèche, from deep within the mines.”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” she said. The tunnel curved, and several meters farther Beka could see a wide silver ladder reaching upward. “It’s not a biological infection, or at least it wasn’t on the Fleet. It was spatial. They emitted a field or an influence.”

  “And yet it spread,” Rine pointed out.

  Beka nodded.
“They couldn’t have gotten a body on each of the ships. Yet their distortive effect propagated throughout the entire fleet. It’s almost as if the human mind serves as a transmitter.”

  Rine watched her.

  Part of Beka’s mind knew she was backing away from what Rine had said, from the memories of Paul’s screams, into something safe: a problem to solve, a riddle to untangle.

  “It makes sense in some respect,” she went on. “They were trying to use the Brick to communicate because they thought they could resonate with it somehow. But to set up the same sort of destructive resonance with a human mind …”

  Beka halted mid-stride.

  “The bodies,” she said, turning suddenly toward Rine. “The soldiers came down through the shafts during the initial assault. My sister came down. And you sent their suits back inoculated with the biological material you found in the Crèche.”

  She stepped closer to him, forcing him back half a step, and lowered her voice. “But that wasn’t all, was it?”

  He was glancing up and down the corridor as though contemplating running. Beka knew he had nowhere to go. She jabbed a finger at his chest.

  “Answer me! What else did you do?”

  “I did not lie to your sister,” he began, wringing his hands together. “Glaucon, tell her I did not lie. It was not immediately clear to me.”

  “What wasn’t?”

  “Why they needed tissue samples from the captured soldiers.” Rine winced. “I assumed they were using the material for testing, that our commanders were curious to know whether the System genome had been modified intentionally over the past three centuries. It is what I would have wanted to know.”

  One of the light strips nearest them in the tunnel was flickering as though losing power. Rine twisted his hands, his long arms bent at the elbows. In the flickering shadow it made him look like an insect, a bizarre praying mantis.

  “The soldiers came down,” Beka said again slowly. “What did you send up?”

  “They were worried the regeneration devices you used on your ships would not recognize purely alien biological material. We combined it.” He paused, flinching again as though Beka were preparing to strike him. “We combined it with genetic material from the captured soldiers.”

  “So the things up there …” Beka whispered.

  “… are hybrids,” Rine finished miserably.

  “Which explains why their disruptive signal can piggy-back throughout the entire Fleet. They’re part …”

  She couldn’t finish the thought, remembering the hellish madness of their passage through the Fleet.

  “Gods, Rine,” she hissed. “And you want to question my humanity?”

  They had reached the ladder.

  “None of this explains what happened on the surface here though,” she said. She was anxious to be out of these tunnels and away from Rine. She began to climb.

  “Unless, once the creatures were incubated on the Fleet and had enough human minds working in resonance, the influence extended down here. There should still be bodies, at least. Something.”

  The bodies were waiting above.

  Beka keyed the shaft entrance at the top of the ladder. It hissed open, and beyond, she had the impression of a howling wind and a vast glass canopy, below which sprawled dozens of desiccated bodies. She had only a moment to take it in before Glaucon and Rine pulled her back and sealed the door.

  “The atmospheric seal has ruptured,” Rine yelled. “There should have been a warning light on the door seal!”

  Glaucon held Beka’s shoulders as she caught her breath. Her throat burned as though on fire and her eyes ran with hot tears.

  “The surface atmosphere is toxic,” Glaucon explained.

  “We still need to get up there,” she finally said when she could speak again. “We’ll have to go all the way back to the ship for thinsuits.”

  “Are those pressure suits?” Rine asked. “We should have some nearby, though there is no telling whether they will still be there.”

  “Can Glaucon go?”

  Rine glanced at him. “The atmospheric conditions would eventually affect him as well, though he would last a bit longer than us, if that is what you mean.” He paused. “It is possible he could resist the atmospheric corrosives long enough to send the message.”

  Beka shook her head. “Don’t order him to. We can find thinsuits.”

  They did, in a storage locker just beyond the ladder, though they were far bulkier than the suits Beka was used to.

  “It’s not articulating,” Beka complained as she struggled into her suit with Glaucon’s help. Rine had already fitted his helmet on his own head. “It’s supposed to adjust itself to my skin.”

  The doctor’s exaggerated sigh came through her own helmet clearly. “It is supposed to keep you protected. Consider it an antique.”

  They left Glaucon waiting at the base of the ladder and re-ascended. At the top, Beka braced for the sudden gust of air as she opened the chamber door. She and Rine stepped through into the wide chamber and let the door seal behind them.

  Her initial impression had been accurate. A shallow geodesic dome, fashioned of hundreds of triangular glass windows, arched over their heads. Beneath it stretched a long tangle of tables, computer terminals, and various unidentifiable pieces of equipment. There were perhaps a few dozen bodies scattered about, all of them dry and shriveled as though they had been lying exposed for a hundred years.

  “What’s in the atmosphere up here?” Beka asked.

  “I don’t know,” Rine said. “We never dealt with the atmosphere, remaining as we did below the surface or in sealed domes.” Rine examined a few of the nearest bodies. “They had no warning, no time to run. Someone broke the seal quickly and catastrophically.”

  Beka pointed. Some kind of mining vehicle – something that looked like a cross between a crane and a single-pilot freight frigate – had buried itself in a tangle of stone and girders at the far edge of the dome. Its immense boom protruded through the glass dome like a jutting bone.

  “Your theory may be correct,” Rine admitted. “It would explain the chaos, the erratic behavior, and why it afflicted those on the surface first and only later spread downward into the tunnels.” The doctor shook his head. “The communication console will be in the center. It should still have power.”

  It did. Rine punched in a manual access code and brought the system online.

  “The Sinks are close to the planets,” Rine explained, “and there are relay beacons at the rim of each. We are within instant communication of half a dozen Hetmantate worlds.”

  “Fine,” Beka said. “Get the word out.”

  She watched as he manually keyed a message explaining their situation and what they knew about the effects of the ETI on the surface and in the Fleet above.

  “I told them to send Synthetics,” he said, when he was finished and turned back to her.

  “Fine,” Beka repeated, fighting a growing feeling of helplessness. What good would reinforcements do if the entire Fleet had been overwhelmed and the Colonizer settlements were graveyards below? There was nowhere to go. The Sinks, as Rine explained, were only one-way. There was not even any guarantee the Colonizers would risk their own personnel on a potential suicide mission.

  At the thought of the Fleet, she glanced upward. Beyond the broken lattice of the dome, the jagged landscape of the Grave World stretched like the surface of a river with the ice broken and re-frozen from a series of thaws and chills. She could see the lips of some of the larger chasms in its surface even from here. Above that, the other Grave Worlds hung in the sky like a series of impossible moons.

  “Look,” she said, pointing. There was movement among the stars. The sky was thick with ships. “The Fleet. It’s closer.”

  “We’re not safe here,” Rine said. “If their influence extends this far, we should get back below.”

  Beka nodded, and they moved back toward the entrance.

  “What about you?” she aske
d, when they reached the ladder. “How did you avoid ending up like these bodies?”

  Rine’s shrug was barely visible through the bulk of his suit. “I spent most of my time in the deep caverns where the captives were held. And as soon as things began falling apart on the surface, we went even deeper.”

  Below, they heard Glaucon yelling.

  “What is it?” Rine shouted as soon as they were back through the door and he had pulled his helmet off. “What’s the matter?”

  “You can’t hear it,” Glaucon said, grinning. “In the suits. Your radios are short-range. But it worked. He’s in the system. He can talk.”

  “What are you talking about, imbecile?” Rine snapped. “Speak sense.”

  Instead of answering, the Synthetic touched an intercom switch along the wall. A familiar voice flooded the corridor.

  “Someone’s trying to kill you.”

  Paul’s voice, despite resonating loudly through the speakers in the tunnel, sounded timorous and very far away.

  Fifty-Two

  It was not the people, Tholan finally admitted to himself. It was not the fifteen thousand lost souls of the First Fleet eating away at his mind.

  It was the fact that they were never coming back.

  He stood on the forward observation deck of the Kemal, watching. He knew – he had been told – his preoccupation with actual sighting on physical objects in space was antiquated and, in most respects, impractical. Ships were too small and too far apart to see. Entire fleets could be hidden in the night. It was like looking for motes of dust on a black background.

  But Tholan didn’t care.

  He looked for them anyway.

  Tholan had a hand in the design of this ship, one of the newest off the line. It explained the glassed-in observation deck at the forward nose. He had dictated that particular design feature.

  “Is it safe?”

  It was the young science ensign. She floated at the entrance to the observation deck, graceful and poised in the zero gravity of the ship’s central axis. It was the only portion of the ship where an observational position would provide a view of the stars not spinning as the ship rotated to simulate gravity.