First Fleet #1-4: The Complete Saga

by Stephen Case

  “Perfectly,” Tholan said.

  He watched her drift in slowly. She was young and quite lovely, but if she died on this mission she would be gone. A res-pod could re-create her body, perfect in detail down to the slope of her shoulders and corn-gold hair, but until they were sure the Brick was stable again – that whatever happened to the Fleet had not given the Colonizers control over it – they were all in danger.

  He had ordered memory scans to begin again, but until he was certain, until he tracked down the Fleet and the Bricks that were lost, they were all hanging over an abyss.

  System command kept the cataclysmic failure of the Bricks relatively quiet. Despite their best efforts, though, rumors spread. Recruitments centers had already noted a drop in incoming numbers before Tholan departed the shipyard. And those soldiers and sailors in the service were starting to get desperate.

  His order to resume memory scans before leaving the Second Fleet at the light-line terminal was an effort to reinstate normality on that front, even if it was illusory.

  The ensign might not make it back from this mission. None of the crew might make it back, especially if they came up against whatever weapon the Colonizers let loose against the First Fleet.

  And their experiences would be gone. The fifteen thousand souls of the lost Fleet were a tragedy, certainly, but far more disastrous was the loss of System’s hold on functional immortality.

  It was the Bricks that mattered.

  She drifted up beside him and caught herself on his arm. “It’s just glass?” she said. “Not a visual display?”

  “Correct,” he said. “No magnification.”

  “Then what are those?” She pointed at the cluster of dots hanging in space beyond the wide windows.

  “Positional markers,” he said. “Projected. Indicating the position of the ships of the Fleet in space. We could highlight the Grave Worlds in the same manner,” he went on, “because they’re also nearly invisible at this distance.”

  They had jumped out farther, trying to come around to the other side of the planets and get a clear line of sight for transmission to the Clerke Maxwell.

  “They’re dark,” she murmured. “The worlds of System would be lit up like diamonds at this distance.”

  He nodded absently.

  Something flashed at the edge of Tholan’s view, briefly outlining the black curve of the nearest Grave World. He recognized it immediately. In an instant he pushed past her, grabbed the handles on either side of the entry portal, and hurled himself down the central axis of the ship.

  “What is it?” she called after him.

  “Colonizers,” he barked. “Reinforcements. That was a light-line discharge.”

  Several yards down the central axis he stopped and hauled himself upward into the first level of the ship, righting in the weak gravity and moving quickly down corridors and up ladders until he climbed to the command deck. The officer on duty looked up in surprise as he burst in.

  “Get me the jump-set technician,” he bellowed. “Prepare for a jump.”

  The officer blinked for half a moment before nodding and bending to his console.

  “Have you detected any light-line activity?” Tholan asked.

  Another officer sitting at the sensor display shook her head. Tholan frowned. It was possible the Colonizers had a light-line terminal on the opposite side of one of the planets, where any discharge would be largely shielded from the scanners that monitored the upper bands of the electromagnetic spectrum. Most detectors ignored their wash of visible light though, which was often lost in the vastness.

  But Tholan knew what he had seen.

  “I want a wide jump taking us to the opposite side of that planet,” he explained. “How long?”

  The officer bit his lip and studied the display. “Sixty seconds to run the calculations. The jump-set is charged.”

  Tholan drummed his fingers on the side of his console.

  If the Colonizers did indeed have light-lines, this changed everything. It would explain, for one thing, how they were able to wipe out the Fleet – or at least partly explain it. Even if they had been able to bring a large part of their forces immediately into play in this system, the Fleet still should have held superiority.

  “Ten seconds, sir.”

  Surveillance of the Reservation Worlds was tight, but it was designed with the assumption that the Colonizers were restricted to their relativistic, chemical-drive vessels. If they could transport forces via light-lines, the nature of the conflict would have to be recalibrated across the board.

  On the other hand, a light-line terminus here – this close to the Fleet – meant another possible avenue to bring the rest of the ships of the Second Fleet to bear.

  “Five seconds.”

  But how could the Colonizers drive a light-line this close to the Grave Worlds, when his own forge-ship had been unable to do that?

  “Jump.”

  Tholan’s teeth clenched. The star field on his display realigned, showing the curve of one of the Grave Worlds clearly but still beyond the ruins of the Fleet. From this new vantage point, the planet was seen to have three tiny moons, tumbling across its face like captured asteroids.

  “Those satellites weren’t on our earlier scans,” an officer remarked.

  “They’re not satellites,” Tholan muttered.

  The officer’s expression was puzzled. He clearly had not been present at any of the operations above the Reservation Worlds. He had never seen a Colonizer stone-ship.

  He didn’t know their size.

  “Look,” Tholan said. He touched the display, magnified the view, and highlighted a superimposed scale. “The scale is correct: kilometers in distance. But look at their energy signatures. Analyze their flight path.”

  “Stone-ships,” someone on the command deck breathed.

  The stone-ships filled the magnified vista, wavering and grainy with the distance but clearly far larger than anything in the System armada. They were indeed moonlets, rocky asteroids that had been hollowed out by generations of Colonizers when they still lived in their scattered colonies at the outer rim of System.

  “Check the surface spectrometry.” Tholan felt for a moment as though he were lecturing first-year cadets. The sheer scale of the Colonizer vessels often had that effect even on seasoned officers. “They have the composition of main belt objects. They’re from System. First-generation crossing ships.”

  But what were they doing here now?

  The cluster of ships tumbled in the view. Tholan knew from experience the vessels were slow and ponderously maneuverable. At this distance the warhead turrets studding their surfaces couldn’t be seen, but if it came to a tactical encounter the atomics they carried as armament were easily evaded. They were hardly a threat to the Second Fleet.

  But the Second Fleet was twelve light-years away, and Tholan only had three ships with him now. In this situation, his vessels and the Colonizer stone-ships were almost evenly matched.

  “Their trajectories are putting them in low orbit of the nearest of the Grave Worlds,” an officer reported. “They’re keeping their distance from the Fleet wreckage as well.”

  Tholan nodded.

  The Colonizers did indeed have a light-line network, with terminals near the Grave Worlds. It was the only way to explain the sudden appearance of these vessels. Moreover, it was a network apparently immune to whatever interference blocked Tholan’s forge-ship.

  “Signal the Laplace,” he said, referring to one of the Kemal’s two companion vessels. “I want them to jump back to the Second Fleet with this information. Place all System ships – all Reservation World listening stations – on high alert. We need to know the extent of this network immediately.”

  For a space of several heartbeats, the three ships of Tholan’s tiny expeditionary force hung in the darkness.

  Space sheered away, and then there were two.

  In that time Tholan reached another decision. The Clerke Maxwell was still on the other
side of the Fleet, and no contact had yet been made. But the situation had changed. Now there were additional Colonizer ships, which could, in theory, pull it back through those light-lines.

  For all Tholan knew, these stone-ships may have arrived specifically to capture the Clerke Maxwell. And if that happened, there would be no doubt that in addition to their apparent hold on the Bricks, the Colonizers would have a jump-set as well.

  “Do we have line-of-sight on the Clerke Maxwell from this location?” Tholan asked.

  The communications officer nodded.

  “Lock onto the signal,” Tholan ordered. He thought of Eleanor. “Send the appropriate command overrides to initiate Puppet-Master Protocol.”

  The Grave Worlds had been a trap from the beginning, a way for the Colonizers to capture the System technology they coveted. The Bricks were compromised, but there was no way in hell Tholan was going to let them take an active jump-set equipped ship as well.

  It was about vessels and technology now, hanging in the night.

  It was about bodies in motion.

  “Executive command: immediate self-destruct.”

  He cleared his throat.

  “Send.”

  Fifty-Three

  “Someone’s trying to kill you.”

  The voice, coming as it did from all directions, startled Donovan so badly he dropped the sample vials he was holding. Eleanor watched him with cool, unblinking eyes that still seemed impossibly wide.

  “Gods, Paul,” he breathed, kicking the broken pieces of glass under the res-pod in frustration. “You scared me.”

  “Sorry, Donovan.”

  “It worked,” Donovan said, when he got his breath back. “We thought – we thought you were dead.”

  Paul’s voice did not sound like that of a ghost’s. It was too loud, for one thing, coming over all the speakers in the science bay at once. “I don’t feel dead. Strange, yeah, but not dead. But listen: someone is trying to kill you.”

  Donovan glanced nervously at Eleanor, perched on the other side of the res-pod that held Davis’s body. From what he understood, she had plenty of reasons to hate and fear Davis. And Donovan had a few reasons to fear her as well.

  “Not just you, Donovan,” Paul’s voice continued. “All of you. Someone’s sending a message to the ship’s systems to self-destruct.”

  “You can hear that?” Donovan asked.

  “I’m not sure.” Paul paused. “It’s difficult, in here. I’m tied into the ship’s systems – I mean, the Brick is – and I’m learning them. Talking to them. But someone’s outside as well, sending this message.”

  “It’s Tholan,” Eleanor said. There was no uncertainty in her tone. “Those are his ships out there we detected. He won’t let this vessel fall into Colonizer hands.”

  “Well, block it then, Paul,” Donovan said. He felt he should be more nervous than he was about the ship’s potential destruction, but all he felt was the strangeness of talking to Paul when he had flash-frozen his body in the morgue only hours ago. “Can you do that?”

  “I have,” Paul answered evenly. “I did. Jens is on the bridge, trying to make contact with the System ships now.”

  “Does she know about the destruct command?”

  “Yes. I said that aloud to everyone, I think. I’m discussing communications possibilities with her now. Colonizer reinforcements have arrived.”

  Donovan glanced toward the ceiling. “Are you having multiple conversations at once, Paul?”

  Paul was quiet for a moment. “Maybe? I think so.”

  “I don’t think you’re quite human anymore.” He glanced across the pod at Eleanor, but her flawless face remained impassive.

  “What are you doing?” Paul asked.

  Donovan could only imagine what sort of perception Paul now had, conscious in the Brick and manifested simultaneously in multiple ships throughout the galaxy.

  “We’re trying to revive Davis,” Donovan explained.

  “Why?” Paul asked. “I thought he tried to kill her.”

  Donovan looked at Eleanor, waiting for her to respond. When she didn’t, he shrugged. “Beka’s orders. She wants as many available hands as possible.”

  Not that he was having any luck though. The cellular catalysts so effective at regenerating necrotic tissue had a hard time working alongside Davis’s own living cells. It was taking far too long to bring the nutrient matrices to the proper equilibriums for accelerated cell growth.

  “If I had months,” Donovan said, “I might be able to. But right now it’s just keeping him alive.”

  “I can see the res-pod system,” Paul said, “from the inside. I can see how it works.”

  Donovan closed his eyes wearily. “Of course you can, Paul.”

  Paul was silent for so long Donovan assumed he had withdrawn his attention. He bent back to his own work over the res-pod and Davis’s ruined form. It was Eleanor who finally broke the silence.

  “Do you see how to repair him, Paul?” she asked.

  “Finding the right matrices is a matter of trial and error,” Donovan began. “It would take weeks to even—”

  “I think so.” Paul’s response showed he had not gone far, though Donovan admitted he didn’t know where Paul could have gone. Paul was a presence now, a ghost haunting their machines. “I think I see how.”

  “Do it.” Eleanor’s voice was even, but her eyes were dangerous.

  Donovan considered arguing, but the res-pod immediately began to hum. The fluids surrounding Davis’s broken form drained away and were replaced. They surged, cycling back and forth, revealing and then obscuring Davis’s body as though he were the king of legend sleeping beneath a river of glass. The pod grew hot under Donovan’s hand.

  “What will you do if he wakes up?” Donovan asked Eleanor.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “He killed my entire crew. Punish him for that, I suppose.”

  Donovan’s unease grew. He watched the fluids swirling in the pod between them and thought of his own experiments on the Synthetics while they were sleeping. Did Eleanor know about that as well? He told himself he had only done what he needed to do to find them a way through the Fleet.

  “Donovan,” Paul asked suddenly. “Is it working?”

  Donovan peered at the displays, which showed a dizzying array of amino acids and Synthetic catalysts being created, applied, and then immediately discarded or modified.

  “It seems to be,” he said. The ragged flesh along Davis’s charred arm was already beginning to mend and knit itself over the weapon built onto the bone there. “Do you know what that is?” he asked Eleanor, pointing to it.

  She nodded slowly. “When it became clear we would be made illegal and exterminated, when we first went into hiding, there were teams of hunters who used these weapons to track us down. They were called seneschals.”

  “And he’s been hunting you this whole time?”

  Eleanor shrugged. “When most of us were destroyed – or had departed with the Colonizers – the seneschals were retired. Some believed, rightly, that more of us remained in hiding. They formed themselves into family guilds, passing down their secrets and their weapon from generation to generation. They believed they were safeguarding humanity against a hidden threat.”

  “Were they?”

  Eleanor met his gaze. “We want to exist.”

  “Donovan,” Paul interrupted. “I can’t see. What’s happening?”

  Donovan glanced back at the pod. “You’re doing it, Paul. I’ve never seen a regeneration propagated so quickly, even on a dead body.”

  “No,” Paul said. His voice sounded strained. “I can’t see anything. I can’t—Something’s happening.”

  “It’s the memories,” Eleanor whispered to Donovan. “Somewhere they’ve begun scanning soldiers. The effect will be rapid. Paul will run out of space.”

  “There are voices in here – frozen,” Paul said. “I’m in a room filling up with sand. I can’t move.”

  Donovan was list
ening, but his eyes were on what was happening beneath the lid of the pod. The fluid had cleared and drained away a final time. Davis now lay beneath the glass surface, scarred and still pale and sickly, but breathing shallowly.

  “You did it, Paul,” he said.

  “I led Cam to the girls,” Paul was saying, as though he could no longer hear Donovan. “I couldn’t reach them, but I led her there. Bring them home, Donovan.”

  “Okay, Paul,” Donovan promised. “I will.”

  “Bring them home, Donovan.”

  “I will, Paul.”

  “Bring them home, Donovan.”

  Eleanor put her fingers over her lips. “He’s collapsed into a static state,” she whispered. “Like a memory scan. There’s nothing left now but an image.”

  Paul’s voice came once more, but faded, stretched and deepened as though by distance.

  Donovan’s eyes went to the Brick in the corner of the chamber.

  “Is he still in there?” he asked.

  “A memory,” Eleanor said. “A broken scan. Too corrupted to pull back out.”

  “Then he’s gone.”

  She nodded.

  Davis stirred beneath the glass.

  Donovan walked to the wall and pressed the intercom for the command deck. “Has Beka returned from the surface?” Jens indicated a negative. “When she does, send her down. Paul’s gone, but Davis is waking up.”

  Fifty-Four

  Cam was not asleep, but she was no longer in the cavern at the center of the twisted planet. Instead, she stood on a world of sharply curving horizons. Ice cracked beneath her boots and tiny jets of vapor rose up around her. There were others near her as well, all wearing thinsuits of a bulky and antiquated make. Above were the spurs and rims of System, which meant she was on a comet or asteroid well off the ecliptic plane.

  She and the other figures stood in a ring around a central mound or low hill of serrated ice. Something lay buried at its base, something Cam sensed was wounded and frightened, although the other figures seemed unaware.

  She wanted to tell them to stop, that they should leave, turn around and forget this comet was here, wipe its location from their charts, but no matter how loudly she spoke, no one could hear her through the weight of her mask and the heaviness of the vacuum beyond.