First Fleet #1-4: The Complete Saga

by Stephen Case

  The Clerke Maxwell still had a complement of the armored, maneuverable combat heavy-suits Jens and her soldiers were trained on. Beka knew Jens’s remaining soldiers were standing by. She could pipe the distortion information into the heads-up displays of the heavy-suits. They could rescue Eleanor and Davis and guide the ships.

  But it was a minefield out there. And the mental influence of the ETI would be a constant threat.

  And Beka knew Jens wouldn’t allow her soldiers to do it alone.

  Don’t save us, Jens, Beka thought. I need you to save us, but please don’t do it.

  “Jens,” she whispered.

  It wasn’t quite an appeal. It wasn’t permission. But Jens took it as such. She nodded curtly, spun on her heel and left the deck.

  “What’s going on?” Tholan demanded.

  “We’re launching suits,” Beka said.

  Her voice did not crack. Her eyes were dry. Whether or not Jens made it back, Rine had been right: a part of Beka Grale was dead now.

  Fifty-Eight

  Space, if possible, had gone even madder around them.

  “Gods above,” Davis heard himself mutter – and wondered at the evident reverence in his own tone – when they saw the stone-ship sheer apart behind them.

  It snagged on something Davis realized with a dull surprise was the geometry of space itself. Then it was fragments of porcelain on an ebony floor, the fragments telescoped by distance so they appeared little more than dust. The dust was spreading, though, and soon they would be within the expanding debris cloud.

  “I can’t see the Hamilton,” Eleanor said.

  Davis could no longer recognize the Clerke Maxwell either. Their vista appeared the same in every direction, a twisting kaleidoscope of ships and fragments of ships and the wavering of starlight that was the only indication something was fundamentally wrong with the state of reality in this particular corner of the universe.

  “Hold on.”

  The voice was one Davis did not recognize. It was not Eleanor. He strained against her hold, trying to twist in space to look behind him.

  A figure approached through the chaos, appearing as abruptly as if space did not afford infinite lines of perspective in all directions. It was an angel of burnished steel and articulated armor, with extended weapon array spread behind it like pointed wings.

  As Davis watched, it fired a projectile at a spinning outrider from the stone-ship debris, expertly holding itself steady with an equal and opposite thrust.

  “Hold on,” the voice said again.

  A huge hand closed around Davis’s shoulder, the rubber finger-pads of the heavy-suit gripping the skin of his thinsuit. It held him lightly yet firmly and propelled him and Eleanor both along a new trajectory.

  “I can’t get any closer,” the figure explained. “You can make it the rest of the way.”

  The hulk of the Hamilton loomed up before them again, a hole gaping in its hull like a mouth waiting to swallow them both. The armored figure released them, and Eleanor pushed off expertly and maneuvered them through the breach.

  “Tell my sister—” the figure began, receding behind them, but the rest of its words were lost in a wave of interference. Then the heavy-suited soldier disappeared, jetting out of Davis’s sight.

  “There’s not enough rotation for false-grav,” Eleanor explained as they touched down on the ship’s inner surface. “Keep your boots magnetized.”

  Davis shrugged out of her grasp.

  “If there’s any power source remaining anywhere,” he said, “it will be in the science bay, near the Brick. Follow me.”

  The ship was full of bodies, most of them bloated and desiccated by vacuum exposure, though some had struggled into thinsuits before they died. Davis tried to stem his professional interest and not spend too much time examining their bodies. But he couldn’t help speculating out loud as they moved through the corridors.

  “I’m leaning toward Grale’s hypothesis,” he said, shuffling around a cluster of bodies locked together in a bizarre death grip, “that this isn’t a pathogen or even a directly biological effect. Imagine the effects of even minor spatial distortions on the neural structure of the human mind. Nerve endings, perception, emotion – they’re all electrochemical.”

  “So why does pain shield the effect?” Eleanor asked.

  Davis stumbled on, the burning in his knees making him clumsy. “I don’t know. Why aren’t Synthetics affected?”

  “Because we’re not alive.”

  Davis glanced backward but couldn’t tell if Eleanor was smiling behind her faceplate.

  “There’s an interesting parallel here, I’ll admit,” Davis continued, when they had moved deeper into the ship.

  He paused at a branching of the corridor, trying to determine in which direction the science bay most likely lay. “You and your kind were created to elicit certain responses in humans: empathy, trust, desire. By your nature, you make people respond in a particular way.”

  He paused again, and then chose the corridor branching left. “Whatever these things are, they do something similar. They elicit a response: madness, apparently. Terror. Death.”

  “Unintentionally.”

  Davis nodded but did not look back. “Being what you are remains your unforgiveable sin.”

  He stopped at a doorway, and this time he turned to look at her. “It doesn’t change the necessary response.”

  She moved as though to push past him, but he stopped her.

  “Wait,” he asked. “What if there is one on this ship?”

  Eleanor stared.

  “We don’t know how many of those creatures the Colonizers managed to breed on these ships. How many they sent back up in res-pods.” He waved a hand toward the door. “These ships are still dangerous, even though everyone on board is dead. There still’s something propagating the effect. If there is an ETI and there’s any power in the systems maintaining the Brick, it may have drawn it here.”

  Eleanor drew a small pistol from the holster at her hip.

  Davis gestured toward the door. “You go first.”

  “You are a coward,” she said evenly.

  “I’m not.” He shrugged. “I just know how to use my tools.”

  She keyed the entrance panel beside the door. When that did nothing, she handed the pistol to Davis and wedged her fingers into the crack where the doors came together. Davis could tell from the stance of her shoulders and chest she was straining, but her face remained impassive. Slowly, the doorway slid apart.

  The room beyond was dark.

  Eleanor took her gun back. “If we’re such useful tools,” she asked him, not bothering to hide a smirk, “why go to such trouble to destroy us?”

  Instead of answering, Davis flipped on the beam of his thinsuit helmet and gestured Eleanor into the room.

  Their beams played out into the darkness, revealing in quick succession the floor, walls, and ceiling of a large science bay almost identical to the one on the Clerke Maxwell. In one far corner of the bay, rearing up like a block of black ice, was the Brick. Davis hurried to it and dropped to his knees, checking the mass of wires and monitors clustered at its base.

  “It’s no good,” he said after a moment. “There’s no power here at all. The entire thing has been drained.”

  “And we didn’t see any other signs of power elsewhere on the ship,” Eleanor said. She still stood near the bay’s center, her light moving back and forth along the walls as she swept the room.

  “We could make our way down to the reactors,” Davis mused. “There might be power there, though it would probably take me a few hours to get them back online and generating.”

  “We don’t have a couple hours. You heard what Beka said. Space itself is getting brittle. This could all collapse into Sidespace at any moment.”

  Davis had only a moment’s warning of vertigo before something dark and massive fell from the ceiling onto Eleanor, knocking her over and sending her pistol skittering into the darkness.
>
  Davis tried to rise and direct his helmet beam at whatever had attacked, but it was as though the darkness itself had gathered into a twisted form. His light passed for a moment against something smooth and black, and then there was nothing but the far side of the room.

  For a moment he hesitated between Eleanor and the gun. She was stunned but trying to rise. The weapon lay somewhere out of sight to his right.

  The creature had disappeared.

  “Get the gun!” she called. Something was wrong with her voice.

  By the time he found the weapon, something was moving in the darkness again, and this time his beam found it directly. But it didn’t help. It was impossible to see, or perhaps just impossible to properly perceive.

  Davis had an impression of a black, twisted form, something with ill-proportioned limbs but roughly hominid. The form itself yawned like an emptiness, like the sensation of falling. It was as if the creature were more void than substance, as though Davis could only perceive the outline of an abyss that gathered itself and reached toward him.

  The feeling went out of his limbs, and with that, the pain.

  *

  Beka was alone with Rine in the command room, watching the storm of projected ships in the space before them. The holographic images of Tholan and Cam looked on, but Jens was gone and Donovan had disappeared as well. They waited, holding position in the center of the Fleet while the two remaining stone-ships continued their revolutions, battering through any twisted ships that drifted too close.

  Tiny purple flares darted among them as well, indicating the location of Jens and her half-dozen suited soldiers. They weaved among the ships and distortion fields. The stone-ships lumbered behind them, picking out the trail they blazed.

  “How long have they been out there?” Beka asked.

  Rine glanced down at a display. “Twelve minutes.”

  “It’s too long. They don’t have any pain treatments, and they’re getting too close to the ships.”

  “Jens will be fine,” Rine said evenly.

  “Davis should have triggered the device by now.”

  Beka bent inward toward the holographic projection, her knuckles white against the edge of the table. Rine still paced, but his voice was soothing and suspiciously devoid of anxiety. Beka realized he was using his bedside manner, speaking as he would to a patient whom he needed to simply hold on a while longer.

  “Two more minutes,” Beka said, glancing at Tholan. “I’ll keep them out there for two more minutes, and if Davis hasn’t triggered the device, we’ll pull them back and fight our way out.”

  Cam spoke to someone outside the field of view. Then she looked back into the room where Beka waited.

  “Perry says we’re out of time.”

  *

  As the pain faded from his arm, reality yawed sideways.

  Something slammed into the creature. In the beam of Davis’s light he could see a flurry of shadow and the flash of Eleanor’s thinsuit. He fired once, twice, three times into the whirling mass, not caring whether he hit the creature or both of them.

  There was a shriek that seemed to rip through the very molecules of the deck plates and walls around them, and then there was only Eleanor alone lying on the ground. Davis ran to her side.

  “You hit me,” she said.

  “And the creature too, apparently,” he answered.

  She was right, though. Fluid seeped from a gaping hole in her thinsuit’s side, too large for the suit to automatically seal.

  “It hit me pretty hard when it fell,” Eleanor said. “And now this.”

  Davis leaned over her and examined the wound. “You’re not going to remain functional much longer.”

  “Do you know why I wanted to come?” she asked.

  “I don’t care.” Davis peeled back the fabric of her thinsuit to reveal more of her skin beneath. He took a few tools from the satchel at his side and began cutting at the fabric on his own arm.

  “You do. You’re curious.”

  “I don’t.” He took two thin cables from the bag. Both were tipped at each end with narrow metal points. He pushed them into Eleanor’s wound.

  She screamed in simulated pain.

  He gritted his own teeth and pulled the fabric of his thinsuit away, exposing the skin of his arm. “You’re going to be my power source,” he explained. “We don’t have time to get to the reactors, and that thing may come back.”

  Eleanor’s voice was ragged. “I came because I thought it was the right thing to do.”

  Davis took a deep breath and plunged the needle-tipped cables into his own upper arm. He pushed them in as far as he could and stopped.

  “I can’t do it,” he gasped, pulling one of her hands to his arm. “You need to push them in the rest of the way, until they reach the device.”

  “Do you understand me?” she asked. Her voice had strengthened. She did as Davis asked, pushing until Davis felt the needles bite against the metal of the device. He bit his own lips against a scream.

  “Do you understand?” Eleanor asked again. “I told Beka. I made a choice. I can do that.”

  “You’re an artificial intelligence,” Davis said.

  He took a deep breath and spoke the commands in his mind to trigger the EM pulse device. The power cell he had linked to in Eleanor’s abdominal cavity would have to serve the purpose that any power supply found on board would have.

  “It was never a question of whether or not you were sentient, whether or not you had freedom of choice. It’s simply not relevant,” he added.

  “It was to us.”

  Davis felt the familiar thrum of the device building to a crescendo. Even if, for some reason, the pulse itself spared Eleanor, its rapid drain on her power cell would soon render her inactive.

  “You’re a thinking machine, Eleanor.”

  The device in his arm was growing hot. In a moment it would be charged enough to emit the pulse.

  She laughed softly, mockingly. “You just named me.”

  “You’re not alive.”

  When she said nothing, he glanced up. Her eyes were still open, but her face was frozen and inert, like a mask.

  He felt the device trigger a moment later.

  It may have been his imagination, but when it did, he thought he felt an answering shudder from the ship beneath, as though it had momentarily stirred into wakefulness.

  Davis pulled the cables from his arm with a wrenching groan and stood. It was done. He felt sluggish, but for now the discharge seemed to have had no worse effect on him than a wave of nausea. He had never triggered it at such a high intensity; perhaps he would survive this after all. With any luck, Tholan now had command of the Fleet and was steering it toward the gateway ripped in the sky to receive them.

  The ache in his limbs was fading, but the puncture in his arm still sang with pain and the cold gnawed into his exposed skin. He rose and turned.

  The creature stood in the circle of his light.

  Davis had enough time to raise his weapon, and then it was upon him.

  *

  The projected images of the ships blurred for a moment, and the lights aboard the Clerke Maxwell flickered.

  “Davis has triggered the device,” Tholan snapped. His own face was obscured for a moment as well as the EM pulse ripped through their communication circuits. “You should have a clear conduit into the Fleet ship systems now. I’m sending the commands to you.”

  Beka’s gaze locked on her own display. Out of the corner of her view, she tried to keep track of the number of purple threads still weaving through the ruins of the Fleet. She could see only four at the moment. Where were the others?

  She pushed the thought of her sister aside and, using the Clerke Maxwell’s communication relays, routed Tholan’s command out into the Fleet. The command was simple: an order to converge on a single set of coordinates, which corresponded to just beyond the location of the rift still yawning in space above them.

  Even as she sent it, the rift started to
unravel.

  Cam’s image disappeared from view. Beka could hear young voices in the background shouting something.

  “Not much time,” Cam barked when she returned. “I don’t know what the creature is doing, but the girls say it can’t last any longer.”

  Where were the violet threads now? The command appeared to be working. The cloud of green dots drifting in the projection above the table were slowly orienting themselves – rising, drifting – like motes of dust in an updraft.

  “The ships have activated their engines,” Rine confirmed, studying a separate display. “It appears to be working.”

  “You need to get out of there,” Tholan warned.

  They had carved out space at the center of the ruined Fleet, but now the ships were moving in mass. The Clerke Maxwell sat for a moment at the eye of a storm. This would soon become the center of a river, though, with the ships rising around them toward the rift above.

  “Order the soldiers back to the Clerke Maxwell,” Beka told Rine.

  She still searched the display. It was nearly impossible to make out the forms of the stone-ships, lost as they were in a blizzard of green markers. In and among them were flashes of purple marking the locations of the heavy-suited soldiers.

  “She is not responding,” Rine said. He looked flustered. “That is, she is in communication, but she says she will not order her soldiers back to the ship.”

  Beka brushed past him and stabbed a button to open a direct line to Jens’s suit.

  “Jens,” she yelled. “You’ve got to get back here. There are too many ships.”

  Jens voice came through an angry storm of static. “… guiding you out! Not coming … until you’re safe.”

  “This is an order!”

  “Negative … no authority.”

  Beka whirled toward the image of Tholan, imagining perhaps she could convince him to order Jens back to the ship, but like Jens’s audio signal, his holographic image was blurring in and out of focus.

  The ship lurched. For the next several minutes, Beka’s attention was absorbed with piloting the Clerke Maxwell between the passing ships and their attendant distortion fields. She didn’t notice Donovan’s return.