First Fleet #1-4: The Complete Saga (10 page)

P
aul could sense immediately
that something was very wrong. The habitation was empty. Usually the girls met him at the interior airlock when he returned from lengthier away trips. The second crawler was still in dry dock, so they hadn’t left in that. There was no sign that someone else had arrived. They were simply gone.

“Station,” Paul said to himself. “They must have taken the car up to Station.”

Though he couldn’t imagine why they would. The body was up there, and the resupply ship would be arriving soon.. He pulled up an interior monitor and checked the scans.

No. The body was there, but Cam and the girls were not.

What the hell was going on?

“Cam!” he yelled aloud. “Agnes! Perry!”

He walked through the empty rooms of the habitation. Their clothes were gone. The girls’ drawings and art supplies had disappeared from the kitchen table. It was like they had never been there.

It was like they never existed.

Station. The attic. The body. There would be some clue up there. This was tied to that damned pod somehow, Paul was sure. He boarded the elevator and keyed its ascent, then sat in a kind of stupor and listened to the whine of its cable reels as it rose to the tethered station. His mind was spinning.

Had the body in the pod awakened already? Had the supply ship arrived early, and had the girls left with it? Cam would have left a note for him, a message, something. Strangely, Paul was more frustrated and angry than scared. They were somewhere. They were probably safe. He’d find them unexpectedly. But he was angry that Cam would leave without telling him. She often made decisions like this—though, Paul admitted, that he often preferred that she take charge—and only later would double back and explain to Paul the how and the why. But with the twins as well?

“Welcome back, Cam.”

Paul looked around as Station’s airlock slid open and he floated into the main compartment. Cam was not inside.

“Station, where is Cam?” he asked.

The sterile, white room was as empty as it had been the last time he ascended, though the pod still took up the corner.

“I don’t understand,” the placid voice answered. “You are here, sir.”

“Damn it, Station. I don’t have time for this. Where is my wife? Where are the girls?”

“Cam, you are the only inhabitant of this terraforming habitation. You are a Caucasian male, of North American descent, unmarried and with no children.”

The face of the dead man behind the glass was mended. Paul slammed his hand against the curved surface of the pod. For half a moment, he thought he saw the body’s eyelids flicker. The impulse of his movement pushed him toward the center of the room, where he revolved slowly, fuming at the white walls as though Station’s intelligence waited beyond them, taunting him.

“She’s reprogrammed you, hasn’t she? That beautiful, conniving genius. She’s messed with your systems. But why?”

“I don’t understand your question, Cam. My systems are functioning normally.”

“My name is Paul Twalish, damn it!”

“Your name is Cam Dowager.”

If she had modified the systems on Station, what else had she done? She could have re-written half the files in the habitation’s database. Hell, she could have altered the displays of the scanners to mask their presence. They might simply have been hiding in one of the rooms below, waiting for him to pass through and leave. But why?

There was a reason. Cam always had a reason.

“There’s a ship approaching, Cam,” the Station said.

He looked out the nearest porthole. Cam would have been able to identify it by the outline of its profile against the stars. All that Paul could tell was that it was large and shark-like and certainly military.

“My name is Paul,” Paul muttered again.

This was what Cam had been afraid of, that the military would arrive and find her here. That she would be implicated in the pod’s presence, somehow. That it would mean her past catching up with her.

“Station,” Paul said. The bulk of the approaching ship now filled most of his view outside the porthole. “I want you to record a message. If anyone comes in here from the habitation after I’m gone, I want you to play this message back to them.”

“All right, Cam,” it answered. “Ready to record.”

“It’s me. The ship’s coming for the pod, which is what you were worried about, and I’m sure you know that.” He sighed. “I wish you would have trusted me. I wish you would have explained what was going on, what you’re afraid of and why you and the girls are hiding. I wish you had confided in me, told me what you want me to do. I think I know though. I’m not angry. I love you.”

There was a loud, muffled clang as the huge ship outside latched onto the comparatively tiny shape of the station.

“They want in, Cam,” Station interrupted him. “They’re trying to access the supply hatch.”

That was the large airlock that the supply ship used to fill Station. It dominated an entire side of the room that was Station’s interior.

“Fine.” Paul sighed again. “Did you get that message? All of it?”

“Yes, Cam.”

“Please save it then. Are they tight against the hatch?”

“Yes, Cam.”

He had removed his thinsuit’s helmet when he stepped into Station. He kept it at the ready now.

“Open the door.”

The wall hissed open, sliding backward and rolling away to reveal a cargo airlock of the outer ship. There were two figures on the other side, holding onto the rungs at the airlock’s sides. They both held some weapons as well, some sort of short pistols that Paul knew Cam would have been able to identify, probably even disarm and disassemble.

When they saw that his helmet was off, one of the figures lowered its weapon and unlocked its own helmet. It pulled the helmet off, and Paul saw that it was a woman. She was older than him but strikingly handsome, with long dark hair held secure against zero gravity in a tight braid.

“I have your body,” Paul said. His own feet were locked in a rung on Station’s floor, which left his hands free for him to raise over his head. “You can take it.”

“Who are you?” the woman asked.

“My name is Cam Dowager,” he said, “And I think you should probably arrest me.”

B
eka was
in the bay with her team and the Brick when they brought in the body. Eleanor and one of her officers floated it in, accompanied by a man Beka had never seen. He was tall but un-uniformed and apparently ill at ease finding himself beside the martial bearing of Eleanor and her officer. He looked at everything with a tired, irresolute air, as though he were accepting some kind of defeat.

“Who is he?” Davis barked.

The officers ignored him and maneuvered the pod—a polished coffin of steel and glass—to a corner of the bay where it rested in the shadow of the Brick. Here was a body finally, waiting, with its memories close enough to touch.

“This,” Eleanor said, pointing at the man who had accompanied them, “is a deserter we found hiding on the Terraforming station. His name is Cam Dowager, and he claims the body just showed up on his doorstep. And this,” she continued, motioning to the pod, “is someone we’d like you to identify for us. Aggiz?”

Aggiz looked at Davis, who nodded. “We’ll interface the system with the res-pod. That should give us an identification.”

Beka walked over to the pod. Cam was standing beside it, clearly uncertain where he should be or what he should be doing.

It was the first time Beka had seen a res-pod. Her sister had told her about them, had explained the entire process to her and her parents when she first enlisted. Beka tried to imagine Jens sleeping beneath the glass—a new Jens, a Jens re-grown from some sliver of genetic material. A Jens as a blank slate, with a mind as empty and yielding as that of the blanks they had destroyed trying to answer their overriding questions.

The body in this pod was not Jens. It was a man, heavy in the face with a high forehead. Beyond that it was hard to tell more.

“I don’t recognize him,” Tsai-Liu said. He walked up to stand beside her. “I thought perhaps—when we finally found a body—it would be someone that I knew. I don’t know why it should have been. There were thousands of people in the Fleet.”

“Yes, ah, here he is,” Aggiz broke in. He read from the monitor at his station near the Brick. “He’s Elias Donovan, according to the records. His neural image—his consciousness—was uploaded into the Brick late into operations. Very late, actually. He’s the newest set of memories we have from the Fleet, a couple days after the rest went dark.”

“He’s a survivor,” Eleanor said. She was now leaning over the pod too. “What ship?”

“The
Mountstuart Elphinstone
.” Aggiz said the name three times before he settled on a pronunciation. “He’s a medic.”

“Not an officer?”

Aggiz shook his head.

“How did he end up out here?”

All eyes turned to Cam, who seemed to shrink under their collective gazes. He raised his hands, palms up. “It just found its way, I guess. I found it in the attic—in Station. It arrived a couple weeks ago.”

“And you didn’t think to alert anyone?” Eleanor asked him.

“I didn’t want the attention.” He scratched the back of his neck and looked away. “With my… background,” he finished weakly, as if this fact explained something.

Eleanor clicked her tongue with disgust and turned back to the pod. They studied the face under the glass in silence.

“So, what now?” Davis finally asked. “A memory dump, or take him back to the Admiral like we were ordered to?”

“We’ll take him back. Tholan and his staff want to be there when he’s revived.”

“Fine.” Davis’s voice was clear and cold. “You have your body now. And maybe it will give us some answers. But we don’t know for sure, though we do know now whose memories we can’t tap in our attempts with the synthetics. So, may we continue our work?”

Eleanor met his eyes over the glass of the res-pod. They were on opposite sides, with Beka and Tsai-Liu at the body’s feet and the new man, Cam, near the head.

Beka held her breath.

Eleanor tapped the glass of the pod with one elegantly manicured finger. Davis waited, holding her gaze. Finally, she sighed and broke eye contact, her gaze coming to rest instead on Beka.

“You think this is something you are doing to others,” she said softly, and Beka realized she was talking about their work on the synthetics. “But you’re doing it to yourself. Every time you cause pain. Every time you kill. It costs you something of yourself.” She turned away. “I’ll have another synthetic brought in.”

Davis snorted when the door shut behind her.

“She sympathizes with them,” Tsai-Liu said. “That doesn’t prove anything, Davis. They
are
sentient.”

“But not alive.” Davis turned to Cam, whom Eleanor and the other officer had left behind. “What the hell are you still doing here?”

Cam shrugged, a gesture that seemed as deeply a part of him as the wide paleness of his eyes. “Nowhere to go, I suppose. I guess I’ll get a court martial or whatever when we get to where we’re going. Which is?”

“A shipyard,” Beka said. Cam stared at her blankly, and Beka realized she had no idea how to explain where it was. Space was like that. She could say it was orbiting a white dwarf star, but that would be pretty useless as well. “It’s a military installment. Somewhere pretty far out the light lines.”

“Get my tools ready, Tsai-Liu,” Davis interrupted, “and we’ll find out whether she is going to keep her word or she’s still stalling.”

Beka went back to the monitors beside Aggiz and called up the information from their last attempt. She found that her hands were shaking, and she couldn’t tell whether it was from the thought of attempting their procedure once again or the feeling that the potential answers to their questions were so close at hand.

The memories had waited for weeks, bound up in the cascade of particles. They could wait, or so they all imagined, for a few hours more.

They were dead wrong.

T
holan sat
with his back against the stars and stared at the schematics in front of him. A modeled projection of the
Grenada
hung in the air above his desk, a muted grey-blue color in the light of the million tiny suns that poured through the large windows behind him. It was gone too, like every other ship in the Fleet. How did one wrap one’s mind around it? They were dropping down a hole, one by one, and at the end of the day there was only one person who would be held responsible for all of them.

Tholan sighed heavily. He should have argued harder against the operation. There had been too many uncertainties, but they had direly needed a large, decisive victory against the Colonizers. It was inconceivable that an overwhelming assault by the First Fleet would have resulted in anything other than capitulation.

And now those ships were gone, joined by this most recent casualty.

Tholan forced himself to read through the
Grenada
’s tiny crew manifest. Half a dozen additional soldiers that now lived on only in the recorded information within the Brick. Half a dozen more ghosts in the machine.

A panel on Tholan’s desk turned a soft crimson. Tholan touched it.

“Admiral, this is Valdez. I’m down in the bay where Davis’s team was working.”

“What is it?”

“It’s the Brick, sir.” The voice sounded strained, almost strangled. “It’s being erased.”

By the time the admiral reached the laboratory bay, it was nearly finished. There was no sign in the appearance of the Brick itself. It retained its impassive black and featureless surface where it was visible between the loops of coolant cable and adjunct machinery. But it was now surrounded by personnel standing as helpless as horrified spectators around a house fire.

“How is this even possible?” Tholan barked to no one in particular.

“We don’t know.” Valdez stood at the center of a knot clustered around the monitors where Aggiz and Beka usually worked. “It shouldn’t be possible. There are fail safes built in to protect against this very thing.”

“Are the other Bricks mirroring this?” Tholan forced his voice to remain steady. Losing the ships of the Fleet was one thing; losing the memories and personalities of every officer who had served on them was something entirely different.

“They mirror everything,” Valdez whispered.

They watched the monitors representing the data stored within the Brick. Usually they were a jumble of equations and a bright pink and blue network illustrating the structure of the data within the device. As Tholan watched, those equations disappeared one by one and the filigree representation flickered out a branch at a time. It was like watching someone unweave a tapestry, thread by thread.

“Who could be doing this?”

Valdez shook his head mutely.

“And every other Brick reflecting the same changes,” Tholan mused darkly. “Every Brick in the universe, matching itself . . .” He straightened suddenly and shoved a silent scientist away from the console.

“Command deck,” he growled, punching some buttons. “How many Bricks do we have traveling via the light lines right now?”

There was silence for a moment, and then: “Just one, sir. The
Clerke Maxwell
is en route, back to the shipyard.”

“Get me Eleanor on the line. Right now.”

P
erhaps a quarter
of an hour had passed since Eleanor had left them and the sleeper in the lab bay, when the bay doors hissed open and she came back through them at almost a run. She was accompanied by four officers this time. Beka still had not mastered the knack of determining rank by the subtle trappings of uniform cut or insignia, but it seemed to her that this must be a good chunk of the command crew of the
Clerke Maxwell
.

“We’re dumping the sleeper,” she said, snapping her fingers at Aggiz. “Get the memory dump ready. Now.”

“What the hell—?” Davis began, but Eleanor cut him off.

“Transmission from Tholan. Someone—something—is draining the Bricks.
Draining
them. Wiping clean. All of them.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Dump it, Aggiz. Now!”

“Hold on, Aggiz!” Davis snapped. “You don’t have to take orders from her.”

Aggiz’s eyes were wide. His fingers hovered over the command board that controlled the Brick’s memory access.

“This is a direct order from Tholan, Davis.” Beka had never seen Eleanor look angry, and surely not anything close to frightened before. But now, she stood opposite to Davis, not quite his equal in height but nonetheless seeming to stare down at him. Her entire countenance radiated command, but it was tinged with fear. Beka felt a grudging admiration for Davis’s stubbornness that allowed him to stand his ground against it. “The moment we drop off the light line, the instant we hit real space again, our Brick goes dead. We lose them, Davis. We lose them all! Fifteen thousand people!”

“If Tholan’s right, Davis, that would happen.” Beka felt she had to add something. “It doesn’t make sense, someone being able to wipe a single Brick, but if you wipe one you wipe them all.”

“Shut up, Grale!”

Eleanor looked past him. “Do it, Aggiz.”

“Don’t do it, Aggiz. This is the crisis she’s been waiting for. A reason to not go back to Tholan. I don’t think you care anything about the First Fleet, Eleanor. You want the information in that body, you want to circumvent the chain of command, and you want to save your Synthetics.” Davis’s voice rose. “You don’t want the Fleet. You want the Colonizers. You think this is a way to find the Prototype—”

When Eleanor’s blow came it was so fast that Beka’s eye couldn’t follow. There was a crack like dry wood splintering as the flat of Eleanor’s hand connected with Davis’s jaw.

Davis was on the floor, cursing and spitting blood, and then several things happened simultaneously. One of the officers moved past Beka and pushed Aggiz out of the way, then tapped several keys in quick succession. The lid of the res-pod clicked open as the memory dump commenced. Cam stepped toward the pod, and another of Eleanor’s officers grabbed him by the wrist and pulled him backward.

Beka, in that exact moment, thought it was odd that there should be no sound. She wanted something, some tone or chime, some sound of wind moving through the Brick like a breeze stirring on a black sea, to somehow signal the memory transfer. She knew it was irrational; the information now flowing into a neural map perfectly sculpted to receive it was as silent as any other data transfer. But she wanted something nonetheless. Something more than Davis’s muttered cursing, which had become something else. He was speaking quickly under his breath, a staccato burst of harsh syllables. They sounded like a code of some sort.

“Davis, what are you—?”

Eleanor screamed. It was so abrupt and unexpected that Beka nearly screamed herself. The scream did not cut off, but instead rose higher. Eleanor was pressing her palms against her eyes and then her ears. The officers that had accompanied her were screaming as well. Beka held her own ears against the bloodcurdling screams.

Davis had risen shakily to his feet. He was silent now, but there was a glow coming from his right forearm, and Beka remembered it was the arm he had cradled when he spoke earlier about “precautions.” Bands of light under the flesh were pulsing, racing like luminous bracelets down his arm, over and over, to a circle of light on his palm, which he now held extended toward the screaming officers before him.

They were on their knees. One had fallen to his side and was kicking feebly, like a poisoned animal.

“Stop it, Davis!” Tsai-Liu bellowed. “You’re killing them!”

It took Beka a moment longer than it had Tsai-Liu to realize that no one else in the room was affected and what this meant.

“They’re not alive!” Davis’s face was twisted, either with pain or triumph, it was impossible to tell.

Beka moved. Eleanor was dying. A liquid that looked something like tears was running from her eyes and nose. Beka moved to the officer that had pushed Aggiz from the monitors and dropped down beside him. He was twitching feebly, his face a wet, writhing mask. He no longer looked human. She pulled the sidearm from the holster at his waist, drew a bead on Davis’s arm, and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened.

Davis was standing over Eleanor now. Her screams were fading away.