First Fleet #1-4: The Complete Saga (13 page)

What was this place?

Suddenly, something caught her from behind and blew out the pistons in both of her leg units. Her suit crashed forward, and she tasted blood.

Any minute
, she thought,
the pod will evac. I’ll wake up again on one of the med ships.

Forms were swarming over the outside of her suit, hammering at the exterior. She activated her engagement foils, but there wasn’t enough power in her upper arm units to do more than flail the huge blades at her attackers. They fell back for a moment, and she felt another shuddering concussion as another surge of mortar fire destroyed her shoulder units.

They were grappling the pod out of the ruins of her suit now. In another moment, they would shatter the screens and pull her out. She keyed for an automatic evac and felt the pod begin to lurch. Something hit it again. Everything went black.

I’m dead
, she thought.
Again
.

W
eeks
after the assault on the Grave Worlds failed and the Fleet was lost, Beka Grale sat at the helm of the warship
Clerke Maxwell
and surveyed the wreckage of the First Fleet. The
Maxwell
was home to a rather ragtag crew. There were four other humans aboard beside herself: Tsai-Liu and Aggiz (the remaining members of her team), Paul (the prisoner Eleanor had picked up from the planet), and Donovan--the only known survivor of the First Fleet. There were also a dozen comatose Synthetics on the ship.

She sat with Donovan now, looking for patterns.

The assault on the Colonizer planets in the Perseus Limb had ended in complete defeat. Her sister, as Beka had been informed, was most likely dead. Records indicated that the conflict on and below the surfaces of the planetoids had lasted several days; yet somehow the Colonizers had not only defeated the ground forces but also infected and neutralized the entire supporting armada as well.

And all that Command had to go on now to piece together the riddle of this disaster were the scanned memories of fifteen thousand soldiers stored in the Brick. Beka had been summoned from System to disentangle those memories and extract information about the Fleet’s fate.

She had failed miserably.

Memories could not be retrieved from the Brick without a host, and it seemed that there was not a single survivor from the debacle. Despite the best efforts of Beka and her team, they could not find a way to tap the memories without a re-grown template of the minds from which they had been extracted.

In the end, their only success had come through finding a single body, killed in the hours before all the ships went dark and ejected into space. His memories were the only way to possibly shed some light on what had happened in the skies over the Grave Worlds.

Beka glanced at their survivor, Elias Donovan, across the command deck where he sat, hunched in the command chair. He caught her gazing at him. His memories were what had brought the
Clerke Maxwell
and its unlikely crew here to the Fleet’s last known location.

“I’ve just figured something out,” he said.

“What?” she asked, noting how distant his voice sounded.

“Normally a ship like this would have a hundred sets of eyes and ears.” He looked around the cavernous command deck that held only the two of them. They were nearly lost amidst rows of panels and displays, many dimmed but dozens still blinking information from the ship’s stations and sensors. “But now it’s just us.”

“I know that. Did you figure anything else out?” Her eyes drifted back to the holographic display in front of her, to the shifting maze of light that delineated the location of the various derelict ships of the Fleet.

“I know you blame me for stranding us here. But I’m a doctor. I was only preventing the spread of infection.”

“We’re light years from anywhere, Donovan,” she answered, keeping her voice steady. “You convinced us to collapse the light-line behind us. We’re marooned. It would take a hundred years to get to any nearby settlement at relativistic speeds.”

“I know.” He pointed at a display in front of him. “But that’s what I’ve just realized: There is someone alive down there.”

She looked back up. “’Down’ as down in the Grave Worlds?”

He nodded.

“How do you know?”

“Because there’s a beacon,” he said. “We’d picked up the signal for a while, but the ship’s AI didn’t pay any attention to it. It’s a frequency-modulated signal, something we haven’t used in centuries.”

“They’re definitely Colonizers,” Beka said. “They’re three centuries behind the rest of the galaxy.”

“Right. But it means that someone is still alive down there. Maybe there are survivors from the Fleet as well.”

She turned back to the display projected above her console, thinking.

It wasn’t like they had anywhere else to go. Without a light-line terminal, space yawned out around them endlessly. But getting to the Grave Worlds would mean passing through the remains of the Fleet. And passing unscathed was the challenge.

“The ships aren’t drifting,” she said slowly. “Even adjusting for random initial trajectories, their motions don’t fit any orbital parameters. They’re moving intentionally. Something is controlling them. I don’t know how we can break through to even get to those planets.”

Donovan rubbed a hand across his weathered face. His visage had been young and unlined when he awoke from the res-pod in the
Clerke Maxwell
’s science bay, but the memories he had inherited immediately upon waking had aged him visibly. He looked tired, but there was something more there as well.

It took Beka--who had difficulty reading anything without numbers attached to it--days to realize that it was terror, tightly restrained. Donovan had served as a medic on one of the Fleet’s medical frigates. He was still terrified of what he had seen on board before he was killed and his body ejected.

Yet he was the one who had compelled them to come to the Fleet’s last coordinates, to collapse the light-line and prevent whatever had decimated the Fleet from spreading to the rest of the galaxy.

Donovan was a doctor, but Beka was an entanglement expert. She knew patterns. She understood the shifting systems of data and coding that translated human consciousness into dancing particles stored in the Brick. That understanding of hers had brought her from System to attempt retrieval of the Fleet’s memories.

But now the Brick was empty and because the Brick was quantum tethered, because every Brick mirrored every other Brick, they were all empty. Now that the Fleet’s memories were gone, she wondered vaguely what function she could serve.

So she studied the swarming dots of the derelict ships, hoping they might spell out a clue. Hoping she could find a pattern.

Donovan touched her shoulder, startling her so badly that she flinched.

“Beka,” he said, “you need to
sleep
. We don’t have enough on board to stand double shifts. And we don’t know how long before another one of those . . .
ships
will come into range.”

His voice broke on the word, the fear rising up for a moment to grasp at his throat. The ships, the ghost ships. The entire Fleet was still out there, but from what they could tell—and from what Donovan believed—they were all devoid of human life. There were no life sign readings. There were no answers to communications.

Beka shuddered and rose. “Fine,” she said. “Fine, I’m going.”

Donovan placed his hand on her shoulder a second time. “Don’t forget this.” He held out a thin plastic vial topped with a tiny needle, a standard medical injection pen. “In case another comes within range.”

Beka reached for the syringe as though it were a snake coiled up in Donovan’s hand. “Will it work?” she asked.

“It should.”

Beka nodded. Pain was the only thing that blocked the psychic influence exerted by whatever was on those ships. They had been lucky during their first encounter.

She took a deep breath and nodded again.

“Inflammation,” Donovan said. “That’s all it’ll be. You’ll feel like you have a serious case of arthritis.” He pushed the syringe toward her. “I’ll alert you if anything comes into range.”

Beka walked to the doorway of the command deck. “I’ll sleep,” she told him. “I will, really. But first I’m going to go check on Tsai-Liu.”

She left the command deck with its cavernous walls of illuminated monitors and descended to the exterior levels of the spinning ship. Their vessel was now a tangled network of quarters, docking bays, and various ancillary chambers that in normal operations would have hummed with life. But when it departed from the shipyard with Beka and her team, it had carried only a skeleton crew and their numbers were even fewer now.

There was a reason Beka did not want to sleep. Whenever she closed her eyes, she vividly saw the horror from days earlier. She saw Davis, the scientist who had been their steady team leader in the science bay, his arm engulfed in green flames and the Synthetic Eleanor writhing on the floor at his feet.

When Beka dreamed, she saw herself, over and over again, pulling the trigger of a weapon aimed at Davis. Flames licked at Davis’s face. Eleanor watched them both with glass eyes and the melting countenance of a wax doll held too close to the flames.

Beka shook her head and walked farther down the empty, curving corridor.

Paul, the vagabond they had picked up from the world where they had found Donovan’s body, shared quarters with Donovan on this level. Beka had an entire barracks to herself one level deeper. Aggiz, the scientist who had been Beka’s partner on the memory project, would not leave the Brick and Tsai-Liu, the last member of their team, was confined to quarters here. She reached his door and knocked softly. When there was no answer, she keyed the door’s release and stepped inside.

“Tsai-Liu? It’s me, Beka.”

His soft reply came from somewhere in the darkness.

Had the
Clerke Maxwell
embarked with full crew compliment, this might have been the captain’s quarters. The room was wide and open with curving furniture of a soft, polished wood Beka could not identify. Tsai-Liu was lying on his back on a polished kidney-shaped table near the center of the chamber. The room’s lights brightened as she entered.

“Beka,” he said, “are the others gone?”

It was difficult for her to meet his eyes. Tsai-Liu was the oldest member of the team. When they had come together to pull memories from the Brick, his eyes had been soft and deep, yet also weathered, bright, like stones polished by years and wisdom. They were empty and wandering now.

“The others, Tsai-Liu?” Beka asked.

He rose from the table and shuffled away from her, deeper into the chamber.

“The ones out there. The ones . . . in . . .” His voice faded out. Beka sighed.

Donovan kept him locked in these quarters not because he was dangerous, but because he would wander the ship aimlessly. They had all been affected by their first encounter with one of the Fleet’s ghost ships. But unlike the rest of them, Tsai-Liu’s mind never recovered.

“Do you need anything, Tsai-Liu?” she asked.

“The rubber people,” he said, still on the other side of the room. Beka walked toward him.

“What?”

“The rubber people,” he repeated. “Are they still there?”

“The Synthetics,” Beka nodded. “We moved them all into one of the barracks, remember? Davis’s weapon—his kill-switch—seems to have overridden their higher functions. They’re still catatonic.” His uncomprehending eyes blinked at her.

She continued, pretending she did not see the emptiness in his gaze. “Eleanor will cry out sometimes. Unless Donovan can resuscitate Davis or figure out what he did to them, I don’t know if they’ll ever recover.”

“A ship full of rubber people,” Tsai-Liu giggled.

Of all the things that had happened to Beka over the past few weeks—from the report of her sister’s death to their eventual marooning among the wreckage of the Fleet—the fact that the
Clerke Maxwell
had been crewed by a hand-picked staff of Synthetics was the hardest for her to comprehend. Synthetics had been outlawed and assumed to be extinct for generations, and yet here they were, a whole group of them apparently functional and hiding within the structure of the military itself. The one person who had shown—or appeared to show—true kindness to Beka at the shipyards had herself been a Synthetic named Eleanor, a three-hundred-year-old human facsimile.

And Davis, the leader of Beka’s team, had possibly destroyed them all.

“Your medicine, Tsai-Liu,” Beka said, pointing to where a syringe sat on another burnished table near the door. “If Donovan sends out the alarm, if another one of those ships approaches, you need to inject it yourself. I might not get here in time to do it for you.”

“Rubber faces,” he muttered.

“It will hurt, but it will be worse if you don’t take it.”

The older man lay back down on the table.

“I’ll bring you breakfast when I wake up,” she told him.

He ignored her.

Beka moved to the wide, sloping window display along the chamber’s farthest wall. It was not a real window. An actual view would have been spinning dizzily as the ship rotated to generate its centripetal gravity. It was instead fixated on a steady exterior projection, lifelike enough that it felt to Beka as if she were gazing through the bulkheads of the ship into the calm and still night beyond.

Tsai-Liu stirred. “Where are we going?”

“Through the Fleet, into the Grave Worlds.” Beka touched the display at the corner of the screen and swung the view so it showed everything directly ahead of the ship. “Donovan detected a signal. There may be survivors of the initial assault. ”

The old man did not say anything.

“I gave Donovan a flight-path that I’ve calculated as the lowest risk of intercepting one of those ships.” She paused, looking out into the darkness. There was nothing to see. “But it’s like trying to navigate through a snowstorm without touching a flake. Maybe I could do it, given enough time. And if I knew how the wind was blowing. But these ships--”

“Creep,” Tsai-Liu whispered.

“Yes. It feels random, but it’s not. It’s not a snowstorm. But I can’t see the pattern yet.”

She strained her eyes, trying to find some hint of the drifting wreckage out there. There were no nearby stars to illuminate the tumbling metal. There were no flashing lights winking like boats out on the water. The ships of the Fleet were dark. To the naked eye, they sailed on a sea of ink.

“Beka,” Donovan’s voice came through the room’s speakers. “Computer said you were still awake and in Tsai-Liu’s room. We have one incoming.”

“How long?”

“A few minutes until it’s in range,” he answered. “Can you administer Tsai-Liu’s dose?”

“I’ll take care of it,” she said.

Tsai-Liu sat up again on the table and stared at her with frightened eyes. She picked up the tiny syringe and walked toward him.

“This will protect you,” she told him when he pulled away. “Tsai-Liu, it’s me. Trust me, please.”

He held out his arm slowly, his gaze focused firmly on her face.