First Fleet #1-4: The Complete Saga (15 page)

T
he
Clerke Maxwell
and its tiny crew drifted deeper into the midst of the Fleet. Pain came and went in waves each time one of the vessels took an interest in them or passed by too close, until Beka felt like an old woman, joints aching, her hands cramped and clawed.

Yet the pain kept her mind clear and focused on the problem of the Fleet’s motion.

Beka thought of life as little more than a series of problems to solve. Without a puzzle in front of her or defined parameters and a clear goal, she felt untethered. For her, the things that should have been on the periphery became too important. A problem kept her focused.

And right now, there were terrible things that she would rather not think about waiting beyond that circle of focus. The image of Tsai-Liu lying on the floor of the chamber where he died. Nightmares about what was living on the ships they were trying to thread a path through. Fears of her sister dead somewhere out there, or trapped on the worlds below.

She could not bear to think about these for long.

The three-dimensional riddle of the Fleet also gave her an excuse to lie awake in her bunk in the empty barracks. She did not want to sleep. Sleep brought dreams of Davis and Eleanor, and they always ended the same. Davis would rise or turn toward her. A flower of green would appear on his arm—an echo of the explosion Beka had triggered—growing, engulfing his hand, reaching outward with a thousand stretching arms and mouths.

She would wake, shaking.

No answers came at night.

Beka glanced at the dim chronometer beside her bed. It was early morning according to ship time, almost time for her to take over from Donovan on the command deck. As a crew, they were stretched too thin. Someone always had to remain awake and alert, ready to notify the others if any ship approached.

She rose. It took her only a couple minutes to pour some cold, dark, reconstituted coffee and drink it in a gulp. Then Beka walked the dim corridors toward the command deck.

Donovan was sleeping at his seat.

“Wake up,” she said and touched his shoulder.

Startled, he jumped, looked around wildly and then focused on her face.

“Time to go to bed,” she said, trying not to smile.

“Gods, I’m sorry. I’m awake.” Donovan ran his hands over his face and peered down at the table in front of him. “Your latest path through this minefield looks clear for now. I thought we were getting close to one a while back, but it veered off at the last minute.”

Beka tied her hair back and stepped up to take Donovan’s position. “Have you heard anything from Aggiz?”

“No,” Donovan answered. “The computer shows he hasn’t stirred from the science bay.”

Beka considered this for a moment. Besides herself, Aggiz was the last surviving member of their original team.

He had always been absent in the manner of a distracted genius, but it had never troubled Beka much. He was a source of immense amounts of information and had been invaluable in their attempts to pull data from the Brick. Over their time together, Beka learned how to cut through his faltering communication patterns and extract what she needed for their work. But since the Brick had gone dark, Aggiz had become ever more withdrawn, running scan after scan of the blank monolith.

“I don’t know what he hopes to find,” she said.

“He’s an obsessive compulsive guy, Beka.” Donovan seemed disinterested. “He’s convinced himself there’s still some way to rescue the memories that were wiped.”

“But there’s no information left to extract,” Beka sighed.

“Paul was supposed to take a meal for him when he left and I came on duty,” Donovan said. He lowered his voice. “I don’t think he took his injection during the last approach, but none of us have had the time or energy to check on him.”

“I was there during the last alert. It was worse than that,” Beka shuddered. “He was standing beside the Brick, screaming. I injected him, but he was furious. He said he wanted to hear it, that he wanted to understand.”

“Ulysses at the mast, huh?”

Beka did not understand the reference and shrugged.

Donovan stretched and Beka heard his joints pop.

He saw her expression. “We’re aging,” he explained. “We have to get through this soon.”

“How much longer?”

Donovan glanced down at the displays. “That depends on how many more of these ships we have to avoid. You know our route better than I do.” He leaned across the holographic field. “There are a few of them on the periphery of our range right now. It’s like weaving through a minefield where the goddamned mines won’t stay still.”

“It’s like walking through a graveyard,” Beka added, thinking of something Paul had said. “But the bodies keep wandering.”

“That’s a pleasant image.”

Beka turned toward him. “You saw it, Donovan. Whatever is on those ships. You know what it is.”

“I don’t. I told you.” He moved away.

Donovan had the lights of the command deck dimmed so that the glow from the surrounding monitors bathed his face in flickering orange and red. He shuddered and touched a control to increase the ambient brightness until the room seemed as sterile, bright and safe as a regeneration bay. He turned to look at her full in the face.

“I saw something old and smooth and . . . I don’t know . . .
leathern
. I saw a face.” He wore an expression that Beka found difficult to evaluate: somewhere between fear and longing. “But it was what happened to the others on the
Elphinstone
—the way they just . . . broke. Their minds sort of
ran
, like molten stone. You know what I mean. You can hear it at the edges, when they come.”

Beka shook herself out of Donovan’s gaze. His words unnerved her. This wasn’t the first time she had asked him about what he had seen, nor the first time he had answered.

But she’d never dared think too hard about the information he gave her. She didn’t want to. Not then, and not now.

“I feel like I’m back on the
Elphinstone
,” Donovan finally said, making an effort to break the eerie silence that had dropped around them like a curtain. “That was a hospital ship with too many bodies and not enough doctors. This is an asylum, but the patients are out there, in the darkness.”

“We have bodies here too, Donovan,” she said, thinking of the Synthetics and Davis.

“Yeah.” He stretched again. “Yeah. Just like home.” He moved to the door.

Beka remembered Aggiz. “Wait,” she said. “I’m not scheduled to come on duty for a bit yet. Wait here for a few minutes. I’m going to go check on Aggiz.”

Donovan sighed but nodded. “I don’t think it will do any good, but at least try to get him to eat something. We can’t afford to lose anyone else.”

B
eka climbed back
through the bowels of the labyrinthine ship, its interlocking corridors as tangled and sterile as gauze, to the science lab near its rear that housed the Brick. She thought again about what she had said to Donovan; that they were in a cemetery dance, careening through a patchwork of open graves.

Graves, clustered in space . . .

What was it about the patterns of the dead First Fleet that was bothering her?

Beka blinked and tried to focus, but she was still deeply tired. She wondered how long before the invariable alarm sounded and she would have to take Donovan’s injection again, gritting her teeth against the pain.

When she reached the science bay, she entered without knocking, knowing Aggiz would be within and oblivious to her. The res-pod still sat in its corner, no longer holding Donovan’s regenerating form but instead the burned body of Davis beneath its clouded glass. The Brick was a black monolith in the chamber’s center; Aggiz huddled before it like a supplicant in the shadow of a faceless god.

“Aggiz,” Beka said to the small man before the monitors. He had not stirred when she entered.

Aggiz did not answer.

Beka stepped closer and squinted at the colored readout on the screen he was studying. The display consisted of ribbons of red and grey, scanning back and forth with a constant stream of numbers. Beka recognized them as the parameters of the Brick’s particle matrix, the ordered bits of quantum foam that normally held the black device’s information. By their tiny amplitudes, Beka saw that they were nothing more than random thermal fluctuations.

“What is it, Aggiz?” Beka pointed at the screen. “There’s nothing in there but noise.”

Aggiz licked his lips. His eyes found Beka’s and slowly focused.

“Echoes, Beka.” He coughed and reached for a glass of water. “You’re right. You’re—the information is gone. The particles are cold. Still. At absolute zero, or as close as possible.”

Beka nodded.

“There’s nothing left of—there’s nothing of
them
. They’re gone. The minds, the particles encoding them, were sharp and clear. But not anymore.” He spoke slowly, but his words gathered momentum as he seemed to become more fully awake. He inclined his head toward the monitors as though bowing in memory. “Nothing there, Beka. But beneath. The noise. Can’t keep it completely cold.”

“Background noise, Aggiz.”

“No.” He shook his head sharply. “Not completely. Not noise. A pattern.”

Aggiz keyed a command at his terminal, and the monitor display took on new angles and dimension. “I am—I have been tracking thermal readings in the Brick. Something is there, Beka. An echo. A ghost. But just one.
Only one.
”

His sudden intensity startled her.

“Residual information?” Beka frowned at the images spreading like fingers of frost across a window. Staring at anything long enough gave rise to imagined patterns. What she saw now reminded her vaguely of the haphazard sidesteps of the Fleet’s ships.

“You can’t . . . It’s not clear,” Aggiz said. “Very faint. But sometimes . . .”

Beka could see his eyes losing their focus, drawn back from her own to the monitor’s broil of static. He had lost someone in the Brick, she knew. Aggiz had never made it clear who—a lover obviously, someone from his past—but the pain he felt when the Brick blanked was palpable.

“Aggiz, you have to let her go.”

He did not answer.

“You have to take the pain when it comes,” she told him, realizing her words held a double meaning. “If you don’t take the injection, you’ll start fading like Tsai-Liu. You’ll be as drained as the Brick, Aggiz. Pain is the only thing that shuts them out.”

“No.” His voice was faint, as though it came from a great distance. “It’s there too. They’re whispering.”

He would say nothing more. Beka pushed a platter of cold egg-supplement and biscuits—remnants of the day’s breakfast—closer to his motionless form and left the bay with its ghosts.

The ship continued its crawl through the night.

C
am Dowager wanted
to be a materialist. She wanted to believe that there was, in a very real sense, nothing more to the universe than particles dancing in space.

It was a view of the universe that was solid. The Brick itself—all the concise, organized madness of the Contract, the regeneration of bodies and storing of personalities—proved that it was true.

Given the correct nutrient mix and sufficient genetic patterning, you could re-grow a human being. You could re-plant their memories from stored information. That should have clinched things. It was what life really was at the core: nothing more than information translated into the arrangement of particles.

Cam wanted to be a materialist. She was comfortable in that.

The difficulty of materialism came with living on more than one world. The problem, Paul had explained to her in one of his many flights of half-ironic eloquence, was the quality of light. Anyone who had lived on a world not circling within System understood.

Theoretically, the quality of light on a planet should have reduced to a matter of atmospheric constituency, weather patterns and the spectral properties of the parent star. But it was clearly much more than this: the color, texture and feel of light itself varied from world to world in ways impossible to quantify. It was like trying to describe a smell.

It could only be felt.

Paul had talked like this. It was an indication of the role his absence played in her own mind that Cam found herself pondering these thoughts at length, that she found herself trying to describe the dying evening light of Onaway.

The light was pale and grainy, like an ancient photograph. Paul called it “a speckled fog of light.” But Cam knew that rationally, it should not have had any quality like this-- their world’s atmosphere was still too thin.

Cam pulled herself from useless aesthetic considerations and turned back to the military feeds on the display before her. She checked and re-checked them each day. Though her initial plan of exchanging Paul’s freedom for her own had been successful, she had found no indication in the military networks of a court martial, nothing that gave her any clues at all about Paul’s fate. He would not contact her, Cam wascertain, for fear of attracting the attention she had gone to such lengths to avoid. But he seemed to have disappeared completely.

Cam signed in frustration and turned back to the windows.

There was something moving on the crest of one of the distant hills, a long shadow against the glare of their slowly setting star.

She squinted, the rapidly-dimming light no help.

The motion was not the mechanical lurching of a treaded crawler. In the growing darkness, it would have been foolhardy for any of their distant neighbors to venture so far afield without one of those. There was nothing alive on the surface.

She leaned against the glass. It was difficult to make out any exact shapes among the jagged hills as Onaway’s tiny sun inched downward and threw long shadows across the valley.

It was her imagination. Or a slide of stones.

The light continued to die.

Cam wished Paul was home.

A
gnes found
her sister Perry already asleep, curled on her side with the sheets twisted around her. She had been crying.

Agnes glanced at her own empty bed. Tonight she would sleep with her sister. She lay down beside Perry and closed her eyes. She found Perry after she fell asleep, as she always did, in her dreams.

In their dreams, the twins were taller, with dark hair, solemn eyes and a narrowness of face that hinted the presence of the long features they would grow into in adulthood.

Their combined consciousness crafted their dream bodies in a way impossible for a solitary dreamer. The twins had assumed that when their mother or father dreamed, neither wore a body shaped by outside observation. Who would look at mirrors in dreams? And if they did, what did they see?

Agnes and Perry had each other. Their own mutual observations stabilized their dream-appearance.

“It’s not her fault,” Agnes told her sister.

“I know,” Perry answered. They were walking through the habitation, where they most often found themselves while dreaming.

“She’s afraid,” Agnes said. “She misses him too.”

“I know,” Perry repeated. “Do you think she knew the ghost? From when she was a soldier?”

Agnes knew her sister was talking about the man who had appeared in their dreams, who was also the man whose body had been in the res-pod that had come to Station shortly before their father left.

“He didn’t look like a soldier,” Agnes said. “He looked like a doctor.”

“The soldiers have left,” Perry whispered, looking out over the empty landscape beyond the windows.

The habitation was larger in their dreams. It stretched out in a hundred directions and branched corridors until it seemed to be a city sprawling across their barren world. Outside all of the windows, though, there was always rain.

“All of them are gone,” Perry repeated.

Because they wanted to see him, they found their father in one of the wide glass rooms along the southern stretch of the habitation. This pleased them, though the twins were certain that wherever he was, he would remember nothing of their time in these dreams together when he awoke. They had learned very early that people they saw and spoke to in dreams were not truly present the way that Perry and Agnes were to each other.

Still, it was good to see their father.

They played games, passing through the wide, empty hallways of the habitation. There were rooms in their dreams that were filled with strange furniture or toys as large as buildings. There were others that held jungles or forests or row upon row of musty books. Throughout their time together, the steady drumming of the rain on the walls and windows of the habitation did not cease. Slowly though, Agnes became aware of a new sound.

“What’s that?” she finally asked her sister.

Perry paused and frowned. Their father’s image, ignored for the moment, faded. “It’s a tapping. A knocking,” she said finally.

The light had begun to fade outside the wide windows. Their planet’s star was setting behind clouds. That had not happened before.

“I’m scared, Perry.”

“It’s okay.” Perry drew herself up to her full height. “I’m here.”

The tapping continued. It was hard to tell where it was coming from. The twins moved cautiously through the corridors, unsure of whether they were moving toward the sound or away from it. It grew louder.

Now it was too dark to see anything beyond the windows. The girls held hands as they walked through the empty rooms. There were windows everywhere.

“I want to wake up,” Agnes whispered.

The tapping grew in volume. Around a bend in the corridor, they froze. There was a hand, huge and distended and with far too many fingers, tapping against the glass outside. It was hard to see any details about it in the darkness other than its size and inhuman shape.

“Who’s there?” Perry’s voice frightened them both.

The hand withdrew. A moment later it was replaced with a face.

The girls screamed and awoke.