First Fleet #1-4: The Complete Saga (18 page)

C
am decided
to take the twins with her.

She remembered sharply the night she had left them alone in the habitation when she ascended to Station in orbit, and she would not let that feeling —of helplessness and rage that they were in danger and outside of her protection—happen again. Cam was not sure what she was looking for or what she would find.

But being out of the sterile walls and beyond the sightless windows of the habitation would do them all some good.

The twins seemed better. Perry was still angry, but it had softened over the past few days. She and Agnes had had another dreamless night, which was better than Cam could say.

She wasn’t sure she had slept at all. The darkness beyond the windows and the darkness of her eyelids had blended into one another until the slow dawn found her still upright in the chair beside the window, weapons assembled.

Station would have to come with them, at least its vocal processor would. There was too much data from the wide array of sensors scattered about the surrounding plantation. It was difficult for her to follow it all visually. It made for a maddening conversation on her part, but the truth was that the artificial intelligence of Station’s systems was the best bet she had of finding out whether anything was actually out there.

Not that there should be anything out there.

Not that there could be.

But Cam was not going to take any chances.

“What’s that?” Perry asked, wide-eyed as Cam loaded the gear into the rear locker of the crawler.

“It’s a heavy rail-gun,” she said. “These are plasma charges.”

There didn’t seem to be any reason to equivocate.

The girls watched with fascination.

“Are we going to go find daddy?” Perry asked.

“Not yet.” Cam lowered the last roll of cartridges into the seat and paused. “At least, I don’t think so.”

She turned to the girls. “I’m not sure what we’re going to find. Probably nothing.”

“We will find something,” Perry nodded gravely. “We’re going to find the thing we dreamed about.”

Cam wondered again at their solitude, at the gravity of growing up alone on an empty world. They were about to leave, for the first time in their lives, the only home they had ever known.

They climbed into the treaded crawler and set off down a rugged path of broken stones that trailed into the valley. The girls stared at everything through the crawler’s bubble canopy with fascination. It was a clear day, as it always was on Onaway. The light seemed liquid, pushing up over the tops of the hills and spreading down into the valley, giving the landscape a softness that it should not have held in such emptiness.

Cam turned the crawler south at the top of the first ridge, heading toward the coordinates where Station had reported the sensor ghosts last night.

“Are we going to see the trees?” Agnes asked.

The question made Cam realize again what this expedition meant to the twins. They were seeing things they had only ever heard their parents discuss before or viewed through long-range feeds.

“The trees are farther to the east, along the Finback Ridge.” She bit her lip. In the brightness of the rock and dust, her fears of the night before seemed unfounded and irrational. “Tell you what—we can head out that way first. We’ll eat lunch there before we go looking for whatever was giving those sensor readings.”

Agnes and Perry clasped hands in the back seat, their only outward sign of delight.

Cam knew these routes well, though it was usually Paul who toured the plantation and all of its various aspects. There were more forests even farther to the east, but the spur running along the Finback was close enough to reach by lunch.

In a little over an hour—an hour of silent, intensive study in which the girls gazed out the window as calmly and raptly as they took in their lessons on the feeds in the habitation—she saw the wrinkle of the long, low ridge appear on the horizon with a faint sheen of green along its back.

“The trees,” Perry said simply.

The trees were huge, like the spars of ancient sailing vessels. Their trunks were straight and slender, untouched by winds on the nearly airless plains. Their modified needle-clusters were tiny spines along the lengths of the upper branches, giving the entire narrow grove the appearance of towers rimed with green frost.

“We’ll drive up there and eat in their shadows,” Cam said.

The girls craned their necks as they approached. There were more rows of the trees on the horizon, stretching outward toward the eastern reaches of the plantation in long, straight lines. Their trunks held the color of the stones from which they sprouted. Cam had always thought the evergreens—engineered to survive in the marginal conditions of Onaway—looked more alien than anything native to the planet.

“Can we open the canopy?” Agnes asked when they were below them.

Cam shook her head. “Not enough air yet. Maybe when your kids are grown.”

They ate silently in the shadows of the trees. Cam wondered if she should explain to the girls how trees and sunlight worked back in System, the fluttering and the shimmering of color and shadow. Here, the shadows fell down on them like wires, stiff and unmoving. The light was tinged a cold blue-green.

“I’ve read about this,” Perry said after a while. “It’s called a picnic.”

Cam smiled.

“I am detecting motion again,” Station said when they had nearly finished a lunch of bread, cheese and perfectly spherical hydroponic tomatoes.

“Where?” she asked.

“It appears to be where the anomalous readings from last night were detected. On the rock-burner perimeter.”

“It could be a rockslide,” Agnes explained seriously. “That’s what the sensors there are for.”

“Seismic activity,” agreed Perry, biting into the last tomato.

Cam looked at the girls. “Do you think that’s what it is?”

They shook their heads in unison.

Cam stared upward into the unmoving branches of the strange trees, weighing their situation. “We could go back to the habitation,” she said finally. “We’re safe there. We could wait this out, whatever it is.”

She knew it wasn’t true. She knew that something was searching for them, though she did not understand what or why. She was taking them into danger, no matter what decision she made.

Perry reached over the seat and touched her shoulder. “We don’t want to go back.”

Cam nodded and moved the crawler down from the ridge. They drove on in silence. The trees receded back into the sharp line of the horizon.

The girls did not speak again until they reached a long, parched valley near the southern edge of their plantation hours later. Station had remained silent as well.

“It’s here,” Agnes whispered.

The world appeared to end at the edge of the valley, at the lip of the immense crater that composed the rock-burners.

The burners were huge man-made fissures, chasms in the planet’s crust carved by orbital bombardment years before any of the terraforming settlements were established. In their depths, catalytic processes dissolved rock and minerals, belching greenhouse gases and particulate matter high into the atmosphere.

They were enormous artificial calderas, venting clouds of grey and white smoke upward in a curtain that hid the landscape beyond.

“Nothing could be in there,” Cam said doubtfully.

“The sensor readings were in this area, Cam,” Station said.

“Where?”

Station indicated a particular sensor cluster, and Cam steered the crawler to investigate. It was an array of pressure sensors and solar panels, like one of hundreds of others scattered across the plantation, perched on a low outcrop of rock within a hundred meters of the rock-burner’s edge.

“Can you run a system diagnostic from here?” Cam asked Station.

From within the crawler, the sensor array looked normal. There was no evidence of rockslide or any other disturbance in the surrounding landscape of stones.

“The sensor array appears to be functioning within normal parameters,” Station answered.

She turned to the girls. “I’m going to step outside and take a look at it. Maybe there’s something Station can’t tell from here.” She pulled on her thin-suit mask. “Put your masks on. The crawler will re-pressurize as soon as the canopy is shut behind me.”

When they obeyed, she opened the crawler’s canopy with a hiss and slipped outside, lowering it back into position behind her and giving the girls a thumbs-up through the glass.

The sensor array was only a few meters from the crawler. She covered the distance quickly, scanning the landscape in all directions.

Perceptions from her military days resurfaced easily: this was a relatively unshielded position, but likewise the ground was clear and open in all directions away from the rock-burners. There was no place for an enemy to be hiding or approach unseen. Besides the smoke continually billowing up from the crater’s lip, there were no signs of motion.

Cam quickly saw that the sensor array was undamaged.

She detached the small box that housed the array’s central recording unit from where it was anchored under a solar panel. It would give her something to do tonight, she reflected, when she couldn’t sleep.

Everything else checked out. She could spend a few hours disassembling its components, but she doubted that she would find anything. The sensors probably had simply detected an unusually large belch from the rock-burner’s catalytic digestion.

She wiped a thin layer of soot from one of the sensor’s solar panels. She had been foolish to come. What did she think she would find? Is this how life was going to be now with Paul gone, with her jumping at every sensor ghost?

Agnes’ voice came through the channel in her thin-suit mask. “It’s here.”

Cam turned. The twins were seated beneath the crawler’s glass canopy, still wearing their masks. One of them pointed past Cam, toward the wall of cloud.

“There couldn’t be anything in there,” Cam radioed back.

She looked back over her shoulder toward the rising smoke. The rock-burners were an inferno. Even Paul rarely ventured this close in his maintenance tours. The processes taking place within those burners were monitored and regulated from space, with orbital platforms occasionally dropping whatever ingredients were needed to keep the catalytic processes burning far below.

The fires were seeded from space . . .

Cam stared at the billowing curtain of cloud. The sleeper—the body in the attic—had found its way here. What were the chances that something else would have found its way to their planet as well?

What were the chances something would have found its way to them?

“Mom!” Perry added her voice to Agnes’. “It’s there.”

Cam walked back to the crawler. “Stay here,” she told the girls through the glass. She pulled the rail-gun from the cargo stowage at the crawler’s rear and braced it against her shoulder.

“What are you doing?” Agnes asked.

Cam felt small and ridiculous, as she always had with this particular weapon. It was too large for her, though it was lighter than it looked and it packed a huge punch. She had used one much like it to bring down several Colonizer walkers on the Shore Worlds.

She walked toward the wall of smoke.

The atmosphere this close to the rock-burners was thick enough to carry sounds weakly. She heard the hiss of the rising smoke and the whisper of her own feet crunching on the stones.

“Whoever you are,” she said, “whatever you are—I’m here.”

The smoke broiled.

“What do you want?” she hollered.

There was no answer. What had she expected? She waited for several seconds more and then turned back toward the crawler, feeling angry and foolish.

The twins’ voices rang into her ears in the mask. “Mom!”

Cam stopped and turned back to the edge of the rock-burner, raising the weapon to her shoulder.

A face, impossibly large, parted the clouds like a curtain.

Her finger froze on the trigger.

It was the color of the smoke, pale and grey, and moved like the smoke as well, waving in and out like a serpent’s head or a tongue of fire. Billows of ash rolled over it like clouds passing before a moon. It seemed as huge and ancient as a moon, staring down at Cam and her weapon far below.

Cam’s mind struggled to take in the half-visible features: eyes wide and black as those of a squid Cam had seen once in the seas of an outer System moon, but metallic and sheened like an insect’s.

If there was a mouth, it was hidden in a mass of hair-like tentacles that covered the lower face. Beyond that it was impossible to tell more.

There was a pressure behind Cam’s eyes. She felt it building but could not blink or turn away. The creature swayed above her, and Cam recalled images of mythical dragons, things huge and ancient crawled up from the underbelly of hell.

She might have stood like that for hours, with the clouds all the time rising up into the dead sky, but after a time she felt a pressure, a hand against her side through the skin of her thin-suit.

She looked down to see Agnes standing beside her.

In the same instant that Agnes touched her, the buzzing pressure in Cam’s skull fell into a steady cadence of words. Agnes’s mouth did not move—the voice was not hers—but it was as though she was an antenna, channeling the voice of the creature not through Cam’s ears but through her skin and teeth and into her bones.

“You are Cam Dowager—you are not alone—you are Cam Dowager—you are.”

“Who are you?” Cam shouted.

“I am alone.” Perry had joined them and stood on Cam’s other side, her hand on her mother’s arm. “I am the vestige.”

Each word exploded in Cam’s skull like a firecracker.

“What do you want?” Cam let the rail-gun fall behind her and sank to her knees on the jagged stones, wrapping her arms around her daughters. She was drained, empty and beyond fear.

She was trying to protect herself and the girls from whatever was seeking them, only to realize now with a failing resolve that they faced something as immense and inexorable as a cyclone, a force of nature rearing up before them. She might as well raise her weapon to shoot a moon out of the sky.