First Fleet #1-4: The Complete Saga (2 page)

“
D
id
you hear what they’re finding on the campaign worlds?” Donovan said, taking a seat across from me in the mess. He wore the brash grin he usually did when he was looking for an argument. Most of the other tables were empty.

I shook my head. We were as tightly linked with the feeds as any other ship, and news usually traveled fast.

“Ruins,” he told us. “There are
ruins
on those planets.”

“Colonizer ruins?”

“The Colonizers are saying they don’t know anything about them. These worlds weren’t even in the first wave of colonization anyway. And the eggheads they’ve sent down with the troops are saying they’re old as anything they’ve ever seen.”

I cleared my throat. “How old is that?”

The grin became a frown. “Don’t you see? They haven’t released a lot of images, but from what I’ve seen they’re sure as hell not natural. Twisted. Weird angles. Something out of a bad dream. But definitely artificial.” He barked a laugh. “We find the first irrefutable signs of alien intelligence right here in the middle of a war.”

Tsun-Chan had joined us and spoke at my elbow. “I saw them too. Carbon dating won’t work, because there’s nothing organic down there predating the Colonizers.” This was her first deployment. Her eyes had the hollow look of someone still getting used to always seeing night outside the windows. “Uranium-lead dating, though, puts estimates on the order of billions.”

“Four or five
billion years old
!” Donovan bellowed, waving his fork over his tray. “There was something out here building on these planets before Earth had even fired up its own plate tectonics. It’s like the Mariana Trench,” he muttered, suddenly sedate. “We blunder on out here, and we find something like this and realize we have no idea how deep things really are. How old. How big.
Billions
of years. Just sitting here. These planets don’t even have
suns
anymore.”

Soon the images were on all the feeds. I saw what he was talking about. The campaign worlds were honeycombed with caverns and chambers and within them—laced up and down the walls and even hanging impossibly from the rocky ceilings themselves—immense ruined cities. The size of the cities was only magnified by the expanse of the caverns themselves, gulfs that opened into carved abysses large enough to swallow an entire troop transport.

“They’ll quarantine them,” Tsun-Chan said a few days later when our paths crossed again between shifts. “Folks back in System aren’t going to like it if we wipe out the first proof of ETI in the process of bringing the Colonizers in line.”

Donovan shook his head.

“Those res-pods we’re getting in right now? They’re coming from one of those worlds. They’re saying the Colonizers have dug into the cities like warrens. Whatever alien architecture is out there, you can bet it’s going to get smashed to hell if they’re hiding inside it.”

“It seems a shame, them lasting so long,” Tsun-Chan said, “and us just kicking them over like anthills now.”

But no one was kicking over anthills. From what we could tell from the information released, the ruins were huge. Their images filled me with a sense of dread. I had nightmares of wandering through them, lost in the half-light of those dead planets. The angles of the stones didn’t sit right in the eye or mind. Their roots ran deep, and if the Colonizers had dug into them, it was going to be hell pulling them out.

“
I
s Ensign Grale still here
?”

It was the tall man again. He seemed slightly breathless as he leaned over my console and squinted at the readouts. Did he think she would have already been discharged, or had he heard that her regeneration was suspended?

“She’s here,” I said.

“Can I see her?”

I nodded. It was unusual but not unheard of for someone to make repeated visits to the regeneration units. I wondered about him, though. He was a pilot, which meant that even if he were stationed on another ship in the fleet he would be able to come to the
Elphinstone
regularly. And he obviously had clearance to do so, or he wouldn’t be here now.

But something about him bothered me besides the unusual interest he was showing in this particular regeneration. His eyes had a clouded, distant look I had occasionally seen in patients suffering from post-traumatic stress. His face was strained.

His brow furrowed when he saw her.

“Shouldn’t she—is she healing correctly? I mean, shouldn’t she be making . . .”

“Better progress? The regeneration units are a tricky business,” I explained truthfully, trying to sidestep his question. “Often it takes quite a while to determine the correct cellular patterns for optimal growth.”

He nodded absently, his grey eyes scanning her form. I followed his gaze.

Odd.

I had indeed cycled down the growth catalysts in the pod when I received the order to halt. That had been a couple days ago now. Yet there were clear signs of further development. What had been gauzy wisps of tissue yesterday had firmed into ribbons of ligament. Threads marking the questing ends of regenerating veins and arteries quivered in the circulating fluids and seemed to extend even as I watched.

The man stared hungrily.

“She was important to you?” I asked, primarily to cover my own sudden interest in the form under the glass.

“She saved my life down there,” he said distractedly. “Our wing had gone pretty far into one of the caverns. I thought I’d be buried when the Colonizers brought the rocks down, but she burned her way through and held them off long enough for us all to get out.”

“Buried? I thought you said her suit was destroyed in space.”

He tore his gaze from the pod and focused on me with some effort, as though he had forgotten I was there. “No, we were in the tunnels.”

A low warning klaxon sounded, indicating another cluster of res-pods had been received and was enroute from the adjoining docking bay. I hurried off to see to them, and when I returned the man was still there, leaning over the glass.

He seemed not to hear me when I told him he needed to leave.

“She sleeps,” he whispered, “for so long. She sleeps so deep.”

Below, the half-formed flesh hung suspended.

“
H
ave
you ever had a regeneration go wrong?”

Donovan looked up from the screen in his cramped bunk. “What?”

“A regeneration.” I stepped through the doorway. “Have you ever had one go wrong?”

“What kind of first-year question is that? Of course I’ve had them go wrong. Not enough cellular material left, or the units don’t get the patterns matched in time to sustain. Lots of flatlines.” He paused. “Oh God, don’t tell me you’re all the way out here and you’ve never lost one before?”

I shook my head. “No, I’ve lost plenty. It’s not that.”

“Then why the stupid question?”

“I don’t mean a flatline. I mean sort of the opposite. Regeneration occurring too quickly, even when you’re trying to stop it.”

He stared at me.

“The rate of regeneration,” he said slowly, as though I was indeed a first-year medical student, “depends on the density of the nutrient matrix. Cells can’t build themselves faster than you give them material to work with. You shut off the flow, and you shut off mitosis.”

“I know all that.”

“Then you check the unit itself. Run the standard self-diagnostics, make sure the nutrient flow controls aren’t faulty.”

“I’ve done that.”

He shrugged and turned back to his screen.

“What if there was—I don’t know—a malignancy?” I pressed. “Contamination of some sort?”

“The bio-filters would have picked it up. Nothing dirty gets into a res-pod.” He tossed down his screen. “What’s this all about?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve got—”

The klaxons went off again. Another influx of pods.

Donovan swore under his breath. “This is getting ridiculous.”

T
he pods came
up through the night like flotsam stirred from deep sea beds. They drifted to us in a steady stream all the rest of that evening and into the morning hours of the following cycle. The
Elphinstone
and the other frigates opened their bay doors to accept them, and we went to work over the twisted, broken forms.

“Doctor.”

I was passing my control panel in the medical bay when the hologram flickered to light. It was the image of one of the men who had ordered the suspension of Ensign Grale’s regeneration. The HUD near his form identified him as a commander on board one of the fleet’s capital ships.

“I have an order from Command,” the image told me, “regarding patient Jens Grale.”

I waited.

“You are to terminate immediately.”

The image was grainy and blinked unsteadily, which bespoke either great distance or a large amount of interference. Even with the poor quality of the image, though, I could tell the officer’s face was worn. If the fleet was engaged in a battle, both his expression and the pods still making their way to us indicated that things were not going well.

I asked him what was going on.

“The order alone should be clear, Doctor. Command will not authorize the release of memory scans for Ensign Grale. You are to terminate her biological regeneration.”

“I’m going to need a bit more information than that. I’ve never been asked to terminate a patient.”

The man hesitated, and his image wavered.

He paused. “We have reason to believe that Ensign Grale is in fact dead.”

I snorted. “Of course she’s dead. What I want to know is why she shouldn’t be regenerated. A soldier’s contract guarantees it, if any possibility for regeneration remains.”

He shook his head. “We’ve been looking at reports of what took place on the surface when Grale was killed. We have information indicating that her suit was compromised and that her vitals failed nearly a full solar day before the res-pod launched.”

He gave me a moment to let that sink in.

“Command doesn’t take a termination lightly. But it looks like whatever cellular material was in that pod cannot belong to Grale.”

There was movement in the background of the image, and the officer turned to speak to someone outside the field of view. Portions of his torso dissolved into static.

“I don’t have a lot of time, Doctor. We’re in the middle of operations out here or I would have visited the frigate again in person. You have your orders.”

“This is ridiculous,” I pressed. “The signature of the cells in the pod matched Grale’s DNA perfectly.”

The man frowned. “That’s what worries us. I’ll be ordering a full-scale investigation of this as soon we return. We suspect a Colonizer agent may have gained access to Grale’s pod, over-ridden identification controls, and seeded it with material from one of their own dead.”

Another burst of static.

“But it won’t matter without a memory scan,” I said. “I should test the DNA again.”

“Negative. If the genetic database was indeed compromised, then it’s likely we’re dealing with internal Colonizer sympathizers. It’s possible they could have a memory scan of their own ready for when the regeneration is complete.” He paused. “I don’t have time for this. Terminate immediately.”

Suddenly the tall man’s repeated visits to the regeneration unit and his conflicting stories made sense.

“Understood,” I said. The image faded.

At unit C-47 I stared a moment through the glass. Whoever the Colonizers were trying to bring back, she was huge. Her skeleton, nearly complete now despite my reduction of the nutrient matrix to the bare minimum required for life support, was half-sheathed in tissue. It was large enough that it was already curled below the glass, legs bent like a fetus. The eyes had formed, but the eyelids had yet to grow, so she stared out at me blindly from eyes that seemed far too wide.

I shuddered and deactivated the unit.

D
onovan joined
me in the corridor by a row of portals, through which I could see the winking lights of the rest of the fleet. They flashed like a storm on the horizon. We had been receiving still more res-pods throughout most of the night. The bays of the
Elphinstone
were nearly filled to capacity, and from what I heard it was the same with the other frigates.

“Things must be getting pretty bad out there,” Donovan said.

I nodded wearily.

“It’s not just the number of pods,” he went on, “though that’s bad enough. Have you seen the shape of some of the bodies?”

“I’ve seen them.” I was trying to decide whether I needed sleep or food more before the next wave arrived. “Whatever the Colonizers are doing down there, it’s getting nasty.” I decided on food, and Donovan trailed me to the mess.

He kept talking as we walked. “I just memory-dumped and discharged about a dozen pilots who came in with the first wave. They weren’t nearly ready to go.” He scowled. “Command sent over their memory scans with orders to get them back on the line as soon as possible, so I dumped the memories and woke them up. Some of them could hardly stand. We brought them out of it too quick.”

“And?” I had been doing the same thing for days now.

“And one of the pilots went nuts. An orderly brought her to me because she was screaming that she wasn’t going to go back. I got her sedated, but she started spilling her guts before the guys from Command showed up.”

The view beyond the portals was largely devoid of stars. Dust falling into the cluster of singularities below obscured those that were still visible this far out. The green and red lights of the other frigates seemed lost on a velvet sea of ink.

Donovan said, “They haven’t found any Colonizers down there.”

I turned back to him. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m telling you what she said. She said that on the planets with the ruins, they weren’t finding any active Colonizer cells.”

“Then who the hell are they fighting?” I asked.

He shook his head. “She said the Colonizers had been there, but the camps they were finding in those caverns were empty.”

I waited, trying to wrap my mind around what he was saying.

“She said the ruins were swallowing whole platoons. Ships were getting lost down stone throats.”

“She had a faulty dump, Donovan. She was trying to sort out her memories. And you had just sedated her. If there are no Colonizers down there, who’s butchering these soldiers?”

Donovan was ready with an answer. “She said they were doing it to each other.” His voice dropped. “They were going mad, fighting ghosts. Turning on each other.”

“Bullshit.” I increased my pace. “A new Colonizer weapon, maybe. They’re down there all right. Biding their time. Dug in and hiding.”

“Maybe.”

“Definitely.” I rounded on him. “You need rest. We all do. How long has it been since you’ve slept?”

He grimaced. “Too many bodies. I see them when I sleep.”

So did I. But I didn’t say so.

S
till the res
-pods flowed in. Transports docked with our frigates to shuttle revived soldiers back to the front. None of the soldiers who I woke said anything about what was happening on the planets. In fact, none of them said anything about those planets at all. We were all run pretty ragged with the amount of bodies we had coming through, so it took me some time to realize that Command had started sending over old memory scans. Whatever had happened to these soldiers on the campaign, their memories were being reset to the very start of combat operations.

That scared me more than anything.

We were too busy to think much of it, though when I told Donovan he just nodded grimly. “They’d been having trouble getting them to go back.”