First Fleet #1-4: The Complete Saga (20 page)

T
here was an overwhelming darkness
, followed by the scent of stone and a barely-discernible rumbling.

“Where are we?” Cam shouted. She still held both twins, but now it seemed even more that they supported her, not the other way around. “What happened?”

“We moved,” Agnes said.

Perry echoed her softly, “We came a long way.”

“Where did that . . .” Cam paused, her mind still reeling. “Where did that
thing
go?”

There were lights ahead of them, approaching steadily. After a moment Cam realized that the stones around them were glowing as well. They were in a long, narrow corridor of rock, the walls only a few meters apart from each other but the ceiling so distant that it was lost in shadows above. It felt as though they were at the bottom of a canyon.

Beyond the curving walls, farther down the corridor, a cluster of bobbing lights grew. In another instant, there were shouts and outlined forms, armed and clearly agitated.

“Hold it, McGoverns,” someone bellowed, pushing forward through the knot of people that Cam now saw were soldiers, though ragged and clearly disoriented. “There are kids there, are you blind?”

“Colonizers don’t have any kids down here,” someone grumbled.

“Who are you?” The voice was challenging, belonging to a woman who was obviously in command. Her red hair was vivid even in the gloom of the tunnel.

The lights had resolved into flares and hand-spots held in the palms of perhaps half a dozen dirty soldiers. Cam kept a hand on a shoulder of each of the girls and answered slowly, trying to keep her tone steady. “My name is Cam Dowager. These are my daughters. We’re . . .” her voice lapsed into confusion.

“Not Colonizers,” the woman finished. “Your face is familiar though, and I can tell by your accent you’re System. What the hell are you doing here?”

“We were brought here,” Agnes said before Cam could stop her. “By the creature.”

“It wants us to speak for it,” Perry added.

Cam craned her neck, but the huge apparition that had appeared over the rim of the rock-burner was gone. It could be waiting unseen beyond the beam of their lights, she thought.

Part of her could not accept what had apparently happened, that the creature had transported them elsewhere instantaneously. She wanted to believe that they had simply slipped into a crevasse in the crust of their own world, perhaps a system of caverns hidden at the edges of the rock-burner. The heat was gone though. Even the gravity felt wrong.

She knew in her gut that they were no longer on Onaway.

Someone in the midst of the group of soldiers yelled something at the twins’ words, and one of the soldiers cuffed him in the back of the head.

“Easy,” the leader said. “That one’s our way out. If there is a way out.”

She turned back to Cam. “I’m Sergeant Jens Grale. And if you are real—and not just another damned conjuring of these tunnels—then you’re pretty far from wherever home is. These are the Grave Worlds. Colonizers outposts.”

Cam shook her head uncomprehendingly.

“This is where it came from,” Perry whispered. “We hear it above.”

“Too many though,” Agnes stared at the shadows hiding the cavern’s ceiling. “Echoes of the only one.”

Jens glanced at the girl, her face unchanged. “Whoever you are and wherever you came from, you’re with us now. Follow me.”

She spoke over her shoulder as they moved down the corridor, the soldiers flanking out on either side as far as they were able. “We can sort you out later.”

Cam felt herself slipping back into her tactical training. She eyed the ragged bunch in front of her; she also saw the splay of the flankers and the way they held their heads.

“You’re tired,” she said. “You’re on the run.”

Jens nodded shortly. “We’re what is left of the assault on this place. We were prisoners. This one let us out of our cells.” She jerked her head at the hunched, frightened man at the center of their party. “We’ve been trying to find others on our way down to the center of these caverns. That, and trying to avoid the Colonizer patrols.”

“Tell me what’s going on,” Cam said.

Jens blinked at her for a moment, clearly puzzled by their sudden appearance but trying not to let it show. “How much do you know about the operation against the Colonizers? About the First Fleet?”

Cam kept one eye on the girls as they walked down the bending tunnel. There was something about the light and the angles that did not sit right against her perception, but the girls seemed unperturbed.

“I was on the Shore Worlds,” Cam said. “Killed once in action. I left the service before the First Fleet deployed.”

“Then you don’t know,” Jens answered. Briefly, she recounted their initial assault and what they had learned about the Colonizers’ strategy and its effects. “Now we’re going down. Maybe all the way to the Crèche, where they found the bodies,” she snorted. “Maybe we’ll find a way to undo all this down there.”

The twins glanced over at that.

The company halted before a branch in the corridor. One opening appeared to spiral up over their head. Another descended downward. Pale purple light filtered from both.

“There are . . .” Cam began, pointing.

“Runes,” Jens finished her sentence, nodding. “Best not to look too closely. The whole place is riddled with ETI. Messes with your head.”

“Which way, Sergeant?” one of the soldiers near the front asked. There was an edge of panic in his voice.

“Downward,” she barked.

The man in the midst of the soldiers, the one who Jens said had released them, groaned behind them as they descended. He walked half-supported by a much younger man who also did not appear to be a soldier.

Cam stepped through the narrow cavern opening into the new, downward sloping tunnel and caught herself against the wall. Her sense of gravity shifted so that what appeared to be a steep incline now felt smooth and even before her.

“We can’t make sense of it either,” Jens said tersely, watching her. “The gravity, the shapes—even the sounds. None of it makes sense.”

Cam noticed Jens wiping her hands and wrists on the front of her pants. In the dim light, she assumed it was sweat, though the caverns were cool.

They walked for some time, but part of Cam’s mind suspected they were not moving at all. The pale shade of the tunnel remained unchanged. The spiraled patterns in the stone pulled the eye in one direction and then another so that she had to concentrate on simply walking straight.

“Why are we going down?” she asked after they had walked in silence for perhaps an hour. She felt this had been explained to her, but the thought had fled, driven out by the winding patterns and the strange glow.

“It’s the only way we can go,” Jens explained. “Rine—that’s the doctor cowering there behind us—says they pulled the bodies they used to contaminate our res-pods up out of what he calls the Crèche. We want answers, and the passes up top are still held by the remaining Colonizers. Nowhere else to go, really.”

“You keep saying remaining,” Cam slowed her gait. “How many are we talking?”

Jens cast a look at Rine, who cringed.

“There were a few hundred in the mines and garrisons originally,” Rine answered. “We brought a few hundred more from other Colonies to ambush your Fleet. But bringing up the bodies—seeding the res-pods to re-launch and . . . and poison your fleet- it didn’t just affect you,” His hands shook. “Even in death, the forms . . . The minds . . .”

He shook his head as though to clear it.

Cam snapped her fingers. “How could the Colonizers bring in reinforcements? They don’t have . . .”

“Light-lines,” Jens interrupted, nodding her head. “Apparently they found a system of their own, linking their own worlds with this place. Likely engineered by whatever built these damn tunnels.”

“These lines are not like yours,” Rine said, shaking his head. “You
can’t go back
through these. They only allow travel in one direction.”

“They’re traps,” Cam whispered.

Jens waved the comment away. “Whatever discipline or chain of command the Colonizers had down here, it was dissolving by the time Rine broke us out. There are still some knots holding the upper reaches, but everything else is chaos.”

“Then why are we descending?” Cam pressed. “If there’s some sort of contagion in these caves, shouldn’t we be looking for a way out, trying to steal a ship, or something like that?”

Jens shook her head so violently that a few red strands escaped the twine holding them back and whipped in front of her face.

“The Fleet is
gone
,” she said. “I mean, the ships are still there, but whatever woke up in our pods, they
killed everyone
. If there’s something that powerful down here, we owe it to our dead to get all the answers we can and do something about it.”

She wiped her hand on her pants again, and Cam realized suddenly that she was wiping blood away. Jens saw her stare and grimaced. “Primitive, but it seems to keep the worst effects of the caverns at bay. You’ll need one soon. These are just bracelets lined with razor wire. Unpleasant, but not as unpleasant as going mad.”

Suddenly, Cam took a half step backward and looked around her. She stood with the soldiers in a curving tunnel that looked identical to the ones they had been passing through continually since they arrived.

“The twins,” she said, “where are the twins?”

Agnes and Perry were gone.

“
I
t’s now
! It’s now, Aggiz!”

Aggiz heard Beka’s voice strong and clear but could not tell where it was coming from. He had left his post before the Brick and was lost in the twisting, sterile corridors of the ship. When, he wondered to himself, had he last seen something green and living?

He remembered the dahlias his mother used to keep in the large blue bowl on the kitchen table. The image of the flower came back to him vividly now. He turned it over and over again in his mind as he stumbled through the ship.

“Aggiz!” Beka’s voice followed him. “We’re going to be within contact in seconds!”

He had left his pen-needle back in the science bay. Why had he left it there? Why had he left the bay? Whatever was using the Brick to communicate had departed. There was nothing left but the emptiness. The Brick was now completely cold.

All of the voices within were gone.

The dahlia was unfolding again in his memory. It was a slow-motion explosion lifted up from the dirt. It seemed significant right now—a pattern of life as organized energy, spun together of soil and water and light. The petals arched out and away from the core like the torn filaments of a supernova, the arched bits of matter of a dying star.

“It’s here, Aggiz! We’re pushing through.”

There was no path through the maze. Beka had explained it to him. They were making their own trail through the corpses of the ships and the creatures waiting within them.

Aggiz felt them howling inside his skull, and the petals of the dahlia dissolved in his mind’s eye. They were passing more of them—more of the corrosive intelligences—than they had before. They were pushing through.

Aggiz heard Beka screaming. She must have given herself the last injection, the medication pushed to beyond safe limits, an agonizing attempt to provide a mental shielding as they made a final break through the Fleet to the planets below.

The ship-wide intercom cut out.

There was no pain for him.

There was . . .

He felt as though his mind was a book and the ink of the pages was beginning to run. Words and phrases were melting together, memories and consciousness fusing and sliding away like parchment in the rain.

He stumbled through swaying corridors.

Someone stepped around a corner and caught his arm. Aggiz recognized a face with difficulty. It was the man from the res-pod. The body they had been searching for. There was a name, but it escaped him.

“Damn it, Aggiz,” the man said through gritted teeth. The pain must be excruciating. The man was finding it difficult to stand. “Beka knew you wouldn’t take it.”

He held out a syringe in a trembling arm.

Aggiz pushed him away and continued down the corridor. The man took a few steps to follow before he crumpled to a groaning heap.

Forms were swimming in the darkness outside the ship. Aggiz could almost see them. They swayed in black currents like streamers. They darted past one another, almost touching, coming together and then away, like dancers in a house of mirrors.

That was what Beka had seen: they were all the same.

There was only one ETI, over and over again, on each of the ships, its memory repeated in mind like the Brick in space.

Events were telescoping in Aggiz’s mind. He was unfolding like the dahlia. It became difficult to tell the past from the present and from the future. Had he already joined them? Was he still wandering the bucking corridors of the
Clerke Maxwell
? Was he in the shipyard, listening for the voice of his beloved in the heart of the buzzing Brick?

There was a circular opening in the corridor before him, a hole in the side of a hill, a passageway. He felt presences moving in the darkness beyond. It was not pain. It was not death. It was a reordering.

Aggiz tried to remember how to move his hand.

The hole vibrated and began to slide away. There was a second hole beyond, with a window-like gash that looked out onto the stars.

Airlock
.

Something inside Aggiz was pleased with the recognition. It was the last word his mind held, and then it too was gone.

The final portal slid open and Aggiz felt the sudden embrace of something cold and eager, grasping at him like a million tiny hands. The pain blossoming up his arms cleared his mind for an instant. He screamed and tried to turn, tried to reach backward and catch the edge of the doorway.

A white rime of frost had already covered his fingers. The hull of the ship slipped from his hands.

He drifted, end over end, crackling with cold, towards where the dead ships danced in the night.

W
ithin the ship
, in the tiny, clustered heart of the command deck, a warning alarm chimed. “Unauthorized airlock release.”

“No!” Beka screamed. “No, no, no! No one else! Who is it?”

“Passenger Aggiz Magreb is attempting to exit the ship without thin-suit protection,” the computer answered.

She and Paul had just injected. She had sent Donovan to find Aggiz.

Beka reached for the console, trying to key in a manual override of the airlock, trying to seal it shut before the pain was too much. Her fingers seized as the familiar agony—magnified now almost beyond endurance—flared up along her arms and into her hands. Her jaw clenched so tightly it burned.

There was no guarantee, Donovan told them, that this would not kill them.

She pounded her crabbed hand on the controls, but it was too late.

“Passenger Aggiz Magreb has left the ship,” the computer reported.

Of the original team from the shipyard, now only Beka remained.

On the holographic display before her, their ship traced a needle’s pathway through a haze of swarming light. They were within range of at least half a dozen of the derelict ships at any one time now, moving fast but not fast enough. They would pass by a dozen more before they cleared the edge of the Fleet.

Beka sat sheathed in a private universe of pain. She couldn’t see. Her eyes ached in their sockets. Her face was wet with either blood or tears.

There was no thought of maneuvering, no chance of piloting a pathway. She had simply chosen a direct course down toward the planetary cluster through what looked like the thinnest concentration of Fleet ships. Once the flight-path was set in, the engines engaged fully, and they rode the impulse all by themselves.

It was inelegant. There should have been a solution. She should have found a solution. Instead, they were burning across the sky like a meteor, leaving Aggiz behind.

P
aul was discovering entirely
new landscapes of pain. Normally, he had experienced life in atmospheres of color and light. It was the thing that had drawn him to the frontier—or had allowed him to be drawn—with Cam.

Part of his mind, even as it curled into one tiny corner of his consciousness and shrieked for it all to be over, could not help but pay some attention to the blooming of reds and angry oranges that tinted the edges of his vision.

This is what an aneurism looks like, he told himself, a seizure, a flashing of the mind, a flailing of the senses against a hot web of pain.

He felt his skin crackling.

Beka had shut her eyes. Only Paul watched the projected vistas of space around them on the faux-windows of the command deck, seeing them through a sheen of tears.

There was a broken world on the screens ahead. They were falling toward it, tipping down into it as though their ship was an ancient sailing vessel sinking slowly. The deck was pitching downward, where the broken stones of the planet below waited.

“We’re coming in too fast,” he heard himself rasp out.

They were through the Fleet. They had to be. But they were falling, spiraling out of control toward the planet below.

“Pull up!” He pushed himself forward, wondering whether they were outside of the reach of the last of the mind-sheering consciousnesses. “Beka, you’ve got to pull us up!”

She was moaning. He shook her arm, and she screamed. The eyes that opened were wild. She clawed his hand away.

She’s gone. It was too much
, Paul thought.
I’m alone.

He looked down at the system of controls that stretched out before Beka. He was not a pilot. He had learned a little of how to control vessels during his time in space, but now he could only make frantic, hypothetical guesses in his mind.

The world on the screens was looming closer. It was crisscrossed with jagged fractures, as though the entire surface of the planet had been dropped and only haphazardly pieced back together.

Sometimes you just gamble and then pray. That was what Cam used to say. At least, sometimes Cam did. It had been something he loved about her.

Paul reached across the wilderness of controls and pulled a throttle.

The lights on the command deck dimmed slightly. Outside the screens—as clear and crisp as windows—the features of the world below were becoming vivid. There were wisps of clouds as well, Paul noted. There was an atmosphere. Would that be enough to slow their descent, or simply something to lick them to flaming pieces as they fell?

He kept his hand on the throttle or control stick or whatever it was. He could feel every individual bone in his hand and arm, glowing red-hot, outlined in a sharp silhouette of agony beneath his skin. Far below him, he felt something in the ship kick and groan, gyroscopes straining to hold the vessel at a constant orientation. Beka slumped lower in her seat as deceleration increased.

Warning sirens went off around him. Part of Paul’s brain recognized them as proximity alarms. The ground—puckered and broken—seemed incredibly close below, drawing nearer each moment.

“Beka,” he called, shaking her shoulder again. “We’re coming in too fast!”

She stirred and held her hands against her head.

The antidote. Donovan had prepared a dosage for each of them in the event that they survived their blitzkrieg through the Fleet. They had to be safe now. Paul’s pen-needle was in his pocket. He watched it tumble out as the ship slowed even further, landing on the far side of the command deck to wedge against a deck plate.

There were still flames burning at each of his joints. Whatever reserves of strength he had were draining fast. He stumbled across the deck, bracing himself on whatever was at hand, to reach the pen-needle. His fingers felt like pieces of lead attached to his palm. When he bent to pick it up, he could barely close them around the thin vial.

Beka was still slumped in the control chair.

There was a rising whine coming from somewhere. Paul imagined that it was possibly the air rushing past the ship at a tremendous speed.

His teeth ground against each other. He had only one needle, but the choice was clear. Beka knew how to fly the ship. He didn’t.

He fought his way back to her, grabbed her shoulder and pushed the needle in.