First Fleet #1-4: The Complete Saga (23 page)

“That was hundreds of years ago,” Beka said, trying to keep the frustration out of her voice. “I won’t be held responsible for something I played no role in.”

Even as she said the words, she recalled the screaming of the Synthetics in the shipyard as she worked alongside Davis to draw memories from the Brick and load them into Synthetic minds.

“Yes, yes.” The doctor waved a hand dismissively again in a gesture with which Beka was becoming distinctly annoyed. “But now they are useful. Now you could have a crew for your ship immune to the effects of the creatures on the fleet above.” He sucked at his lower lip for a moment. “But in any case, I agree with you, and I am of course obligated to render treatment to any patient – biological or Synthetic.”

Beka snorted, a bit too loudly, and Glaucon grinned.

“So what
is
the prognosis?” she pressed.

“Not good,” Rine said. He led the way back toward the row of bunks. “It was a high-frequency EM pulse. We saw these used frequently in the hunting squads before we left System. It completely disrupts all higher functioning.”

Beka followed, pausing over Eleanor’s bed. “How do we reverse it?”

“You do not. Except perhaps for this one, who appears to have been at the epicenter of the discharge. Paradoxically, these weapons are least effective at extremely short range. She was thus partially shielded.”

Rine nodded toward Eleanor’s form. Her dark hair spread across the pillow, her chest rose and fell, and her eyelids occasionally fluttered. She looked as though she were simply sleeping.

“We have to wipe all disrupted cognitive processes,” Rine was saying. “Then we can use a functioning model to reload the operative matrices. If it works, her personalities and deep memories will not be affected.”

“Fine,” Beka said. “Good. So how do we do it?”

Rine jabbed a thumb at Glaucon. “We require a very early model Synthetic to provide an active template. A jump-start, if you will. The earlier, the more primitive, the better. Ideally, our template would be the simplest, barely cognizant excuse for sentience we could find. An idiot, if you will.”

Beside him, Glaucon grinned again.

“Luckily,” Rine said, with exaggerated exasperation, “we have such a specimen among us.”

“Do it,” Beka said. “Do it now.”

Glaucon seated himself at the edge of Eleanor’s bed, and Rine pulled a spool of wires from a pouch at his side. He began attaching them to Eleanor’s scalp.

Beka glanced back toward where Donovan and Paul lay. Beside them, Jens conferred with a pair of soldiers.

Perhaps, Beka thought suddenly, there were other tasks she should be doing – trying to repair the ship, or checking on the status of the Brick.

But there was a chance to get Eleanor back, to undo whatever Davis had done, and she was going to take it. Eleanor had cared for her when she was alone on the shipyard, when she was sure Jens was dead.

When she was killing Eleanor’s own kind.

Beka grasped the Synthetic’s hand, which felt warm. “I want to know that this won’t hurt her.”

“Does it hurt to wake up?” Rine murmured. “Look, Glaucon.” He barked a laugh. “She has let herself appear the oldest, even though you can tell by the facial structure that she is the latest model here. The most advanced, I suppose. She will also have the highest cognitive functioning, so if we were to have any problems it would be with her.”

Beka felt her chest constrict. “Can you try it on another one first? Just to make sure the process works?”

“It will not work on the rest. They are too far gone.” He selected half a dozen loose ends of the wires and moved to where Glaucon sat. “We wipe the processors, as I said, and then we reinitialize them using Glaucon’s eminently simply neural pathways. She may wake an idiot, but once she is fully functioning her own process will work back up through his induced fog. He’s a very early model, Glaucon is.”

“Will it hurt her?” Beka asked again. She was remembering Eleanor’s face when Davis discharged his weapon.

Rine sighed deeply. “Does it hurt when you defragment a processing unit?” He turned to Glaucon. “Put her mind at ease, please.”

Glaucon smiled and shook his head, the wires attached to his scalp catching the light as he did. “It won’t.”

Rine must have given Glaucon a signal Beka did not see, because suddenly Eleanor’s eyes flickered and opened. She sat up slowly and put her hand to her head.

“We have reinitialized your higher processes,” Rine said, putting his face directly in front of Eleanor’s and speaking slowly.

“Who?” Eleanor asked. Her voice sounded like a child’s. She looked around until her eyes found Beka. “I remember you.”

Beka squeezed her hand. “Eleanor. How do you feel?”

“Fine,” she said. “Better. Things are coming back. Davis had . . . where are we?”

Rine was already pulling the wires free. “Take your time explaining,” he told Beka. “Use small words at first.”

Jens was calling from the other side of the barracks. “Get her up as soon as she’s able. Your crewmen are coming around, Beka. We need to plan our next move. I have a feeling we won’t have much time to lick our wounds.”

“
T
he planets aren’t
heavy enough.”

Tholan stood on the command deck of the forge-ship, staring into the darkness of space as though willing the objects of his search to come into view. A young science ensign stood beside him, clearly nervous, though just as clearly convinced she had something important to communicate.

Tholan sighed and turned toward her. “The planets, ensign?”

“Yes, sir.” The young woman swallowed. “I was part of the team analyzing the data
Grenada
downloaded from the Fleet.”

“Yes?”

Her face was wide and young. She might have been Tholan’s granddaughter, had Tholan ever chosen a family. For an instant his mind turned to Eleanor, and a cloud of mingled anger and regret crossed his features.

The ensign misinterpreted his expression.

“I should have sent you a report, sir, I understand. But it seemed important, and I wanted to tell you before the rest of the Fleet arrived.”

They were in high orbit above a brown dwarf – a failed sun – still almost twelve light-years from the Grave Worlds, on the very edge of the Perseus Limb. The rest of the Second Fleet winked into space around them, but Tholan had only about half a dozen jump-set equipped vessels among them. It meant the Fleet’s numerical strength was useless.

“Our entire transport system is tied to the light-lines,” Tholan said, ignoring the worried expression on the ensign’s face. “All commerce beyond System. And all large-scale military operations. Do you know how many jump-set equipped vessels there are in existence?”

The young woman shook her head helplessly.

“And you never will. It’s a closely guarded secret. But they’re costly as hell to construct, and they’re not going to replace the light-lines for decades, if ever.”

Tholan pointed at the projected view, toward an empty spot in the blackness he knew contained the Grave Worlds and the remains of the First Fleet.

“That spot in the sky has swallowed an entire Fleet,” he said. “And now it’s swallowed two jump-set equipped vessels as well. The first was the
Grenada
. The second was the
Clerke Maxwell
, carrying the Fleet’s only survivor. And we can’t get to it. It’s cut off. The bridges are burned.”

Tholan’s voice had risen gradually as he spoke, and the other deck officers stopped what they were doing and watched him silently. He dropped his volume back to a more conversational tone and turned to the ensign.

“Now what was it I need to understand about these planets, ensign?”

The woman, he noted with a weary approval, swallowed whatever she was about to say, squared her shoulders, and spoke.

“The planets, as I mentioned before, sir. What they’re calling the Grave Worlds. They’re too heavy. Too massive.”

Tholan slowly took a seat at the command console, trying not to look as tired as he felt.

“You’re going to have to unpack that for me a bit,” he growled.

“We have the data from the
Grenada
,” she explained, “which included all the planetary telemetry the First Fleet gathered before they were overwhelmed and we lost contact. We’ve correlated that now with our own long-range imaging of the system from here. It’s unique. Physically quite bizarre, actually.”

The ensign was warming to her subject. It was evident in her voice. “A cluster of planetoids orbiting a common center of gravity, which in turn orbits a small group of singularities.”

“Yes.” Tholan touched the surface of the command console – a smaller version of the desk in his quarters – and a holographic display of the system blinked to life. The Grave Worlds spun together like a pinwheel.

“We’ve been able to calculate the relative velocities of the planetoids,” the woman continued. “And the thing is, they’re moving too fast. We know their masses – the First Fleet determined that from gravimetrics – and so we know what sort of gravitational pull they would have on each other.”

“The first year physics is unnecessary, ensign.”

“Sorry, sir.” She paused. “The velocity at which the planets rotate their common center of mass is too great. From their mass alone, they wouldn’t stay gravitationally bound. They’d spin off into space.”

Tholan rubbed his chin, staring at the display in front of him and the wheeling of the tiny worlds.

“For this to be a stable system – and it is, by all accounts, stable – something else is holding these planets together.”

“Such as?” Tholan asked.

“We have no idea. The planetoids move as though they were part of a solid structure, but there’s nothing we can detect holding them together besides gravity – and that’s not enough. There’s something more binding them, somehow. We’ve gone through all our databases, and we haven’t been able to find anything similar on any of the surveys.”

“Is it artificial?”

The ensign shrugged. “If it is, then it’s beyond our capabilities to create, and certainly the capabilities of the Colonizers.”

Tholan drummed his fingers while the ensign waited. He didn’t like information that did not add up. He liked even less the possibility of stepping into a situation where the enigmas seemed to be proliferating.

Besides the loss of the Fleet and the subsequent disappearance of Eleanor and the
Clerke Maxwell
, his engineer had already added the possibility that, in addition to armed Colonizers, there awaited space-bending ETI at their ultimate destination. And now this additional riddle, which Tholan would bet was intimately related.

A tone chimed somewhere behind him, and an officer cleared his throat for attention. Tholan rotated his chair to face him.

“The first of the jump-set equipped ships have arrived off the light-line, sir,” the officer explained.

“Good.” Tholan stood. “I’ll be transferring my flag to the
Mustafa Kemal
. Tell the captain to get his ship ready for a jump to the Grave Worlds. Find me an additional medium-heavy cruiser and a hospital ship with jump-sets. Order them to position alongside and prepare to accompany us.”

He paused, regarding the black screen before him.

“Wait one standard hour. If I haven’t sent a ship back with a message, consider this entire system quarantined. And consider full-scale hostilities opened with all Colonizer worlds.”

The officer nodded, and Tholan turned back to the science ensign.

“How badly do you want to solve your riddle, ensign?”

“I’d prefer not to stay behind, sir, if that’s what you mean.”

“Then you’re more fool-hardy than most.” Tholan gestured again at the black expanse beyond the forward view. “This particular pool of space has swallowed seven hundred ships and nearly fifteen thousand souls. And we’re jumping in blind.”

When he saw she wasn’t going to be dissuaded, he nodded curtly.

“Then get yourself scanned, suit up, and transfer to the
Kemal
. We’ll be jumping in fifteen minutes.”

After she left, he turned back to the first officer. “Once the rest of the Second Fleet has arrived, send a general order. I want every soldier, sailor, and officer scanned, starting with the crews jumping with us.”

“But the Brick is still empty, sir.”

“Whatever activity erased it seems to have subsided,” Tholan pointed out. “We need to start backing up our soldiers again, or we’ll have mutinies across all the fleets. Order the memory scans.”

It might be futile, Tholan admitted to himself, but it felt prudent.

Fifteen minutes later, three ships pushed forward beyond the picket line the Second Fleet was holding at the new light-line terminus. When they had achieved a safe distance, each triggered the oversized jump-sets that bulged as silver blisters on each side of the ships. The jumping vessels did not disappear cleanly as though slipping into the laminar flow of a light-line. They distended, blossomed, exploded as the fabric of space curdled around them.

Then they were gone.

Twelve light-years away and no time later, they reappeared and set a course for the Grave Worlds.

C
am Dowager was lost
. There was no sense to the caverns. She had heard the soldiers say that before, but now she knew it for herself. How was this possible?

She could feel her training coming back to her: months of tactical simulations beneath the honeycombed surfaces of various outer-System moons, working through networks of tunnels that intelligence thought might be similar to Colonizer encampments. She had become quite skilled at navigating in three dimensions below ground.

But nothing worked now.

She was lost.

Cam cursed and forced herself to slow her pace. There was something in the walls themselves, something in the lines of glyphs – etching the surface of the stones at intermittent lengths along the tunnels – that made it difficult to think.

Lines twisted in directions they shouldn’t, or met at angles in such a way that something in her gut told her was impossible. She found herself chewing the inside of her lip, looking for a pain that made things sharper, that pushed the haziness back down into the outlines of clarity.

The tunnel curved and re-curved on itself. There were no branchings she could see. The light that emanated from the stones themselves was faint, but she was certain she could not have missed any side tunnels. There were no other chasms like the one she had watched the ship fall into before she left Jens and the other soldiers. There was no other direction she could have gone, and yet there were no signs of her daughters.

“Perry!” she screamed down the tunnel. “Agnes!”

Her voice broke.

She had lost her girls. She had taken them out of the habitation, leaving whatever safety they had to hunt shadows. And what had she found? An impossible creature that had brought them here, to an impossible planet.

And now it had taken the twins.

They were down here, somewhere, in these caverns with that thing. They had to be. There was no other place for them to go.

And try as she might, she could not convince herself this was all a terrible dream, that any moment she would wake up to the slow dawn of Onaway slanting through the windows of their room to find Paul sitting beside her in bed and the thick smell of coffee hanging between them.

It was not a dream. It was a nightmare. And she was living it.

She kept running.

L
ater – how much later
, she had no idea, her only chronometer being the burning of her lungs – Cam fell against the side of a tunnel wall and let her knees give way, sliding against the cool stones to the cavern floor.

The pale rock warmed her back. Her chest and legs ached. It was fruitless. She was exhausted and so angry with herself that she could not think clearly. Each line of reasoning flared out like an angry, white-hot thread, trailing back on itself.

She pressed her palms to her eyes and stifled a scream.

Calm down
, she told herself.
You’re on the edge. Step back.

There were breathing exercises to do, pressure points to hold. When she was a soldier she had been taught how to behave, how to gain control, in the face of panic: a cave-in, a frozen heavy-suit, a dead ship. Bring in your horizons and focus on the here and the now. What do you know? Where are you? What do you have?

Start with the first:
I’m on an unknown world, looking for my daughters. I don’t understand how we got here, and I don’t understand how they disappeared. I’m dealing with an alien intelligence. I don’t know what it wants.

Deep breath.

It said – I thought it said – it wanted to communicate.

Next question:
Where am I?

Again, not much help there.

Cam forced herself not to look back down the corridor. There wasn’t anything to see. For the past several minutes she had been convinced that she wasn’t moving at all, or that the entire tunnel was revolving beneath her feet like an immense treadmill. It somehow felt like the inside of a nautilus shell, as though she was spiraling downward, burrowing into the skin of an empty world.

She shook her head to clear it.

What do you have? What are your resources?

She had been running so hard she hadn’t paid any attention to what she carried. She had no light, no supplies, but she still gripped the weapon she had taken from the soldier. It was a standard-grade plasma rifle, identical to the one she carried during her years in the military. This one had seen plenty of action: the grips were worn and the barrel showed telltale signs of EM fatigue.

Cam checked the charge. It was still more than half full and would remain so, indefinitely, if not fired.

What else could a standard issue plasma rifle do with half a charge? She could break it down and use the discharge trigger inside to start a fire, if she had any fuel or any need for light or heat. She could activate the homing beacon in the grip, were there anyone nearby to hear it. She could—

She could call for help. It would drain the charge quickly, but if this rifle were anything like those she trained with, it would have a small communication unit built into the stock, keyed into any active System frequency. The units were not very powerful and only to be used in emergencies on the rare chance a soldier’s primary communication belt was disabled.

Cam flipped the rifle around and placed her face near the receiver.

“This is Cam Dowager of System, to anyone in range.” She paused. What had the ship she saw descend been called? It was the same ship that had come to their world when she abandoned Paul.

“Cam Dowager to the
Clerke Maxwell
.” She swallowed. “Paul, it’s me. Are you there?”

J
ens’s soldiers
had managed to anchor the ship to the walls of the shaft using its grav-tethers – originally designed to grapple small asteroids for taking on water or transferring momentum during evasive maneuvers – and rotate the
Clerke Maxwell
so the lowest levels were roughly parallel with the surface of the planet it was still perched within.

The ragged crew – Beka, Paul, Eleanor, Glaucon, Rine, Donovan and Jens – had climbed to the science bay where Davis’s body was still in stasis, to compare notes and discuss their next steps.

“We’re secure for now,” Jens said. “We have supplies and power, and the ship is anchored. We’re not going anywhere, and we seem for the moment hidden from Colonizers, if there are any, and out of range of those things in the Fleet.”

Beka waited for her to continue and offer a plan of action, but Jens stopped. After a few more moments of silence, she realized they were looking at her. They were looking
to
her, expecting Beka to make the call as to whether they would remain in hiding or try to find some other, safer location. Even Eleanor was watching her as though she expected Beka to have answers.

This was something new. She had been in de facto command after they marooned themselves at the end of the light-line, but that was simply because there were so few of them and she had the mathematical drive to attempt – however unsuccessfully – navigation through the Fleet.

In that case – as with her efforts as an entanglement expert extracting memories – all of her training and problem-solving had accomplished nothing. Yet they were all waiting for her decision now.

Beka cleared her throat. “We can’t stay here long term,” she said. “Once the ship is repaired, we need to find a way off this planet.”

“We need to call for help,” Rine put in. “It is no doubt only a matter of time before the creatures above find their way down here or what happened on the surface begins to affect us.”

“Who is there to call?” Jens asked. “There are no System personnel on any channel.”

Donovan glowered at Rine, his face grim and still bearing the signs of their recent passage through the Fleet in bloodshot eyes and ragged bruises. Beka wondered if she looked as bad as he did.

“Whatever your people released,” he growled at Rine, “it’s effectively wiped out both sides. We might be the only survivors on this entire planet.”

Rine ignored the barb and rubbed his chin, pulling his angular features into an even narrower frown. “The Sinks. Our own light-line network. The means by which we brought reinforcements when you first attacked. We can send a message – a distress beacon – to our planets.”

“You don’t think someone’s already done that?” Beka asked.

“The Hetmantates would not have responded,” Rine said, then sighed. “Whatever began to affect the surface settlements and shallow mines after . . .” He paused and shuddered, then went on, “after we pulled the bodies up from the deep, it
appeared
at the time as an infection, and standard procedure across all the Hetmantates is to enforce a strict quarantine on any unknown pathogen.”

“So what makes you think they would answer us,” Beka pressed, “especially if your light-lines – these Sinks – are only one way? Anyone they sent to help would effectively be as marooned as we are.”

“We have information,” Rine said. He extended a long finger. “First, as you have pointed out, your passage through the Fleet proves that whatever the ETI effect on humans, it is not biological nor is it infectious. Second, we have determined that Synthetic organisms appear to be immune to the effects. We ask the Hetmantates to send Synthetics.”

“You think they would?” Jens asked.

The doctor shrugged his sharp shoulders, making the gesture appear somehow pained. “I do not know for certain they would. But at least they would know what had happened here.”

Beka thought about their time at the shipyard, of Tholan and their attempts to pull memories from the Brick to determine what had happened to the First Fleet. The Colonizers were in a similar situation. They had lost an entire cluster of colonies.

She nodded slowly. “How do we do it?”

“We would have to reach the surface,” Rine explained. “The communication relays are there. From the surface we could send a message back through the Sinks.”

Their eyes turned again to her, and once more Beka realized they were waiting for her to make the final decision. For a moment her response was anger. Why should she be responsible for them? She had come for one reason, and that was to find her sister.

Now that Jens was safe, why shouldn’t she be able to go back to the sidelines, content to apply herself to problems of quantum entanglement and the finer points of encoding information into the particle condensates of the Brick?

Jens had command experience, and Eleanor certainly had a better knowledge of their ship. Even Donovan was an officer in the medical corps. Any one of them, she wanted to tell them, would be better suited than her to lead.

But then she glanced at Paul and Donovan, at their lined, weary faces. They had seen so much. They had followed her this far.

She could try to take them a little further.

“All right,” she said. “Jens, can the ship get back up this shaft and get us to a docking spur just below the surface?”

“We’re almost ready to go,” Jens said. She pointed over her shoulder to where the Brick waited in the shadows of the science bay. “But before we do anything else, we need to get scanned into that. My soldiers have gone weeks without getting backed up. We’re all getting anxious.”

Beka stared at her for a moment. “Jens,” she said slowly, “the Brick is dead. It’s drained. The creatures wiped it.”

Jens face grew ashen. “We can’t . . .”She paused.

Beka abruptly realized what this loss meant for soldiers who depended on regular scans into the Brick as insurance that, whatever happened, their personalities and memories would be saved.

They all waited for several moments while Jens visibly got her fear under control. “If the whole Fleet is gone and the Brick is too,” she finally whispered, “then it’s forever. No one is coming back.”

“They’re gone,” Beka agreed softly. “We saw them go. But Aggiz found residual signals in the condensates. The creatures were using it to communicate, somehow, though they might not have even realized what they were doing. They may have resonated with it naturally.”

“We’re entirely cut off,” Jens went on, as though she hadn’t heard her sister. “Whatever we learn here, whatever happens, we won’t be able to upload.”

“All the more reason to send a message through the Sinks to the Colonizers,” Rine said.

“There is one more thing,” It was Eleanor. She had been silent for most of their meeting, watching them, her eyes dark and wide.

She had recovered from the damage inflicted by Davis’s device, but her voice was soft and strained. Like everyone else, she seemed to have aged. She pointed to the res-pod in the corner of the bay. “What about him?”

“Davis?” Beka asked. “What’s his status, Donovan?”

“Holding steady, but healing slowly.”

“One of my men on the command deck says he’s getting a message on a System frequency,” Jens interrupted. Her hand was at her ear, cupping the tiny implant that allowed her private communication with the surviving soldiers of her platoon. “I’m having him patch it through down here.”

They were all seated around one of the science consoles, the closest thing they had to a conference table. Beka sat across from Paul, so she saw his face when the voice came over the room’s internal communication system. It was the same expression he wore when the static output of the Brick had resolved into an image of his wife’s face. A mixture of disbelief and joy sprang to his ragged features.

“Cam!” he stood, shouting. “Cam, it’s me! It’s Paul!”

Somewhere, on a distant level of the ship, an alarm klaxon sounded.