First Fleet #1-4: The Complete Saga (3 page)

A
mid the rising
tide of the dead I had forgotten about the tall pilot until he reappeared in the medical bay.

“What did you do to her?” he demanded to know.

He was beside her res-pod, though I hadn’t seen him arrive. Opaque brown fluids circulated beneath the glass. It usually took a terminated unit several days to fully discharge the organic materials and cleanse itself in preparation for the next culture.

“Is she dead?”

I ignored the question and asked who he was, careful to remain on the opposite side of the long row of glass coffins.

“You can’t kill her,” he said, laughing softly. The eyes that had seemed clouded before were now somehow empty, as though he looked out on a world blurred by fear or despair. He bent over the unit until his forehead rested against it.

“The termination order came through days ago from Command,” I said slowly. “There was nothing I could do.”

He did not seem to have heard, though he raised his head. “Some of us knew.” His fingers were splayed on the surface of the unit as though reaching for what was within. “Some of us saw. We had orders to dig deep, to find them and send them up. Even though it had been so long. Even though all her worlds were dead. She was our weapon. She was the flame, and your ships are so many moths.”

“You’re a Colonizer,” I said. “I don’t know how you got aboard, but I’ve alerted Security.” I was edging away.

He fixed me with a stare that was suddenly unclouded and sharp, and I thought again of the sightless eyes of the body in C-47.

“The caves do strange things to the mind,” he whispered. “And we had to go deepest, looking for her. And then, when you came, we were ready. We poured out of the Sinks and we stole your pods, and we sent her pieces back.”

He seemed to be looking past me, through the walls of the frigate itself, to something only he could see swimming toward us through space.

I froze.

There was movement in the unit. The man saw it and stroked the surface gently.

“Down there,” he murmured, “all we heard were her echoes. All we saw were her shadows. But it was enough. We thought the worlds were her grave, but I think she knew we were coming.”

His eyes unfocused again, he smiled.

The brown fluid in the pod surged like a swollen river.

It was impossible. Nothing could still be alive in there.

“We brought her back!” His tone had risen in pitch and volume. “We found her in her house of stone, but we brought her back.”

“What have you done?”

The low klaxons sounded again. Beyond the hull of the ship, I knew more res-pods were rising from the deep with their carrion cargoes.

His laughter was soft. “Resurrection.”

There was another sound, this one strangely like stone on stone. Something inside the pod was tapping on the glass.

“It’s impossible,” I said, aloud this time. Nothing had overridden my commands to the pod. The nutrient flux had been shut down. The cleansing enzymes should have scrubbed the interior of any organic matter.

The pod was still between us, but now there was a pistol in his hand.

“Open it.”

I shook my head.

“She’s alive. You said so yourself. All it takes is as few as half a dozen cells.”

I stalled. All I could think of were those worlds coughing up the broken bodies of the rows upon rows of soldiers all around me. It wasn’t bravery; it was an overpowering fear of whatever was waiting behind that glass.

“What did you bring back? Is this what’s down there, killing our men?”

“They’re killing themselves. Or each other. It doesn’t matter.” He laughed again.

The tapping came again, louder this time. Something like a shard of bone dragged along the inside surface of the glass.

“Open it,” he ordered.

The doors at the far side of the bay hissed apart as incoming pods slid into the few remaining positions. His eyes glanced that direction for a moment, and I broke for the entrance to the corridor. It was a long sprint. I was only halfway there when I heard the shattering glass.

“She is here.” His voice rose even higher, a sort of agonized, ecstatic keening, only to end suddenly in a strangled scream. There was no question of turning to look.

I met Donovan in the corridor, his face clouded with worry.

“I was coming to find you,” he said. “Something’s jammed our contact with the rest of the fleet, and even intra-ship—What the hell is going on?” This last was as I elbowed past him and slammed the manual lock to the med bay entrance.

When I turned back to him his face was grey as stone.

“There was . . .” He was struggling to find words. “In the bay, standing over one of the pods . . .” He started shaking.

“They brought something back, Donovan.” I grabbed him by the shoulders. “Look at me. You saw it.
They brought something back.
”

He slumped against the wall. “What are you saying? Who brought something back?”

“The Colonizers, somehow. They found remains of—of whatever built those ruins on those planets, and they’re using our res-pods to—to culture it or something.”

Donovan’s mouth opened in horror. “Oh my God!” He brought his hands to his head slowly. “Oh my God, I hear her.
I hear her in my head.
”

The entire corridor seemed to slope. I braced myself beside Donovan. He was right—there was something outside, something beyond the door, beyond the surface of my mind. It was as though it was slowly, methodically trying different frequencies one by one until it locked on and was able to get a clear and overpowering message through. The voice was growing clearer.

I had once, as a boy, stood beside the spillway of a huge earthen dam with nothing but a low rail between me and hundreds of feet of yawning space with a thousand gallons of water surging below. The sensation to simply step over the edge—the horrifying and almost overpowering realization that there was nothing between me and the abyss—had been dizzying. It was like that now, except that space itself, a chaos of surging emptiness, was itself whispering for me to step closer. There was something utterly and immensely alien on the other side of the wall, and I felt my mind sliding toward it.

I fought down an urge to turn and release the lock. Instead I pulled Donovan to his feet, and we ran farther down the corridor.

Where the corridor branched, Donovan stopped and shook himself. “We’ve got to.” He licked his lips. “We’ve got to get a warning to the rest of the fleet, and then we’ve got to self-destruct the
Elphinstone
.”

Farther from the medical bay it was easier to think.

I blurted, “What about opening the space-side bay doors, evacuating it?”

He nodded. “That might work. But from the command deck, not from down here. I can’t go back.”

It was like running in a dream. It took a huge effort just to move farther down the corridor. Before we had gone far Tsun-Chan emerged from another bay, walking as though asleep. When we tried to hold her back, she started screaming. By this time more crewmembers had spilled into the corridor. They all drifted toward the locked entrance.

Donovan pushed me into the medical bay Tsun-Chan had just exited and locked the entrance behind us. It was empty apart from us and the hundreds of regenerating soldiers.

I wondered what she would look like to the other crewmembers when they opened the door to the medical bay. An alien intelligence, resurrected after billions of years. Something so incredibly old, something that had crafted the sublime stones in the warmth of those caverns unspeakable eons ago. Something sleeping for so long returned—

“No you don’t.” Donovan caught my hand. It had been drifting toward the entrance release.

I bit my tongue until I tasted blood. The pain seemed to help keep my mind clear.

“There’s no way to get to the command deck now,” Donovan was saying, “and there’s no way to send a message from here if she or whoever is out there has jammed transmissions.”

“A memory scan,” I said. The terminals waited above each res-pod, and it would be easy to reconfigure for a scan instead of a dump. “They couldn’t have taken down the memory net.” The memory storage units on each ship—what we called the bricks—were quantum-resonance tethered. It was the closest thing in space to being hard-wired. Command had gone to the utmost to ensure they’d be able to dump the consciousness of their soldiers back into their bodies wherever they ended up being regenerated.

“Fine, but what good will that do without a body to dump it into?”

There were voices in the corridor now.

“That’s our way out,” I explained, motioning to the doors at the far end of the bay where the pods docked. “You first. You saw it; you’ll be able to tell others,” I said as I pushed him toward the nearest memory terminal before the implications could sink in.

The terminal made contact, and his eyes glazed with the brief but overpowering sense of déjà vu that a memory scan effects. The nearest blunt object was a canister of flame retardant. Before his eyes cleared I brought it down with all the strength I could. I was not strong, but I was a doctor and I knew where to strike. He struggled. It took longer than I would have liked. When he was finally still, my arms ached and her voice was hissing even louder in the back of my head.

My plan would not work with a live body. The pods weren’t lifeboats.

They were tombs.

I pulled Donovan’s body along the long row of sleeping soldiers, some barely more than pulsating bundles of nerves and tendons. This was a charnel ship. This had always been a charnel ship.

The voices in the corridor were louder, and there were screams as well.

At the end of the row, I found an empty pod and put what was left of Donovan inside. I set it for stasis and watched the nutrient bath flood up around his broken form. There was a code to enter that would reverse the evacuation process, push the pod back into the space-side bay and launch it. With any luck it would find its way to another frigate away from the fleet.

I stared at the keypad, trying to recall what I was doing.

The screams outside continued, but now there was singing as well.

Donovan had seen her. Wherever his body was resurrected, his memory would find its way, and he would be able to warn others.

I pressed the buttons, and the pod slid away.

Behind me, the door to the corridor opened, and I heard her clearly. It was cold and piercing, like starlight.

T
here are graveyards in space
. Some say that all of space is itself a graveyard, that the dark between the planets is simply the dark of the tomb. It is, after all, where the stars and the worlds go to die. It holds them all in darkness.

The darkness of space is an endless tomb where the dead are never still. A graveyard on a world holds bodies locked in the embrace of soil and gravity. They do not stir. They do not move. They sleep the quiet and inexorable sleep of decay.

In space, the dead wander. Torn ships leak debris and detritus like gauzy filaments. They are ghosts, wandering along listless trajectories. Even the bodies within them drift. And the bodies without, the bodies scattered beyond the metal wrecks, each take a different course determined by their particular momentum when hulls were breached, when suits or ships were ruptured.

War has always been a comrade to death. Fallen soldiers lay wasted on shorelines, buried in mass graves, or at the bottom of dark seas. War in space, however, scatters its dead in an eternal dissipation, a random retreat along a thousand black and trackless pathways. Ships and bodies slip away, a broken army fleeing into the darkness, each picking its silent way, alone.

F
ar from System
, far from the Reservation Worlds, far from all habitable planets, amidst the drifting refuse of a battle lost there was a single point of purposeful motion - a sleeper. Alone he was carried, directly and resolutely, on a straight pathway back through the expanding cloud of the dead. The glass and steel cocoon in which he was encased pulled away from a single dark vessel and launched itself out into the night.

He was not a survivor. There were no survivors. He was dead.

At the graveyard’s edge, the sleeper’s pod reached a light line terminus and, in a nearly instantaneous flash, disappeared within the light line, disregarding the laws of relativity to slip through space. The sleeper did not choose his path. He glided down the lines randomly, a broken twig in the currents and eddies of a stream in which time and space go awry. Presently he reemerged, in a region of space that was not scattered with the dead.

The sleeper’s pod needed power. It had exited the light line near a large and mostly empty world that held only a handful of energy signatures. The pod locked onto the nearest one and approached.

There was a station in very low orbit, apparently unmanned. The pod sent the appropriate signals: the imperative to render aid, to assist in upholding the Contract. The signal was binding on all civilians, biological or mechanical. The governing intelligence of the station opened an airlock accommodatingly. The sleeper’s cocoon entered, tethered itself, integrated with the station’s energy system and began its work, regenerating and repairing.

The sleeper slept. It was an absolute sleep. There would be no dreams.

How could there be? Theorists had argued about the possibility in the past, before ruling it out as impossible.

He was, after all, dead.

B
eka Grale was tired
. She was tired of the grey bulkheads and corridors of the shipyard, of taking her meals in a mess filled with flint-faced soldiers who would not speak to her, of the isolation and the confusion. She had been here for a week. But, apart from meals, she had been confined to her spare quarters with no explanation of why she had been summoned from System and no outside communication.

She was tired of this endless space.

There was nothing to see out here. The shipyard orbited the furious dot of a dwarf star of interest only for the metal-rich asteroid belts ringing it. The only sight out of any porthole was the iron ribs of ships being built and the robotic constructs swimming between them. The entire scene frosted like ice in the star’s white glare. Its light burned like an arc lamp. It didn’t matter how much she reduced the transparency of the porthole in her temporary quarters, the light of that angry star gave her a constant headache.

She considered asking again about messaging her parents. She had written a few just in case she ever had an opportunity to send one, mainly as an activity to keep herself busy. However, her letters always read like log entries. She couldn’t write like her sister - long, descriptive missives home from wherever Jens happened to be stationed. Beka’s mother would read them aloud to Beka and her father over and over. Jens could always capture the look and feel of a place and pour her teasing personality into the words as well. She knew how to connect with people. Beka only knew how to connect information. And right now she had very little.

She had almost convinced herself to write another letter nonetheless when a faint chime with a flash of static over the table signaled an incoming transmission. The torso of her superior back in System resolved from the dancing particles of noise.

“Eduardo, where the hell have you been?”

She was relieved to finally see a familiar face but angry as well. She had been pulled from her work at the Entanglement Center ostensibly with his permission, though he had never offered an explanation on what her assignment at the shipyard would be.

His image smiled apologetically, “They’re being pretty tight on whose transmissions they let into the shipyard. Apparently there could be Colonizer sympathizers anywhere.”

“So what am I doing here?”

“You know as much as I do. You’re there because they wanted an entanglement expert. You’re one of the best.”

Beka pushed her fingers backward through her short dark curls and swore, “It’s been a week and they haven’t told me a damned thing. They only let me out for meals, and none of the soldiers would speak to me. The only information I’ve been able to pick up is what I’ve overheard them talking about.”

“What are they talking about?”

“About the Colonizers, mainly. About the war. And about how quickly we’re going to win it.”

“Anything about the First Fleet?”

Her eyes narrowed. “No one here talks about that. And you shouldn’t either, especially not on an open channel.” She flopped down into a low chair beside the table and sighed. “And no, I don’t think there’s a chance in hell that they brought a junior entanglement expert all the way from System to help some admirals find their missing fleet. That’s a bit above my pay grade.”

“Maybe they’re just bored. All those lonely officers floating in their tin cans. Maybe they like smart women.”

“Screw you, Eduardo.”

He spread his hands. “You never would.”

“Is there a good reason I’m enduring this?”

“It’s—” His gaze dropped suddenly and he grimaced. “A stab at levity. I’m sorry. I’ve once again made a mess of personal communication.” He paused for a breath. “The message came to the office, and I took it as the senior staff member. You got notification.”

Like everything else in space, the shipyard spun to generate its own gravity with centrifugal force. For an instant Beka felt certain it tripled. Her stomach clenched.

“It’s her,” she said. “Oh god, it’s Jens.”

“I’m sorry, Beka.”

“She wasn’t even—” Beka’s mind raced as she tried to run through her most recent conversations with her sister in memory. “She wasn’t even anywhere near the front. They had her stationed at a fuel depot. Sentinel standby. Nothing to do. I made fun of her.”

Eduardo tried to keep his voice neutral. “Apparently she was reassigned. Or the front shifted. You know what they’re like with information. The notification didn’t say anything, just the usual. They did fulfill Contract. Her uploaded memories were intact. However, though all attempts at regeneration were made, they were unsuccessful.”

“This is just . . .”

“I’m so sorry, Beka.”

He may have said goodbye or signed off, but Beka wasn’t listening. When she glanced up again his form had winked out.

Beka stared, out the porthole, into the unblinking eye of the dwarf star.

You weren’t supposed to die in space, she thought to herself. That was what the Contract was all about. The military guarded their regeneration technology closely. No matter where you were killed, your pod would take you back to a ship where you would regenerate, and you’d get your memories back. You’d get your life. Every ship, all the time, everywhere, held every sailor’s memories in the quantum-tethered Brick. If they could save just a hair, or just a fingernail, they could bring you back.

Sometimes there was nothing left to save. An entire ship might go down. Or someone’s suit might be hit so badly there was not enough cellular material to work with. Even afterward, if you got sufficient organic matter back, sometimes—rarely, but sometimes—there were problems with the regeneration process itself. The nutrient matrices wouldn’t align properly or the memory scan would, for some reason, be corrupt.

Some soldiers still died, but so very few.

And now her sister was gone.

Forever.

The star winked balefully.

Beka cried with a stubborn and silent fury in her room aboard the shipyard, but her tears did nothing to soften its glare.