First Fleet #1-4: The Complete Saga (9 page)

T
he call swept
out into space from the shipyard. It was broadcast on all channels through the transmitter that sat on the lip of the light line, tethered to the gravity of the tiny dwarf star. From there, it raced outward along a thousand corridors, echoing down the network of lines. The lines that connected humanity’s corner of the galaxy like a dense, entangled, and slowly-shifting spider-web.

The lines joined planets and stars together, all the junctions of humanity’s staggered expansion into space. Each of these terminal points moved, carried along in the sweeping rotation of the galaxy as a whole. The light line network stretched and distended, bending like a web in a light breeze, as its various nodal points swam through space while a gravity well anchored each light line terminus. The lines were threads that linked drifting dust motes in an empty room, shimmering and stretching.

The message spun down these corridors, the conduits of which the laws of space and time were shunted aside in, a bundle of compressed information encoding a single command. At each thread’s end, the call radiated out back into space, like ripples from a thousand thrown stones. It held its cohesion against the flux of stellar static, the ceaseless noise voiced by a billion foaming suns.

Where are you?

Orbiting the almost empty world of Onaway, Station’s receptors picked up the call and channeled it into the pod’s processors. The sleeper did not stir, but the pod responded. It relayed a message back to Station. Station sent it out over the curve of the planet it hung above, back through the light line terminus and into that bright, spreading web. A single call, a simple answer:

Here.

P
aul got
the call while he was at the foot of one of the rock-burners along the North Ridge. The noise of the catalytic process by which megatons of rock was transformed into gas and particulates was deafening at this proximity, even with his thin suit’s aural receptors turned all the way down. He could barely hear Cam’s voice.

“Just a minute,” he said. “Let me back away.”

But he lingered for a few moments. The rock-burners held an almost hypnotizing attraction for him. There were no seascapes in their new world, nor were there cloudscapes to form and dissolve above and hold the varying shades of sunlight as there were on planets that knew weather. Besides the stones of the planet itself, which were dead and unchanging, the only dynamic vista was that presented by the rock-burners.

It was the only place on Onaway where you could see clouds. They rose from the gash on the surface to several kilometers over Paul’s head. Over decades, the process would release enough greenhouse gases from the rocks in the planet’s crust to raise the temperature. The particulates in the smoke would provide nucleation particles for cloud cover. The hardy, engineered evergreens in long, even rows to the south and the green sludge that filled the tiny artificial seas to the north added oxygen to the mix.

Paul sighed and walked back to a safe distance.

“What’s up?”

“It’s our body in the attic.” He could tell that she was worried. Very worried. Cam’s emotions didn’t usually carry over into her voice unless they were strong. “The pod, actually. It’s sending out a homing beacon.”

“Good.” Paul climbed back on the crawler to head down the ridge to the next burner. “It will be finally out of our hair, become someone else’s problem.”

“My problem, Paul.
Our
problem.”

“You worry too much, Cam.”

On the other end, Cam was silent. Paul craned his neck to look upwards. He was at least a hundred kilometers away from the habitation, but he wondered if he would be able to see any capital ships in orbit. No matter how much Cam wanted to stay off the radar, stay hidden and beyond the reach of any possible attention from the military, Paul had a hard time believing that things could be as serious as she made them seem. Whatever had happened, it was in another lifetime.

He watched the smoke from the rock-burner behind him billow upward.

“I can’t deactivate the beacon, Paul.” Cam finally said. “There are going to be ships on our doorstep any time. They’ll want to know what we’re doing with a body.”

“And we’ll tell them the truth,” he answered, pulling the canopy of the crawler down over him. “Tell them that we just found it. Actually, it found us. We have no idea where it came from.”

“Just get back here, Paul.”

C
am clicked off the channel
, swearing softly and eloquently. It was what she got for Licensing with an artist. Paul’s reaction to danger oscillated between irrational heights of fear and outright disinterest or denial. It never settled anywhere useful between the two. If he did not understand how to deal with a problem, he usually proceeded as though the problem didn’t exist or would eventually resolve itself.

Paul did not understand. He did not know the whole story.

She had died. That much was true. She woke up inside a res-pod with no memory of her last mission, regenerated from the legs up. From that moment on, every ship she served on had been haunted. It didn’t matter where she went. It didn’t matter what ship. Every vessel was filled with ghosts.

It took her some time to figure out that it was the Bricks, the one Brick, actually: the single Brick that was mirrored on every ship in the combined fleets like a toy in a house of mirrors. Something had happened to her during her regeneration process. When she woke up, she could hear the ghosts inside the machine. At first it happened only when she was asleep, but eventually it was all the time. It was like having one’s ear pressed against a beehive: there was this constant thrum of a million voices murmuring together. She couldn’t turn it off. She couldn’t tune it out. When she realized what must have happened, she knew she couldn’t tell anyone, and she fled.

Of course she wasn’t certain. She only had theories.

And now, with the girls’ ongoing dreams, she was afraid that they had inherited this ability.

Cam turned from the wide windows that looked out over the pristine desolation that was their corner of this new world. She had convinced Paul to take this assignment, and she had done so in a way that made him believe that it had been his choice. Who else but a painter would be able to see beauty in this place? Cam thought that she had found a way to protect herself, and along the way she had found Paul and created a family. But she wasn’t going to be able to protect them all.

Paul was on his way home, but she wouldn’t be here when he arrived.

Cam had been up most of the night using the last of the contacts she maintained in the military’s informational network to build a final cover. It wouldn’t last long, but it might be just enough. It depended on Paul being here though, whenever the inevitable vessel arrived looking for that pod.

They could have their body back. Cam didn’t care about that.

But she’d be damned if they were going to find her. Or the twins.

Paul would help if he knew what was going on. If she asked him. But he would help just as effectively—perhaps, she admitted,
more
effectively—if he did not know. So long as he was back on time. An empty habitation would look too suspicious. They would be sure to investigate further. But finding the pod along with a known deserter would make more sense to them.

Cam sighed. There was an impending sense of guilt with this plan. But there was also a certainty of what would happen if she were found again.

Regenerating a body was a well-established practice by now. Even when Cam was in the service, it had been going on for decades. Yet in all of those tens of thousands of regenerations, there had to be one or two incidents in which the body that was regenerated was not exactly the same as the body that died. It happened in evolution: tiny errors in the genetic code ultimately gave rise to transformation of organisms. In a res-pod, cellular material was created from genetic coding at millions of times the rate it took place naturally in reproduction or cell growth. It was reasonable that the process would not always be perfect, that there would occasionally be duplication errors that resulted in minor changes in the new body.

It probably happened more often than anybody realized but with effects so minimal that they were never noticed: a misplaced mole, perhaps. A degenerative genetic disease that might not show up for decades. Many soldiers were probably killed and regenerated again before any genetic flaws in a particular body ever had a chance to show up.

However, the mind was the most complicated portion of the regenerative process, in which neural pathways were re-forged from the cartography laid out in the cellular coding. This was where the floor-plan was constructed as the foundation for a person’s stored memories—the regeneration of a mind gave rise to particular potentialities.

And Cam’s regenerated mind had been different.

It had resonated.

Cam wasn’t an entanglement expert, but she knew the basics of how memories were stored in the Brick. She had a working knowledge of the quantum-structure that made every instantiation of the Brick identical to every other one. And Cam’s mind—somehow—had become attuned to the wave functions that kept every Brick quantum-anchored. Her mind resonated. She heard echoes. Consciousness itself was a dance of particles, and her mind danced in tune with the Bricks. She heard the whispers of minds stored within them.

She had no great desire to become a test subject, to have neuroscientists and entanglement experts working on her to peel back the subtleties of what was happening in her head. Neither did she have the desire to be slowly driven mad by the hum of disembodied voices around her. So she deserted her post. She fled to the barest, most lifeless and out of the way parched piece of land she could find, far from any ships and their forever unquiet Bricks. She brought Paul with her.

And now she was going to let him take the fall.

The sunlight touched the transparent steel of the habitation’s wide windows. She heard stirring in the room down the hall. The twins were up.

Perry came into the kitchen with eyes wide. “When will the man upstairs wake up?”

“Did your sister tell you about her dream, honey?”

Cam glanced down once more at the changes she had made to the files. It would be enough to give them some time. She didn’t have the skill to erase herself completely. But hopefully by the time anyone realized the data had been tampered with, it would be too late.

“It was my dream. We were in it together, with the man upstairs.”

“What happened?”

Perry shook her head. “Nothing. He was trying to talk. We weren’t scared, but he was.”

Cam took Perry’s slim face in her own long palms. “Have dreams like this happened before?”

“No. Usually the people stay outside.”

“What people?”

“The people who whisper, who wait in the rain. We never see them. They’re like ghosts.”

Cam sat back slowly and took a deep breath.

“Wake up your sister and get your things.”

“Where’s daddy?”

“He’ll be home soon,” Cam lied smoothly. “We’ll meet him on the way.”

I
n the shipyard
, the killing continued. By early afternoon of the next diurnal cycle, Beka had helped kill two more synthetics and personally dismembered the minds of as many soldiers from the Brick. She tried to ignore their names, both of the archived personalities within the Brick and the self-attributed names of the synthetics. She tried not to consider her sister’s stored psyche, tried not to wonder whether Jens had known any of the officers or soldiers they were now ripping from the Brick and dumping into synthetic minds.

They were closer to getting answers. Even Beka had to grudgingly admit that. The synthetics were trying to form words now. It was painful to see how close understanding waited beneath the surface, beneath running eyes and twisted mouths. Beka could tell that they were reliving memories of the Fleet’s final days from the dumped personalities. The parsing was getting sharper. Another two, or perhaps three, attempts and they would finally have useful information.

Eleanor arrived in the lab as they were preparing their third trial for the day.

“We’ve located a pod from the Fleet. One with a body,” she said evenly, ignoring the wailing synthetic now writhing on the table. “We’ve been ordered to retrieve it.”

“We?” Davis glanced up from where he was poised at the end of the table with his surgical gear.

Eleanor turned to him. “You’ll discontinue your investigations until we return. Until we know what the survivor can tell us, we can’t afford sacrificing additional scanned personalities.”

Davis blanched. “Like hell we can’t. We can’t afford
not
to. We don’t know if we’ll learn anything of use from this body, even if it does turn out to be from the Fleet. You might be reviving a private who saw nothing.”

“Or it might be someone whose mind you’ve already destroyed, or the mind you attempt to pull out next.” Eleanor held Davis’s glare steadily. “The orders come from the Admiral himself.”

Davis snarled silently. Eleanor leaned towards him over the body.

“He imagined you might be a bit…intransigent,” she continued, in a low voice. “Your whole team is coming along. Our ship has a Brick. You won’t waste any time resuming your... work if this indeed turns out to be a goose-hunt.” She spun on her heel. “We leave immediately. The remaining synthetics will be placed on board as well.”

Davis glared after her, but Beka was relieved. Finally, a key. A body that would take the memories for which its brain was shaped. Someone, ultimately, who could give them some answers.

E
leanor had been
correct about leaving immediately. They were not even given enough time to return to their quarters and get their things. When Beka arrived on the ship she learned that a bag of her personal belongings had already been placed onboard. The
Clerke Maxwell
stood, perched on the end of one of the shipyard’s dozen spurs, looking like a bleached bone arrowhead in the harsh silver light of the dwarf star. As soon as they had boarded, it pushed off from the airlock and ferried out to the light line.

Artificial gravity did not work in the light lines. Spinning a ship was the easiest way to keep the crew’s feet planted on the deck plates in normal space, but traveling on the light lines made even such simple physics moot. The lack of gravity did strange things to one’s perception. Beka couldn’t tell if the window she was staring through gave her a view down into a chaos of electric blue arcs and whorls or up into a sky of impossible clouds. Whichever way she tried to orient herself, the view was the same formless cerulean foam of a light line interior.

“We should never have gotten on this ship,” said a voice behind her.

Beka had never seen Davis look so angry. The four of them—herself, Davis, Tsai-Liu, and Aggiz—were crowded into the tiny bay where the
Clerke Maxwell
’s Brick was kept.

“Calm down, Davis,” Tsai-Liu drifted beside Beka.

If Davis was angrier than she had ever seen him, Beka thought she had never seen Tsai-Liu look so old. Something about the blue light behind the window—or perhaps just the sudden and unexpected change that had transformed them from being Admiral Tholan’s selected team of specialists to a group of mission tag-alongs—somehow extenuated their features: Davis the fuming scientist, his long face pinched and angry; Tsai-Liu the old grandfather, wise but worn; and Aggiz the prodigy, listless and almost impossibly young.

Beka wondered what she herself looked like. Like a child, maybe. A wide-eyed girl, still scared and looking for her big sister. Beka’s rebellious black curls, always hard to control in the best of circumstances, were a mess in zero gravity. Too short to pull back into the tight bun or braid that other sailors wore, they were still long enough that they surrounded her face like a dark, disheveled aureole.

“Calm down?” It was impossible to pace without the ship’s sustaining gyroscopic spin, though Davis obviously wanted to badly. “Calm down?” he repeated. Then the familiar bark of a laugh came, but it was edged with what might have been panic. “I don’t think you realize what’s happened here.”

“We’re on our way to find some answers, maybe,” Tsai-Liu answered reasonably. “It’s what we’ve been hoping for.”

“We’ve been kidnapped,” Davis snapped. “You think the Admiral would have approved of this? You think he wanted us to stop in the middle of our work for a body that might have seen nothing? Eleanor went in over his head. We shouldn’t be here.”

Beka piped up. “Why would she do that? She was right. We can’t risk destroying the memories of whoever it is we’re about to revive.”

Davis swore and tried to turn away but only succeeded in flailing due to lack of gravity.

Beka realized suddenly that he was terrified. His anger, always simmering beneath the surface, was now being stoked by fear. It was crystal clear on his face and in his eyes, even as his words tried to mask it.

“What are you afraid of, Davis?” she asked.

Davis’s abortive turn had set him spinning before her. He eyed Beka as his face swung slowly toward her.

“Consider our situation for a moment, please,” he began slowly and softly. “We have been working for the past few days with . . .” He searched for a suitable word. “With
artificial organisms
that, until very recently I must add, the rest of you almost certainly believed were extinct. For once in humanity’s littered history we as a race realized what needed to be done for our own preservation and reacted decisively and uniformly to protect ourselves. The things you saw were outlawed and eliminated. The military kept a single handful in deep secrecy. And now these . . .
fossils
might hold the key to what happened to the First Fleet.”

“We already know all this, Davis,” she replied, her voice steady.

“But what you somehow fail to realize,” he continued, and here his voice took on a tone that was harder to decipher. It was harsh, almost grating. She felt like flinching away from him. “What you somehow fail to realize is that I am almost certainly the current leading expert on synthetic technology. I know more about their inner functioning and their history than anyone else they have. I have—” He paused, and his speech faltered. “I have more reason than most to have agreed to do this. And now, by reasons outside of my control, I am on a ship full of them.”

Beka was confused. She watched the light from the blue folds of sidespace paint shadows crossing and re-crossing Davis’s face.

“Good god, Davis.” Tsai-Liu drifted up beside him and placed a hand on his arm. “You’re paranoid.”

Davis shook free of Tsai-Liu. “Paranoid indeed. I really have to spell it out for you, don’t I? Why were the Synthetics so quickly seen as a clear and present danger to the human race? They were flawless. They were stronger and faster and better. They could have
replaced
us.”

Aggiz had spent most of the conversation absorbed in his ceaseless studies of the monitors connected to the Brick. He looked up at Davis sharply now, as though seeing him for the first time, but he spoke with a calm detachment.

“You think Eleanor is a synthetic, don’t you?”

“Out of the mouth of babes,” Davis said, clapping once, loudly and abruptly. “I suspect everyone, Aggiz. I can’t afford not to.”

“This is ridiculous. There hasn’t been a documented case of a rogue synthetic in two hundred and fifty years,” Tsai-Liu pointed out. “You couldn’t even enter the military without submitting to a full body scan, let alone serve for years.”

The ship lurched slightly and the electric light beyond the window faded out. The stars began cutting wide arcs across the view as axial rotation resumed, and they all oriented themselves toward the room’s outer wall - Aggiz adjusted his monitors with a studied patience - as centripetal gravity resumed.

“We’ve arrived,” Davis said needlessly. “Listen, whatever she is, we’re on a ship filled with her hand-picked crew. She’s managed to isolate us from the shipyard and confiscate the remaining Synthetics. She’ll make her move soon, once she has the body and knows what kind of leverage it brings. Follow her if you want. But if you don’t, stay close to me.”