First Fleet #1-4: The Complete Saga

O
ur job was putting together
the bodies they sent us back from the Limb. It rarely involved more than watching and monitoring the corpses in their res-pods: adjusting the nutrient matrix a bit here, tweaking a bone or a muscle graft there. For the most part, we were left to our own devices on the medical frigates.

The
Mountstuart Elphinstone
was a standard ship with a crew of around fifty, half of us medical staff, though the vessel was large enough that I sometimes passed an entire shift without seeing anyone else. I had worked in several hospitals back in System before deployment. It was a graveyard shift with only a skeleton crew in a hospital where it was always night. We were tethered to a cluster of singularities far from the front with the other support vessels, so it was unlikely we would see any action ourselves. The only things to see were the winking lights of the fleet outside the portholes and the growing, sleeping forms of the regenerating dead encased within their long rows of glass and steel cocoons.

Few officers visited the frigates, though they would sometimes inquire about the status of specific soldiers. When they did, I would translate tissue growth rates into the number of days or weeks remaining until the soldier awakened.

“The cluster of pods we received from the battle over Aleph? Most of those soldiers will be ready for a memory dump and re-briefing in three days. You should have them back on the line by the end of the week.”

And so on.

In my mind, the war was fought by faceless men and women in large armored suits. When the suits were destroyed and the flesh within burned or broken or shattered, the cockpits became res-pods (“rescue, resuscitation, and resurrection”), ejected, and found their way back here. And then the regeneration units would stitch them back together so they could go fight again.

It always surprised me when officers came in person to see about a specific regeneration. Usually they simply inquired by message. We’d been told that officers couldn’t spare the time for a shuttle-flight back from the front.

“Ensign Jens Grale.”

The tall, dour-looking man wore the uniform of a pilot, which meant he commanded a whole wing of suits. I didn’t look closely enough to see whether his insignia designated air or ground assault. I consulted the display before me.

“She’s in C-47,” I read. “Regeneration only twenty-four percent complete.”

“Can I see her?”

I glanced up at him again. It was hard to read expressions in the dim light of the medical bay.

“We usually recommend against it. The deceased don’t develop skin until the final stages of the process. Most find the sight of a regenerating—”

“I’d like to see her.”

I shrugged. He had the appropriate clearances. “Follow me.”

The medical bay was large and divided by long rows of res-pods. There were dozens of such bays on the
Elphinstone
, each with the capacity for perhaps four hundred units. Bodies were suspended in the pods horizontally, so those near the end of the process seemed to simply sleep under a canopy of glass.

The form in C-47, however, was nowhere near that stage. In her res-pod there was only a hint of bones and tissue drifting in the nutrient fluid with groupings of bud-like organs still too small to identify.

I heard the man’s intake of breath behind me.

“Will she remember?” he asked after a moment.

“The deceased have no memory of their time regenerating.” I wasn’t sure if that was what he meant. “She’ll remember everything up to her last memory scan. We get the files sent over from Command, and we re-structure them into the patient’s cortex just before we revive.”

“Memory scan,” the man mused, aloud.

I nodded. “The ones you usually do before each mission.”

“So she won’t remember . . .”

“Dying? No.” He was staring at the form with an ambivalent expression somewhere between pain and wonder.

“How did it happen?”

“We were over one of the Colonizer worlds, well outside of atmo. You’d have thought,” he said absently, “our Mother would have seen a whole wing on her screens, but they came out of nowhere and cut through the entire van before we had formed up. She held off an entire squadron of Colonizers for the minutes it took us to pull back.” His voice grew in strength. “I wouldn’t have made it back if it wasn’t for her. I saw her suit go up, and I thought, ‘Oh God, there’s not going to be enough; they won’t be able to get her back.’”

I checked the display on her unit, and feeling oddly relieved, said, “There was plenty of residual material. Usually we obtain a successful regeneration with as few as half a dozen sound cells.”

He blinked. “I appreciate you letting me see her.”

When he was gone I went back down the rows, checking and rechecking the monitors of various active pods. Some, like hers, contained only rumors of flesh and bone, tendrils of tendon and congealed blood. Others near the end of regeneration slept fitfully. Muscles twitched under naked skin as they were slowly reconditioned.

“
Y
ou have
a soldier we’re looking for here,” said someone.

I glanced up from checking the levels on a unit that had consistently been reading low. There were more navy men. The tall man from the day before was not among them.

“I’m sorry?”

“An ensign.” The man in the center checked a digital readout he held. “Jen Grales.”

“Ah. Yes, sir.” I had to check my own display again. “C-47.”

He handed me the readout. “This is an order to discontinue regeneration until further notice.”

I took it without looking at it. “May I ask why?”

“Command jurisdiction.”

One of the other men leaned forward and muttered something, and the first nodded. “May we see Ensign Grales?”

I walked them to her pod.

“Will it kill her, stopping the regeneration?” one asked.

“She’s already dead.” When I saw that wasn’t the answer they were looking for, I shook my head. “Removing the growth catalysts won’t destroy what’s already re-formed, but it will retard the re-growth until the order comes to resume.”

The men were staring through the glass at the form beneath.

“Has there been anything unusual in the process?” another asked.

I looked down at the unit. “Right now there are almost two hundred deceased in this bay alone. The regeneration process is controlled largely automatically.” I touched a few buttons on the pod’s display. “Everything seems to be in order with this one.”

They thanked me and left, conferring among themselves.

When they were gone I stared down again at the form inside. Her heart had begun to pulsate, and crimson threads were pushing into still-translucent extremities. I hovered uncertainly and then made the adjustments to suspend regeneration.