First Fleet #1-4: The Complete Saga (12 page)

A
ggiz felt
the barely-discernible lurch as the ship dropped off of the light line back into normal space. It always came several moments before the ship resumed its spinning and centripetal gravity pulled everything slowly back to an up-down orientation. Sometimes he missed it. But he was waiting this time. His stomach was as clenched as his hands, which were knotted and intertwined in front of him.

He stood before the Brick.

Even if he had missed the tiny lurch, he would have known that they were back in normal space, because the monitors immediately started squealing alarms. He knew it was coming. They had heard Tholan’s warning, that all the Bricks throughout space were being wiped.
No
, Aggiz amended himself silently.
One Brick only
. Only one somewhere was somehow—impossibly—being wiped. The rest of them were busy, and there was nothing they could do anyway. But Aggiz had to see it by himself.

The Brick was draining.

He couldn’t see it happening, but the monitors showed the flow—the clean, soft draining of information.

The disappearance of memories.

The departure of ghosts.

Aggiz pushed past the monitors and the coolant cables. He brushed the fine net of fiber optics from the Brick’s black surface. It was always black, but the absence of light felt deeper now. In another few moments, the Brick would be completely empty.

Their lives would be gone.

He pressed his hands against the surface. The Brick was kept super-cooled far below freezing point, so cold that it scalded his palms. He flinched, but did not pull away. Instead he leaned closer, pressing the side of his face against the Brick, gritting his teeth against the pain.

She had said goodbye to him in a café beside a lake on one of the outer moons of System. It bothered Aggiz that he couldn’t remember which one, that he couldn’t recall exactly where they had been. The light lines were laced under the flesh of space in and around System like filigree; moons and stations and habitation rings came and went like towns on the roads his grandparents used to tell him about traveling on. The café had been cheap, but they were hungry and the brine-shrimp was tangy and sweet.

She had asked him to renew their License. “Another five years, Aggiz,” she had said. He tried to recall the exact shade of her eyes. “I’ll be out of the service in two. That would be a perfect time for children.”

He couldn’t remember her eyes, because he couldn’t meet them then. He had been looking out at the water and the curving metal of the dome arching to the mist above the entire time she was there.

“I don’t . . .” Even in memory, his voice sounded weak, indecisive.

He squinted his eyes shut and pressed his cheek harder against the Brick. He thought he could hear it, the whisper of patterns dying, of systems of particles settling back down to their zero state, the information—the minds—they had encoded disappearing forever.

She had looked away then. He had felt it, like a light switching off. The words that came after, the stammered explanations, had been unnecessary. She had heard from him all she needed.

Aggiz said her name. He was alone in the bay with the empty Brick, his face and hands burning, and he cried. Like she had.

She was gone. They were all gone.

P
aul and Beka
stood in their thinsuits on the
Clerke Maxwell
’s skin. They had climbed through the airlock as soon as their plan was established. Donovan had wanted to come along himself, but Beka had argued.

“Your memories are too valuable to lose,” she said. “You’re staying here.”

Tsai-Liu was too old. The Synthetics still showed no signs of coming back to life.

Space had reappeared around them, endless and dotted with cold stars.

“Why did you bring me along?” Paul asked. He rubbed his wrist through his thinsuit. It sent a dull pain shooting up his arm. “I’m supposed to be a deserter, a criminal, remember?”

Beka laughed humorlessly. “It doesn’t really matter now, does it?”

If what Donovan had told them was correct, the area around them was scattered with dead ships. This was the final resting place of the First Fleet, where they had disembarked from the light line to attack the Colonizer worlds. There was no way of knowing how many of those ships had been seeded with what the Colonizers had found on the planets below.

“This isn’t a forge ship,” Paul said. “I don’t understand how this plan is supposed to work.”

“Forge ships are for carving light lines through space,” Beka explained. She had begun the long walk down the hull, her boots magnetically grasping at the metal plates with each step. Paul hesitated for a moment and then followed her. “You don’t need a forge ship to collapse a light line. At least, theoretically you don’t. I don’t know that it’s ever been done.”

Tsai-Liu and Donovan had slowed the ship’s rotation. The centripetal force that provided artificial gravity for those inside the ship would have spun Paul and Beka into space like a dog shaking fleas.

Paul stopped and tapped Beka on the shoulder. He pointed. “There’s something out there.” There was a dim point of light moving against the background stars. A new voice cut into their communication channel.

“There’s a ship coming in,” Donovan said, his voice strained.

“Who is it?”

“I can’t tell at this distance. But it looks like one of ours. One of the Fleet.”

“A survivor?” Paul asked.

Beka shook her head. “There are no survivors.” She had finally said it. It seemed real. Jens was gone. “If it’s ETI, it means they’ve learned how to pilot our ships. Is it headed for us or the light line?”

“Does it matter?” Donovan’s voice trembled. “Get that line closed.”

They reached the blister on the outer hull that contained the jump-set. Beka went to one knee in front of the access panel. She pulled it off and then released it, letting it tumble end over end into space. The opened panel revealed a dizzying knot of wires, transparent and thin as hair.

The ship was closer. Paul could see it, its hull ripped and gaping. It did not hold any constant orientation in space, tumbling toward them like Beka’s discarded access panel.

“Which ones do I cut?” Beka asked helplessly, staring into the tangle.

“Eleanor said any. It doesn’t matter which ones. Just as many as possible.”

Beka fumbled with the mini-welder she had pulled from a storage locker at the airlock. It flared orange and then spit a steady beam of light. She thrust it into the cavity, where it bit through the wires. They snapped and coiled in the heat.

“Is that enough?”

“It will have to be. Come on.”

Paul pulled her to his feet and again the pain bloomed up his arm. He thought for a moment—helplessly—of Cam and of Perry and Agnes.

Beka had stood upright but was now frozen, staring upward. The dead ship had arrived. It drifted above them like a blasted moon, hull plates peeling off it like skin from a leper. It was a corpse, Paul realized. There could be nothing alive on it. And yet the portholes facing them danced with light. Beka stood staring at it, mesmerized.

“Beka.” His arm ached, a constant dull throb that flared whenever he moved it. “Beka!”

“Stab her.” It was Donovan. His voice was suddenly firmer.

“What are you talking about?”

“Take the mini-welder and stab her in the leg.” He sucked in his breath. “It’s the pain that’s keeping you conscious. Keeping me conscious. I just broke my finger, I’m fairly certain. I’ll break another if I need to. Tsai-Liu is down here rolling around and screaming.” His voice rose shrilly. “No one can think when those things are around. So stab her in the leg and get inside because I’m going to do this in about ten seconds one way or another!”

Paul hesitated a moment. He grabbed the mini-welder and jabbed it sideways into the back of Beka’s leg. She screamed.

“What the hell are you doing?” The skin of the thinsuit sealed itself instantly.

“Come on,” Paul yelled and pulled her toward the airlock. The dead ship loomed closer. Back in the direction they had come, sparks had begun spilling from the damaged jump-set.

They had just reached the airlock when they felt the ship lurch around them.

“We’re in,” Paul cried, slamming the outer door shut.

“I’m engaging the jump-set.”

Space groaned. The familiar blue whorls of the light line flared outside the portals, but they were sharper and angular, jagged and angry. The jump-set clawed at the fabric of space. If Beka had succeeded in slicing through enough of its processing matrix, it would have nowhere to go. It would simply pour energy out into the quantum foam that the jump-sets somehow floated upon, until—again, if Eleanor was correct—the feedback would collapse the entire light line terminus. Whatever had happened to the Fleet, it would not be able to reach back into the rest of the galaxy. And no other ships would be able to stumble upon this graveyard.

Something snapped loudly. Beka and Paul felt it at the edges of their vision and in their teeth. The blue light outside the windows flickered once and died. The stars reappeared, silent and morose.

“It worked.” Donovan’s voice came through the intercom, tinny and exhausted.

“Is the other ship still out there?”

“We did a mini-jump, in toward the Colonizer planets. I think we left it behind.”

Beka breathed deeply. She leaned in, supporting her weight against Paul as they shuffled out of the airlock and tried to find their way back to the command deck. Donovan’s voice kept pace with them as they walked.

“But it worked. The light line terminus is dead.”

“So we’re marooned.” Paul’s voice was flat.

When they finally arrived back at the command deck, Tsai-Liu was wrapping Donovan’s hand into a bandage.

“So, what now?” Beka asked.

“We still have control of the ship, for now.” Donovan winced as Tsai-Liu pulled the wrapping tight and fastened it.

“He broke two of his own fingers,” Tsai-Liu whispered to no one in particular. “I was just . . . I was just screaming. I heard voices in my mind.”

“It’s the pain. It keeps that thing at bay, for some reason.” Donovan sniffed.

“What do we do when the Synthetics wake up?” Paul asked.

They were afloat. They were looking for a leader. Donovan had stepped up when he first awoke, because he was the only one who had any understanding of what they faced, but now . . .

“We’ll talk to them.” Beka found Jens’s voice, the one she used when they were growing up and she wanted to convince others that whatever plan she had just hatched was inevitable. Beka tried to fit her own voice inside it, tried to shape the words into certainty. It had always worked for Jens. “We’ll need their help.”

“Their help for what?” asked Donovan. The others looked at her, almost gratefully.

“Their help to get through this.” Beka motioned at the viewscreen.

Darkness stretched out before them. A few faint orbs were highlighted near the center: the Colonizer worlds. Between them and those worlds were the dead and drifting ships of the First Fleet, invisible now but still out there, lurking menacingly between them and any hope of rescue. They were stirring in death, if what they had already seen was any indication of things to come. They were coming to life. They were learning.

“The Colonizer planets? You think there’s anyone left alive down there?” Donovan’s voice was harsh. “You didn’t see what we were getting back from those planets on the frigates.”

“Someone has to be. Someone planted those ETI on our ships.” Beka didn’t add it, but she thought it:
And if there’s any hope for Jens at all, it’s on those worlds.

The Bricks were empty. The ghosts were gone. If there were any survivors from the initial assault, they would be down there.

There was nowhere else to go. The light line terminus was collapsed behind them. Their jump-set was fused to glittering slag.

“We had a name for those planets, you know.” Donovan said slowly. “We called them the Grave Worlds.”

N
othing dies in space
. Not really. Life is an upstream battle—constantly pushing energy up a hill. When the conflict ceases, the energy spills back down, out into a thousand streams and gullies. Bones and skin become soil and stone, a thousand tiny gifts on a green and growing world.

Not so much in space. In space, death is not an outspilling. It is simply a cessation. A waiting, perhaps.

The Fleet drifted.

In one of the the worlds below, Jens Grale awakened in a grave.

J
ens Grale could not tell
whether she was dying or falling asleep. How would one know the difference? She had been dead once before—had
died
once before. It had been in space, just after her first deployment. Her heavy-suit had triggered the magnetic proximity field of a Colonizer mine. The detonation was not powerful enough to kill her, but was enough to overload all her suit’s systems and send it into shutdown.

She asphyxiated , paralyzed under starlight.

Now she was wounded. She knew that. She was lying on a hard cot. Not the safe, womb-like egg of a res-pod. She did not float in a warm nutrient bath. She was not coming awake in the brightness and sterility of a medical bay, with calm faces looking down and her memories threading back to her fresh and clean.

Instead, she ached everywhere. She could not feel her legs. There was a burning sensation along her side each time she breathed. She drifted in and out of darkness.

If she died here, wherever
here
was, she would be gone. Death was not supposed to be the end, not for people like her. That was the point of the Contract, the point of the memory uploads into the Brick, the point of the res-pods. You could get killed, sure, but you could never die. Her memories had of course been uploaded as per the Contract before the mission, but they were useless without a body to dump them back into. If her body was gone, her memories would be purged from the Brick. When she died, she would be simply a corpse. It would be death in its truest form.

She would end.

Not preserved. Not resurrected. Just plain dead.

But it did feel very much like falling asleep. Sleep was a sort of death, wasn’t it? Memories flicked off like a switch during the night. Anything could happen during those dark hours. Morning was only ever a promise on the horizon, only a matter of faith. Who was to say that there would be an awakening on the other side?

She tried to stay awake.

Through the pain, Jens thought of her sister. Beka used to whisper to her as they lay awake in the slow System evenings, watching the long, tangled branches of trees through the skylights above their bed reach out like the fingers of tall women. Beka was younger than her by less than two years. They had always understood one another—or thought they did—and had always been together until Jens’s enlistment.

She had never told her sister of her first death in the broken suit.

Here, Jens was naked and exposed, wherever this was. Her res-pod was gone. Her surroundings were unfamiliar. She tried to recall what had happened, but the memories slipped away like smoke as she reached for them. They circled, at the edges of her consciousness. As she lost the battle with sleep and drifted off, they returned.

T
hey had fallen
toward the Grave Worlds in a series of staggered waves. The First Fleet dropped off the light-line in formation, its ships as pristine and orderly as soldiers marching on a parade field, and left the medical frigates to hold position far to the rear. No one anticipated there would be a need for the frigates. No one believed the Colonizers would be able to mount a significant resistance. These were planets far beyond the Reservation Worlds, after all. There weren’t even supposed to be Colonizers here.

“They pop up like weeds,” an officer had told them in briefing just before the mission. “These are likely outriders from the first waves that left System, at most a few generational ships that went off course. This is a relocation operation.”

A relocation operation with seven hundred ships.

It was really, as Jens and every other soldier understood, a show of force. The military was tired of dancing around the Colonizers and the nuances of the treaties. The folks back in System wanted resolution.

Not all barracks on the carrier ships had portals, but Jens’s did. She crowded it with the other members of her unit as the blue whorls of sidespace faded to the black matte of space. The rest of the Fleet flashed into existence alongside, the background stars broken by gunmetal hulls of ships in formation, their white, green, and red running lights extinguished for combat. They were silhouettes in starlight.

The armada divided to enclose the targets. The renegade settlements were mining outposts on a cluster of sunless worlds in a region of space called the Perseus Limb. The worlds were a planetary anomaly, the briefing officer had explained, a tight cluster of perhaps half a dozen planetoids clinging together in weak mutual gravity and transcribing a long, slow orbit around the singularities which the Fleet used to tether the light-line. Astrometrics had been buzzing for months about what sort of natural evolution could give rise to such a system: a naked bed of worlds without a governing star, orbiting a hive of tiny black holes.

It was a slow crawl from the light-line terminus. Few ships in the Fleet were jump-set equipped. But Command seemed to have calculated correctly. The Colonizers were taken unaware. By the time Jens’s ship arrived at its target world, scouts had pegged the location of the Colonizer entrenchments on and just below the surface. The carriers discharged their flotillas of heavy-suits, which spiraled down into chasms of the pockmarked planetoid.

As they fell, rocky rifts below yawned like open graves.

Jens loved watching her wings fall into combat. Operation in three dimensions was an elegant ballet, she used to tell her sister. Suits were far more maneuverable than ships. Articulated thrusters at the shoulders, rear-knees, feet, and elbows allowed tight formations and high-precision turns. Jens’s wing of suits fell downward together like a web of leaves spiraling down in an autumn storm.

“Keep it tight,” she told them over their shared open channel. She led her own wing of twenty suits, followed by Pearson’s to her right and McClaire’s to her left. For this operation, she was in nominal command of all three. “Flank, keep your scanners wide for wall turrets as we come through that lip.”

It felt like a trap. Jens would have been nervous had they not held overwhelming numerical advantage.

“The Colonizers are dinosaurs,” the briefing officer had said. “You have to think of them like fossils. They are primitive. That makes their tactics brutal and aggressive, but it also makes them slow. Remember: Their ships travel at relativistic speeds. They have no light-lines. Even if these outposts called for reinforcements, it would take them an entire generation to arrive.”

The wave of suits drifted downward into the huge mining shafts, searching for the Colonizer bunkers.

Things started going wrong long before the first salvos opened up from emplacements along the chasm walls. It was the rifts themselves. The shafts seemed natural near the surface and for the first several hundred meters, the only signs of mining activity were the metal docking spurs that protruded from the walls and marked the entrance to small side-tunnels. Transports likely docked there to take ore up to the surface, though there was no sign of activity now.

The shaft down which they descended appeared to be a huge volcanic vent, an immense stone throat wide enough that their carrier could have followed them down. But deeper down—in contrast to what the radiographic surveys taken from orbit had established—it opened even wider.

“My god,” someone whispered on the channel. “These aren’t natural.”

Jens checked her helmet display. “Out of line, Lars. Keep the channel clear for tactical only. Commentary to yourself.”

But he was right. Jens switched to a closed command line.

“
Forbes
, this is Grale.”

There was a wash of static that made Jens uneasy, and then a voice from the ship hovering above cut through.

“This is
Forbes
, Grale. Go ahead.”

“No resistance yet,” she said, “but relay to Command: We have clear signs of ETI down here, sir.”

There was a moment of silence against another background surge of static.

“Can you confirm evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligence, Grale?”

The cavern opened out around them. The beams of the clustered suits played along the walls as they continued their controlled descent. It felt as if they were falling underwater, as though Jens were back in her initial suit training in the seas under the icy crust of an outer-System moon. Even as darkness thickened around them, the walls their light beams revealed were becoming angular, carved with spiraling geometric figures. It was hard to see details in the darkness, but they were clearly artificial.

“Grale?” the voice from the ship asked again. “Can you confirm that what you’re seeing was not done by Colonizers?”

The darkness faded as they fell. The stones themselves gave off faint grey phosphorescence. And still the cavern opened out wider around them. Spires of stone extended from the walls like fingers.

“Copy that,
Forbes
,” Jens said. “I don’t think it’s human technology, let alone anything the Colonizers have done.”

Jens could hear more chatter coming through on the open channels. Pearson told them to shut up and spread out, to keep looking for any sign of Colonizers. They appeared to be a few hundred feet from the cavern floor.

There was silence again on the closed channel.

“Pearson, are you getting any clear reading for depth?” Jens asked on the open channel.

“Negative,” Pearson replied. “And I’ve got a host of sensor ghosts as well.”

So did Jens. There may have been interference from the walls, which were still glowing in a way that made the rocks look like gravestones at dusk. The suits of her wings had shut down their beams and were descending into a thin grey fog.

The chasm wreaked havoc with depth perception. Its angles seemed incorrect, almost illusive; features that looked like they were a few dozen yards away turned out to be much farther distant.

“Tighten up the formation,” Jens told her wings. “McClaire, your suits are drifting down too fast.”

“We’re still in formation,” came the reply through a thick wall of static. “You guys are spreading out above us.”

The spires of stone that split the shaft here made it hard to tell whether they spanned it like branches or whether the chasm itself was splitting into smaller rifts. Yet the view down each branching seemed larger than the shaft they were falling through.

“Gods, how far down do these things go?” someone asked.

“Jens, I’ve lost five of my suits,” Pearson radioed. “They’ve just disappeared from my scanners.”

Jens fired her thrusters to slow her own descent. “Everyone pull up and regroup. Cease descent. Abort. I repeat, abort.”

Something was definitely interfering with transmissions now, because only half her wing and perhaps half a dozen of Pearson’s appeared to receive her transmission. The rest continued their steady fall. Several were already out of view.

“Do we even have a clear path back to the surface?” It was Pearson again.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Jens snapped. “We just dropped down a huge hole.”

She looked up, though, and immediately saw what Pearson meant. Impossibly, the view above mirrored that below. There were no signs of stars. Instead, there were more branching chasms, stretching upward. Jens couldn’t tell which shaft they had dropped through. Even more disconcerting, looking up seemed to shift her center of gravity until she had the feeling she should be falling down one of those shafts above. She could see some of the suits of her wing falling—or rising—through them now.

“Seismic didn’t show anything like this,” she said. “Is the whole damn planet honeycombed?”

The suits continued drifting.

“Keep it tight, people,” she snapped and flipped back to a private channel. “
Forbes
, this is Jens. We need a recall beacon. These caverns are really messing with our sensors.”

Static was her only response.

“
Forbes
?”

The Colonizers had no need to spring a trap. Whatever this place was, it was enough of a trap itself. Half her suits continued to drift downward. There were now only a dozen still in sight. There was chatter on the open channel, faint enough that she couldn’t make it all out, but it sounded panicked. They were getting lost. She switched on her own homing beacon, hoping to cut through some of the interference and draw her wing back together.

It was hard to concentrate. The angles of the chasms and their branching, the way the carved spirals of stone split and divided like roots, kept drawing her eyes down and away from the other suits in her unit.

It’s a fractal
, she thought to herself.
There’s no sense of scale. Like clouds. You could hide cities down here.

Maybe the Colonizers had been waiting for her to activate a beacon, or maybe they were just waiting until the entire wing was disoriented and divided, because suddenly they did indeed spring their trap. Rail-gun mortars lanced out from the walls, and two of her wing’s suits exploded into flames, their pods ejecting instantly and drifting upward.

“Form up!” she hollered on all channels. “Activate phase shielding!”

The familiar blur of deflective plating appeared around those suits closest to her, and the view beyond her screens took on the familiar shielded haze as her own plating went up. It would buy them time, but without scanners they couldn’t get a lock on where the firing was coming from. Lines of arching light crisscrossed the chasm.

She was hit several times before her own shield plating finally failed. Another round of mortar fire drove her suit down onto a plane of weirdly slanting stone. After some struggling to make sense of which direction was up and which down, she scrambled to get up. She finally found some footing and rose, only to find that she was standing upright on an upper wall of a chasm, looking down at the continuing fight below. At least, that was how it seemed. Her mind told her she must be on the floor of the shaft, that gravity could be pulling her only toward the planet’s center. Yet as she watched, she saw one of her wing’s suits fall slowly to an opposite wall.

It was impossible that the Colonizers could have the technology to alter gravitational fields. Nothing on their preliminary surveys had indicated anything like this.