First Fleet #1-4: The Complete Saga (14 page)

Touching the tip of the injector to his upper arm, the needle lanced out too quickly to see and then just as swiftly disappeared within the pen.

Tsai-Liu giggled. “It didn’t hurt.”

Then he screamed, arched his back, and fell off the table.

“Donovan!” Beka shouted. “Tsai-Liu’s having a reaction!”

The all-ship alarm sounded, followed by Donovan’s voice, which echoed in the corridors outside the room as well. “All hands, proximity alert. Administer protective treatment. Repeat, all hands, self-inject immediately.”

“Donovan!” Beka shouted again.

Tsai-Liu was thrashing on the floor. His eyes bulged.

Beka felt a keening note throb somewhere in the back of her mind. For a moment her vision swam. She fumbled in her pocket for her own syringe as the psychic pressure grew. It was as though there was an overwhelming
otherness
pressing on her consciousness like a weight, bending thought along directions it was not meant to travel.

She touched the pen to her own arm. For a moment she felt nothing. Then suddenly, a fire flared in her elbows, shoulders and the joints of each finger. They all throbbed with a dull, red ache that washed out every other thought. The psychic pressure was replaced by the sharp immediacy of pain.

Tsai-Liu was lying on the floor, breathing rapidly.

“Donovan!” she yelled again. “Get down here! Something’s wrong with Tsai-Liu.”

“I’m trying to get us away from this thing!” Donovan’s reply came ragged, as though he were speaking through gritted teeth. “I can’t . . . What are his symptoms?”

Beka’s knees felt lined with jagged glass as she crawled to where Tsai-Liu lay. “His pulse is racing. He’s sweating. Unresponsive.”

“He’s having a reaction to the inflammatory. I was worried about it given his age. I gave him a reduced dose.”

Beka couldn’t move. It was as though every joint were pinioned with steel burrs. She knew Donovan could not climb all the way out to this level. He was too busy trying to put some distance between them and the approaching ship.

She cradled Tsai-Liu’s head in her lap and held one of his hands. Every movement burned. His breath was becoming shallower bit by bit.

When the
All Clear
from Donovan finally came, Tsai-Liu was long gone.

Beka stood up, trembling, staring down at Tsai-Liu’s lifeless form. There was nothing she could do, nothing she had been able to do. Just like with her sister and all the others. They were gone and she had been powerless to help them.

“No,” she said softly. “Not again.” Helpless. Just like all the other times. Helpless and useless. She was so tired of feeling useless…

She had been carried along for long enough, first at the shipyard and then here on the 
Clerke Maxwell
. For years before that, she admitted to herself, she had moved in the shadow and the wake of her sister. She had followed the instructions of others, she had done the job assigned her, she had played her role as an expert crunching numbers in her tight, tidy universe.

B
ut not anymore
.

This was cold and dark and messy. And getting them through it was on her shoulders now, hers alone.

“I’ll get us through,” she said suddenly. The words sounded ludicrous, like the boasting of a small child. But somehow, as soon as she said them, she felt better.

She looked out the empty window on the wall of Tsai-Liu’s chamber. “I’ll get us home. And I won’t lose another.”

C
am fielded
the first call from a neighboring habitation a week after Paul left.

“I’m sorry,” she told the face on the screen. “Paul can’t help this season with the sea-changes.”

The shallow, manmade seas of Onaway needed to be drained and their mineral baths re-seeded twice a season. It was the only time most of the plantation families came together. “He’s gone.”

The face—a lined visage of one of the elder matrons from a habitation two or three worlds to the west of them—took on an expression of puzzlement and vague concern.

“What do you mean, gone?” the face inquired. “He ran off?”

Cam shrugged. “It appears so.”

The woman was not buying it. “Does this have anything to do with the military transport that came to your Station a few days ago?”

“It does indeed.” Cam chose her words carefully, trying not to appear as though she were choosing her words carefully. “He had stolen something from them,” she decided to say. “And they came to get it back.”

The woman on the screen clucked her tongue, a sound that did not translate well through the communication system. Agnes and Perry raised their heads from their coloring.

“He always seemed a bit off,” the woman confided to Cam. “Like he was thinking most of the time of something in the back of his head that he didn’t want you to know about.”

Probably light and color
, Cam thought to herself.
Framing and context. He was a goddamned artist. He didn’t belong out here.

But Cam had brought him here. And now, she had abandoned him.

When the screen finally, mercifully, blanked out, Cam turned to the twins still coloring quietly at their table.

“That wasn’t true,” Agnes said. “About daddy.”

“No,” Cam shook her head. “It wasn’t.”

“He didn’t leave. We hid.” That was Perry.

Both of the twins had Paul’s pale features and dark hair, but they had their mother’s wide eyes. Cam sighed as she tried to meet both sets now.

“Because they would have taken us too if we hadn’t,” she told them.

The twins nodded silently. Cam slid into a seat between them.

It would be difficult but not impossible to run the habitation and its concomitant plantation by herself, Cam knew. However, she would not be able to make Paul’s maintenance tours, which would require her leaving the girls alone for days at a time.

Now, she would have to hope that the rock-burners, mineral baths, algae lakes and the long, straight rows of engineered high-altitude conifers would be fine until the girls were old enough to ride along.

“What are you coloring?” she asked them.

Their pages were almost uniform in color and tone. Paul had switched the girls from crayons to oil-based pastels shortly before he left, which had cost them a fortune in trade credits to have shipped. The pastels made vivid splashes on the paper that the girls meticulously blended and blurred to form hazy, dream-like images.

“It’s outside,” Perry explained.

Cam looked closer. The black and browns could be the rocks of the canyon vista surrounding the habitation. The marks of red were where the stones were touched by sunlight. The grey shapes above those, with a little imagination . . .

“They’re people,” Cam said.

Agnes nodded. “We used to see them outside. They’re gone now though,” she added.

Cam knew the girls had never seen anyone outside their habitation. Their planet was empty, and the nearest habitation was over a hundred kilometers to the west of them. Cam felt that they had seen
something
though. There was a certainty growing inside her that the girls had inherited some iteration of the abilities that had driven Cam away from the military and into hiding on this desolate planet.

“You can
see
them,” Cam said slowly, watching the girls’ faces for some sign that she had guessed correctly. “The people in the Brick. I only ever heard their voices.”

“Not now.” Perry looked at her with disappointment. “We don’t see them anymore.”

“What voices?” Agnes’ face held the question.

“From the Brick,” Cam explained. “That’s the device that stores the memories of dead soldiers. Before they can be regenerated.”

“Like the body in the attic,” Agnes answered. “When did you hear voices? When the ship came for daddy?”

Cam shook her head. “Only when I was serving aboard a ship. Before I met your father, I was a soldier.”

Cam was not sure she wanted to explain that her neurological twist had taken place after she had been killed and her body regenerated. Not to her two young daughters.

“I . . . woke up one day, and I could hear the voices in the Brick, whispering. Wherever I went, on whatever ship I was on, they were there.” She shuddered, remembering the constant voices and the dreams that had come in the midst of them.

When she had realized her own ability, she had read every piece of scientific or pseudo-scientific literature she could find on the subject. There was not a lot about it out there and much of it was beyond her. The quantum resonance that governed the links between all the Bricks—that made them very literally instantiations of the same physical Brick—seemed magical to her.

So did human consciousness. It was not too much of a leap to imagine a human mind somehow tuned to this resonance. In Agnes and Perry, this simply appeared to be augmented. For Cam, they had mercifully faded the farther away she was from any military ship.

“What did you do?” Agnes still held a pastel loosely in her hand, but the picture in front of her was forgotten.

“I ran away,” Cam said.

“Why?”

Cam leaned forward and rested her chin on her hand. Perry had stopped coloring as well and was watching her.

“Because I was afraid,” she answered. “First I thought I was going crazy, but when I realized what had happened, I was afraid that people—soldiers, or scientists, maybe—would come after me. Try to figure out what had happened to my mind and how to understand it, use it. I didn’t want that. I wanted to be left alone. So I came here, after I met your father.”

“Why did you let them take daddy?” asked Perry.

“I had suspicions that you were like me,” Cam said. “And I thought that if they found me, they would find you too. I wanted to keep you safe.”

“From what?” Agnes asked.

The orange light of evening was slanting through the windows and across the table where they sat. Days on Onaway were long. The planet had a rotational period of almost thirty-five standard System hours. They had adapted to its cycles, but by this time every evening, Cam felt as though she had been awake for weeks.

“From people who might . . .” Cam sighed and blew air through her lips. “I’m not sure. I ran from the military, which is illegal. If they found me here with that body, they would have asked questions. They would have found out what I could do. And then they would have found out about you two.”

Agnes nodded slowly, but Perry continued to stare.

“So I altered some records. When they arrived, they found your father and they thought he was me. So they arrested him.”

“You made us hide in the crawler,” Perry said. It was clear now that this frustration had been growing in her. “We didn’t even get to tell him good-bye.”

Cam closed her eyes. “I’m sorry. It had to be that way.” She paused. “He would have wanted it this way too. He would have wanted to protect us.”

“He would have wanted to say good-bye!” Perry shouted.

It was the first time in years Cam had seen her so angry. Usually the twins were almost troublingly sedate. Their eerie calm was, Cam and Paul had believed, part of growing up here alone, in isolation from other children and any non-simulated vista but the rocks and sky beyond their windows.

Perry stood and left the room. Agnes watched her go.

“I’m sorry,” Cam said again.

Agnes bent back to her coloring. “She’s scared.”

“We’re safe here,” Cam said.

Agnes looked up at her. “She’s scared because the people are gone. We’ve never been alone before.”

“You didn’t just hear voices,” Cam said. She tapped the forms on Perry’s drawing. “You saw them too. But you don’t see them now?”

Agnes shook her head and walked away to find her sister.

Cam ran her fingers through her short black hair and continued to speak even though the girls were both gone. “That doesn’t make sense. If you heard—saw—them before, then the distance from the Brick doesn’t affect you, like it did me. Why would they be gone now?”

Outside the habitation, their star continued its slow crawl toward the horizon.

We are safe
, Cam repeated to herself. Perry would come around. The ship was gone. The Brick was gone, along with whatever had inhabited the twins’ dreams.

Paul was gone too, but that couldn’t be helped.

Their planet was empty.

They were safe.

“
I
need light
,” said a voice. “Give me some light, you damned mechanoid.”

“Sorry,” a second voice answered. “Here.”

Something flared, and Jens saw a red haze through her closed eyelids. Someone was sweeping a light back and forth in front of her face.

“Is she dead?” the second voice asked.

“No.” The first voice softened and took on a professional air. “No, she’s fine. She’s awake. The stimulants are working.”

Jens felt cast up on the shores of a sea of pain. Each beat of her heart was a wave of dulled agony washing up around her. She groaned and opened her eyes.

“She’s beautiful,” said the second voice.

The first voice, which belonged to a long, drawn face peering into hers, laughed derisively. “Is that your professional opinion?”

“Sorry.” The second voice sounded young, but Jens could not see beyond the light the first speaker held and was shining into her face.

“Can you hear me?” the first asked. “My name is Rine. Rine Westdweller. I’m a doctor. How do you feel?”

Jens coughed, which wracked her ribs with pain. She licked her lips and tried to speak.

The doctor leaned closer.

“Colonizers don’t have doctors,” Jens rasped. “They have undertakers.”

“Oh good!” The face smiled. “Very good. A sense of humor. Make note, Glaucon. This is the first sign of recovery.”

“I’m not joking.” Jens tried to move but found that either bonds or the nature of her wounds restrained her. “Kill me now.”

The face in front of her slowly came into focus.

Jens had sat through multiple briefings on the Colonizers and seen images taken from the historical feeds as well as the limited interactions that had taken place once contact had been reestablished. Three centuries were insignificant on the scale of human evolution, but the Colonizers had been living in outer System for generations before their exodus. Years of reduced gravity gave them a characteristic thin, drawn, almost elfish look. The face before her now fit that description, though it was dirty, with wide eyes and furrowed, shaggy brows caked with grey dust.

“She refers, no doubt,” the face said, “to our reputedly antiquated technology.” His brows furrowed even further and he turned to his companion, who remained out of view. “We are, as they say amongst themselves, fossils. Dinosaurs, even. Relics from the more primitive days of humanity.”

He turned back to Jens. “But we, my survivor, have a few tricks of our own. We have even, believe it or not, availed ourselves of certain avenues of research that your own cultural mores have forbidden.”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Jens said.

Speaking was a wall against fear. Faced with this figure from the ancient past, she found to her surprise that she experienced an almost visceral horror. The fact that he was trying to be civil simply made it worse.

She forced herself to analyze the situation. She was a prisoner, obviously, and she was clearly being treated and held for some purpose. Colonizers, the briefing officer had said, would interrogate any soldier they were able to capture for information on advanced technology. Command gave explicit protocol for the level of compliance in such an event.

“I am Sergeant Jens Grale, of System, third wing leader of the
Georges Forbes
,” she began. “It is Command policy that active soldiers have no training whatsoever in combat technologies. I can’t tell you how the re-gen pods work. I don’t have forge-ship schematics. I can’t explain light-line physics. I don’t even know how to repair my own heavy-suit.”

The Colonizer rubbed his hands together—one of which still held the light that swayed wildly in the darkness—and laughed again. “Segmented education at its best,” he said to his companion. “Silos, my dear Glaucon. Silos all the way up.”

He paused. “But I’m not here to interrogate you, survivor. As I said, I’m a doctor, and the antiquated technologies that you are so sure we would discard in a heartbeat for a glimpse into your own technological wonderland are what have kept you alive. And they will, with some time and some patience, have you up on your feet again.”

“If you’ve saved me,” she asked, “then why do I feel like I’m dying?”

He laughed once more, this time clicking his small light to a visor he wore and peering again into her face. “Because,” he explained with exaggerated slowness, “this is what it feels like
to heal
. To not simply re-grow your body from scratch every time it gets banged up.”

“Where am I?”

“Ah,” said the doctor, turning away. “That is the question, isn’t it? And now you are interrogating me.”

He turned to his assistant and snapped, “Glaucon! Let me watch you make an absolute mess of changing the patient’s dressings.”

A new figure moved into the light. Beyond the small light the doctor wore on his brow, Jens’s eyes had adjusted so she could see enough. The entire chamber in which she rested was suffused with a faint grey glow. She was reminded sharply of the mist in the caverns through which her wing had fallen.

“I’m in one of the mines,” she said.

The second figure, Glaucon, approached and nodded. He looked much younger than the doctor, with a jutting jaw and classic good-looking features. He lacked the narrow features characteristic of a Colonizer, which made Jens imagine for a moment that he was a prisoner like herself.

“Are these the Grave Worlds?” she asked him. “Where is the rest of my wing?”

Glaucon opened his mouth to speak, but the doctor snapped again. “The dressings!”

She was lying on a cot, Jens could see now. There were a bundle of vials, wires, and tubing hanging over her head to which the Colonizer doctor was making adjustments.

“You had multiple broken ribs,” he explained in a bored voice. “Lacerations. A broken femur. That’s going to take a while to set.”

She repeated her questions.

Noises broke out somewhere beyond one of the stone walls of the chamber, and the doctor and Glaucon both stopped what they were doing and fell silent, staring towards the sounds warily. Their obvious fear made them both seem more human and familiar.

“What is it?” Jens asked. “What’s wrong?”

The doctor motioned her to be silent. When the noises—
voices?
—had faded, he turned to her again.

“What’s wrong? What’s wrong? A war is what’s wrong,” he said. “An unprovoked attack is wrong.” He sighed. “And these planets. This place. Everything about this place is wrong. Everything.”

They finished their work. Jens peered at them suspiciously.

“I would ask you to not try to escape,” the doctor said, almost apologetically, when he was done. “But you’ll find it impossible to move yet. And there’s no place to go.”

She stared.

He leaned down in front of her so that his dirty, narrow face was close to hers. “We don’t eat our prisoners. At least, not unless we’re very, very hungry.”

It took Jens several moments to realize that the wide grimace across his face was a smile. Glaucon looked on as though he was embarrassed.

“This is barbaric,” she finally muttered. “I want a new body.”

The doctor rose and his grin widened. “We don’t do that here,” he called over his shoulder as he and his assistant left. “This is
healing
, my survivor, and usually healing hurts.”

When they left, Jens lay back and tried to sleep. Noises came and went beyond the walls of the chamber. A few times she heard approaching and retreating footfalls, as though someone was passing down a corridor beyond the entrance to the chamber. At other times the noises sounded like breathing or talking, either low murmured voices or words raised in a pitched argument. She could not turn her head to see the door through which the doctor had entered and exited.

After some time, the pale grey glow in the chamber faded. Sometime after that, Jens slept again.