First Fleet #1-4: The Complete Saga (25 page)

R
ine lagged
behind Jens as they threaded a path back through the interstices of the ship. He watched the spill of the red hair between her shoulders, the steady pacing of her booted legs on the deck plates. He knew what he felt; it was a familiar ache in his chest.

It was responsibility.

He had felt it often before, tending the broken forms of the young soldiers in the first, tentative measures of resistance against the System picket forces surrounding New London. They were batted back like flies, and he had spent long, fruitless hours with other Hetmantate healers, working to mend the wounds of battle that System technology would have repaired in minutes. He had seen his fill of futile deaths long before the call came summoning him to the Grave Worlds.

He was already an old man then, and he had fallen in love with the helplessness of a hundred patients before. It was this mingling of love and responsibility, the feeling that to let even a single one of them die – and they had, so many of them, died – was to fail them all.

“You’re slowing me down.”

She was paused halfway up an access ladder. He had fallen further behind, lost in his thoughts.

“I do not think your sister’s instructions required us to remain together,” he answered, feeling the full weight of his decades. “If you go ahead to the command deck, I am certain I can find my way.”

Jens waited, smiling slightly, and Rine had an overpowering feeling that she was dead already, that he was seeing only a particularly sharp memory of her now.

For a moment he considered confessing.

“What?” she asked as he approached, her brow furrowing.

Rine forced his expression into what he hoped was a studied neutrality. He had to remain objective, and he had to let this objectivity show on his features. He would lie. If she asked – if anyone asked – he would lie.

He remembered her form when it was pried from the wreckage of her metal suit and brought into the caverns. He had healed her, but he had also taken the samples he was ordered to.

And then – when the other samples came, those brought up from the remains in the Creche – he had done as ordered as well: he combined them. He gave his superiors the hybrid material needed to seed the captured res-pods.

What would she do if she understood, if she realized the creatures that had destroyed the ships above were – in some genetic sense he was loathe to fully consider – aspects of herself?

“What is it?”

His mouth was dry. She waited on the ladder, though she had not begun to climb.

“I was considering the technology,” he said. Half-lies were always better if possible. “The systems that made this possible.”

“System technology isn’t to blame here,” she answered defiantly, misinterpreting his words. “The res-pods were never built to do what the Colonizers did with them.”

He noted with remorse that she did not include him in that accusation. He had gained her trust. Was it simply because he had nursed her back to health? In any case, it was undeserved.

Fearing she might still be able to perceive the emotions warring beneath his features, he pushed forward with the argument, eager to distract his own attention from the possibility of confession.

“And what were the res-pods designed to do, exactly?” he said. He was close enough to see the smoothness of her skin, and he wondered briefly what it would have appeared like, newly grown and reborn within a pod’s womb. “Individuals are more than networks of cells and information structure. They are not meant to be copied like pages from a book.”

“I would be dead, Rine,” Jens said slowly. “Not this last time. Before. Before I ever came here. A proximity mine near one of the Reservation Worlds. Asphyxiated in my suit.” She turned toward him. “Res-pods keep soldiers alive.”

The feeling returned. It was a sense that Jens was already dead, that she had always been dead, that Rine was speaking with a corpse.

“They hide the price of war,” he muttered, terrified.

She touched his shoulder and pulled herself against him for a moment, leaning into him as she had when her legs were healing and they had paced up and down the length of cell in the caverns. He was too shocked to respond. She kissed him once on the side of his face, as a girl would her grandfather.

He would have told her then. He would have asked her forgiveness – for what he had done with her, for what he had done
to
her – but at that moment a scream ripped up and down the corridors of the ship, splintering his thoughts and making him grasp convulsively for her hand.

It was agony, flooded through the bulkheads and ringing out into the waste spaces beyond.

“Come on,” Jens said, moving back into action, grasping the ladder and flowing up it. “We need to find out what’s going on.”

Rine followed slowly, wishing only to be done with it, to know for certain who was dead, who was dying, and whether at the end of the day he would join them.

P
aul’s voice
crackled through the butt of the rifle slung across Cam’s back.

She had been slowing for a while now – sprinting for as long as she was able, then finally giving up and lapsing into a ragged trot. There was a time, years ago, when Cam had been able to keep up a flat-out run for hours and a brisk jog for most of a day.

She remembered the arching tracks of training bases in the artificial moons of System, the forced marches always bringing you back to where you started along the tiny curving circumference of the natural satellites, some so small they had been issued magnetic boots to keep their footsteps from propelling them off the surface.

Cam felt right now she might have been on one of those tiny moons again, circling over and over, for all the progress she had made so far.

The voice brought her up short. “Paul?” she answered.

“Gods, Cam!” His voice shook. “Hold on. I’ve been listening everywhere, and I’m hearing a lot. It’s hard to focus. It’s dark in here.”

“Where are you?”

“It doesn’t matter right now. I’m close enough. I found the girls.”

She doubled over with a sob of relief and exhaustion. If they were with him, if he had them, she would collapse on the floor and cry and perhaps never move again. There would be no need.

“They’re with you, then?” Cam asked. “They found their way back to the ship?”

“No. But I can see your location, and I can see theirs as well.” His voice sounded flat, as though the depth to which the transmitter was broadcasting stripped it of its normal timbre. “I can lead you to them.”

“Are the girls together?” she asked. “How far are they from me?”

“It’s hard to tell, exactly,” Paul said. “But it doesn’t seem far. Keep walking down the tunnel you’re in. How do you feel?”

Cam resumed her gait. “Tired. Sick. Confused.”

“Rine and Jens said the tunnels have that effect on you. Don’t focus on trying to understand how they’re arranged in space.” Paul paused. “I can see the network now. It bends in directions you can’t see.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’m not sure.” He paused again. “I think it’s tied into Sidespace, somehow, like the light-lines. There are half a dozen of these Grave Worlds, but they’re all the same at the core. I think they’re all connected through these tunnels.”

Cam had learned the disorientating effects of the tunnels reduced if she kept her eyes fixed on the surface directly before her or on the movement of her own feet. Even with the realization, though, it had been impossible to maintain. Instead, she was constantly scanning ahead of her for any sign of the missing girls.

“Paul, what’s going on up there?”

“Hold on. There’s going to be a slight turn-off to your left coming up. Take it, and then take the first branching to the right.”

Cam obeyed.

“They’re trying to get help, I think.” He briefly described the situation on the ship and the distress message Beka and Rine were attempting to send, then paused again. “Honestly, I haven’t been paying much attention. I’ve been trying to track down the girls.”

“They can read the Brick, Paul,” Cam said. Now that she knew where she was going – or rather, had instructions to follow – she broke again into a run. Paul’s voice followed her, coming from the rifle still strapped to her back.

Apart from the flatness of his voice, she could almost imagine he was following just behind her, guiding her with his instructions. “I mentioned this to you earlier, but there wasn’t time to explain. The thing – the creature, whatever it is, the ETI – communicates the same way. It said something about needing to communicate. That’s why we were brought here. I think that’s why it wants the girls.”

“That’s something we need to talk about, Cam.”

He sounded like he was talking out of a box, Cam realized.

“I’m using the Brick to find the girls,” he went on. “I can see them clearly with it, and I can see you a bit fuzzier. I can see the creature as well, the one I think brought you here, and I even have a sense of the things in the Fleet above. But I don’t see anyone else. You and Agnes and Perry – you’re the only ones who make any impression on the Brick.”

His voice dropped. “Another left, just ahead. This one should curve downward sharply. Take a deep breath and keep your eyes off the walls.”

“What do you mean, you’re using the Brick?” she asked. “How?”

“Beka figured a way for me to interface with it. But the point is I don’t understand why the girls should be so bright in here but no one else.”

Cam sighed heavily. The tunnel floor spiraled downward.

“I don’t know for sure, Twalish. I should have told you a long time ago, but it didn’t matter. It was why I got out of the service.”

“Eleanor explained this: necroeugenics. They were experimenting on you, Cam, when you regenerated. The tunnel branches again. Keep following the one going downward. That’s why you were so scared when the
Clerke Maxwell
showed up on our doorstep.”

“Yes.” Cam stopped.

“But why the girls?”

“I don’t know, Paul. My genes? Yours? The environment in which they were raised? It doesn’t really matter now, does it?” She closed her eyes and spoke directly into the handle-mounted speaker. She needed to apologize. “I had been running for a long time. I thought Onaway was far enough out, a safe way to start over. And then when the girls came . . .”

“I understand, Cam. I would have done the same thing.”

She shook her head. “No, you wouldn’t have. That’s the point. You would have found some other way. You would have sacrificed yourself. I sacrificed you.”

“It doesn’t matter, Cam.”

“No, it doesn’t – because the thing still came for us. We’re still here. We didn’t escape.”

“You’re close to them now, Cam. The girls. I’ve pulled as much power from the systems here as I can to get this signal to you, but I’m not sure how long you’ll be able to hear me.” As if in confirmation, a wash of static surged out of the speaker.

Paul continued. “The tunnel will go straight for a while now, and then you’ll find a right-branching passage that will start going downward quick. You may have to climb for the final stretch. Then you’ll be at the Crèche, and it should be simple enough from there. The girls are waiting in its center.”

Cam fought the urge to start off immediately. Instead she remained where she was, holding the weapon in front of her.

“I can tell when you’re holding something back, Paul.”

“Let me tell you, quickly, what I’ve learned,” Paul said, ignoring her comment. “Then you need to go get Agnes and Perry. They’re unharmed, but they’re scared. I thought I might be able to make contact with them directly, but I can’t.”

“Okay.”

“The creature – the ETI – the one that found you and the girls on Onaway: the reason they warp the human mind is because they warp space itself. I can see it from here. You’ve been sliding in and out of Sidespace passing down those tunnels.”

He went on, “But all of the Grave Worlds – their entire three-dimensional surfaces – are only the perimeter. You’re now down into where they’re all connected. The center of this world is the center of all of them. And the human mind can’t really follow that, can’t process it or even perceive it. That’s why the Colonizer miners started going insane, I think, and why the Fleet’s initial assault into the tunnels fell apart.”

Cam nodded, though Paul could not see. “That also explains how we were brought here. The creature carved a path through Sidespace like it was a living forge-ship.”

“That’s on a bigger scale,” Paul agreed, “but yes, I think so. Making passages to and from Sidespace is natural for it. I can’t imagine how it sees the universe. It’s a higher-dimensional being.”

Cam grunted. “You sound like a goddamned quantum topologist.”

“Good enough.” Paul laughed dryly. “But it gets worse. You’re going to see the Crèche. It’s where the organic remains of previous generations of these creatures were, from what Rine explained. And the Colonizers robbed the graves. They seeded the Fleet res-pods with the organic materials they found. They didn’t know for sure what would happen, but they assumed the mind-warping effects would be propagated.”

“Biological warfare.”

“Right. With a biological agent they didn’t understand. It worked better – or worse – than they hoped. Whatever the res-pods spit out, they were smaller half-breed versions of the creature that brought you here. I can see them – like a hundred angry scars in the space above these worlds. If the one that brought you here
bends
space, these things rip it. They twist it and any human mind close enough gets ripped as well. They’re like
knots
in Sidespace.”

“Poetic. How do you know all this?”

“I told you. I can see it.”

“Why are you telling me?”

“So you’ll know, and so you’ll be able to explain to the others. I’m not sure how much longer I have here.”

Cam sensed there was still something important he wasn’t telling her. By this time, though, she was anxious to be moving toward the twins again, the directions Paul had given burning like a map of fire in her mind.

The line faded to static for several seconds. When Paul’s voice came back it sounded scared. “Are you still there?”

“I’m here, Paul.”

“Tell Agnes and Perry, when you find them, that I love them.”

“I will.” She paused. “What about me, Paul?”

“I don’t have to tell you, Cam. It was all a bright adventure with you. You gave me a world.”

Her eyes burned. “And then took it away.”

“I adore you, Cam. Now go get the twins.”

She ran, waiting for Paul’s voice to come again and wondering whether she was out of range. She followed the directions he had given, trying to keep her eyes off the walls that now seemed to be twisting out of her sight as though seen through turbulent water.

“If we get out of this, Paul,” she said, not knowing whether he could still hear her, “I’m going to marry you.”

The response came faint through a snow of static. “Okay, Cam.”

Then he was gone, and she ran on in silence. The stones bent closer, as though to consume her. She stumbled downward, at one point half-slipping, half-climbing down a steep scree of cold rock. Still the sides of the tunnels drifted nearer until it felt somehow they met before her and she was swimming through a fog of cool, blue stone.

The Grave Worlds had swallowed her.

Then she was beyond, and an abrupt sense of empty space brought her to a breathless halt.

The thick stone fell away on either side to form spreading walls of a huge, spherical chamber so large it appeared she had descended all the way through the planet’s shattered crust to its hollow core, as though the planet itself was simply a broken shell sheltering this inner spherical world within.

Cam thought about what Paul told her; if this were the case, she was somehow seeing the space simultaneously with the center of
all
the Grave Worlds.

In the middle of the immense spherical chamber hung suspended a second, smaller sphere, its surface riven with cracks as though in re-creation of the world it was centered within. The whole surrounding chamber was suffused with the faint purple-blue glow that had illuminated the stones for her entire long journey downward.

From the central sphere a soft yellow light filtered through its broken surface, as warm and unexpected as a campfire in a forested System biome.

She couldn’t tell whether she was looking down at this interior central sphere or looking up at it like a broken moon in a stone sky. There was no sense of up or down here, though her feet and internal equilibrium told her – at least at the point where she stood – down was toward the surface of the tunnel from which she had just emerged.

The central sphere – the actual size and distance of which was impossible to judge – was tethered to the surrounding walls by what looked like gauzy filaments. The image came to Cam’s mind of a huge egg sack held within the center of a membranous web, and she shook the unpleasant image away violently, not wanting to consider what such a vision might indicate about the creature.

It was only from those filaments descending to near where she stood that Cam was able to see they were actually ribbons of rock, carved or stretched into arching stone sinews spanning the space between the inner and outer globes.

There was no doubt in Cam’s mind that the central sphere was what Paul called the Crèche and that was where she would find Agnes, Perry, and the creature.

She crossed one of the ribbons of stone, feeling she walked an impossible pathway across the sky, to the stone hub hung in the middle of the cavern. The cracks that shattered its surface loomed as she approached. From within she could hear voices, and she quickened her pace.

Passing through one of the largest of the cracks was like emerging into a smaller version of the chamber she had just entered. There, sitting against the curved stone sides of the interior, talking quietly as if they were burrowed in their room back at the habitation, were the twins.

Cam shouted their names.

The relief she felt was palpable, the sudden release of a tension that held her coiled for the past several hours. She dropped the plasma rifle and ran to them, taking them both in her arms.

“What happened?” Cam pulled away and tried to study both their faces, tried to hold their faces between her hands simultaneously as she had when they were young. “Are you okay?”

“We’re fine,” Perry said calmly, though she hugged back. “We followed
her.
” She pointed upward.

The interior of the stone chamber was huge, though far smaller than the interior space it hung suspended within. The walls were covered with intricate patterning that rose in a spiral along the inside surface. Suspended above them and filling the bulk of the chamber’s dome was the shape that loomed up over the edge of the rock-burner on Onaway.

Cam eyed it, her arms around the girls. In the diffuse light, which – like the blue glow of the tunnels she had passed through – seemed to emanate from the stones themselves, the creature was exposed in all its naked strangeness.