First Fleet #1-4: The Complete Saga (32 page)

Beka’s gaze locked on her own display. Out of the corner of her view, she tried to keep track of the number of purple threads still weaving through the ruins of the Fleet. She could see only four at the moment. Where were the others?

She pushed the thought of her sister aside and, using the
Clerke Maxwell
’s communication relays, routed Tholan’s command out into the Fleet. The command was simple: an order to converge on a single set of coordinates, which corresponded to just beyond the location of the rift still yawning in space above them.

Even as she sent it, the rift started to unravel.

Cam’s image disappeared from view. Beka could hear young voices in the background shouting something.

“Not much time,” Cam barked when she returned. “I don’t know what the creature is doing, but the girls say it can’t last any longer.”

Where were the violet threads now? The command appeared to be working. The cloud of green dots drifting in the projection above the table were slowly orienting themselves – rising, drifting – like motes of dust in an updraft.

“The ships have activated their engines,” Rine confirmed, studying a separate display. “It appears to be working.”

“You need to get out of there,” Tholan warned.

They had carved out space at the center of the ruined Fleet, but now the ships were moving in mass. The
Clerke Maxwell
sat for a moment at the eye of a storm. This would soon become the center of a river, though, with the ships rising around them toward the rift above.

“Order the soldiers back to the
Clerke Maxwell
,” Beka told Rine.

She still searched the display. It was nearly impossible to make out the forms of the stone-ships, lost as they were in a blizzard of green markers. In and among them were flashes of purple marking the locations of the heavy-suited soldiers.

“She is not responding,” Rine said. He looked flustered. “That is, she is in communication, but she says she will not order her soldiers back to the ship.”

Beka brushed past him and stabbed a button to open a direct line to Jens’s suit.

“Jens,” she yelled. “You’ve got to get back here. There are too many ships.”

Jens voice came through an angry storm of static. “. . . guiding you out! Not coming . . . until you’re safe.”

“This is an order!”

“Negative . . . no authority.”

Beka whirled toward the image of Tholan, imagining perhaps she could convince him to order Jens back to the ship, but like Jens’s audio signal, his holographic image was blurring in and out of focus.

The ship lurched. For the next several minutes, Beka’s attention was absorbed with piloting the
Clerke Maxwell
between the passing ships and their attendant distortion fields. She didn’t notice Donovan’s return.

When the last of the Fleet ships disappeared past them, she glanced back at the display. The two stone-ships had miraculously escaped unscathed. Their attendant heavy-suit guides were nowhere to be seen.

When she sent the order again for the heavy-suits to return, only three came home.

Jens was not among them.

T
holan watched
his ships disappearing one by one through the hole in the sky. He sat at a safe distance in the
Mustafa Kemal
, watching the broken Fleet funnel into the Sidespace rift through his displays set at maximum resolution.

In surprisingly little time it was all over, the entire Fleet erased from space as though it had never been there. The distortions accompanying it disappeared as well, until the dark of space was as smooth and black as jet. Then the rift itself sealed, the blinding white of the opening into Sidespace winking out as abruptly and completely as a thrown switch.

Space was empty, apart from his own two ships and the three remaining vessels –
Clerke Maxwell
and two stone-ships – heading off on a separate vector.

“Sir.”

It was his science ensign, speaking on his side out of view of the cluster of holographic avatars from the
Clerke Maxwell
. “The Grave Worlds.”

“What about them?” he asked.

“When the rift, the light-line terminal, when it closed.” She stared at her own displays with a look of mingled wonder and confusion. “The relative velocities of the planets shifted. They’re behaving exactly now as we would expect: they’re careening off into space.”

He glanced down at her display but could make nothing of the equations projected.

“This whole system was artificial, held together by the Sidespace structures the creatures created or maintained. The Grave Worlds are gone now; they’ll simply disperse into space like rogue planetoids. The planets themselves might even break up; their surfaces seemed held together by extra-spatial tension as well.”

“It was all the tip of the iceberg,” Tholan muttered. “We blundered into structures we don’t understand.”

A new figure walked into the holographic display projected from the
Clerke Maxwell
, and Tholan returned his attention. It was Cam Dowager.

“Cam,” he said pleasantly. “You didn’t depart with the creature.”

She shook her head mutely.

“We have a great deal to discuss,” he continued. “I’m sure there’s a lot you’d like explained. I can’t provide answers to all your questions, but I can give you all the data on your past I’ve been able to collect.”

“We don’t have anything to discuss,” she said shortly. Her holographic visage turned toward Beka. “Can we shut that thing off?”

Tholan’s display winked out.

C
am
, Agnes and Perry appeared on the command deck of the
Clerke Maxwell
the instant the Sidespace rift and the final remains of the First Fleet disappeared. Agnes gripped her mother’s hand, and Perry was crying softly by her side. Even in their mother’s presence, they had the air of abandoned children, of those who had fleetingly experienced flight and feared now they would be earthbound forever.

The Grave Worlds were gone, dissolving like sandcastles in a rising tide. Soon there would be nothing left – of the caverns, the cities, the network of linked tunnels – but cold, drifting stones in space.

Where earlier there had been the wreckage of the Fleet, now there was the ruin of worlds. It made it impossible to scan the area for the remains of Jens’s heavy-suit or any ejected pod.

“It doesn’t matter,” Donovan whispered. He stood beside her again on the command deck. Beka looked at him uncomprehending. “Trust me. Not now. Soon.”

She was too tired – too empty – to question.

She had lost her sister again.

But the riddle was not quite solved. She could not cry. She couldn’t fall apart. They had come this far, and now the Fleet was gone. But she had System soldiers, Colonizer stone-ships, and now three newcomers.

Tholan’s ship approached. Beka steeled herself for negotiations. She didn’t trust him, and she knew Cam didn’t either. But they were marooned. With the light-lines collapsed and without a functioning jump-set, his ship was their only ticket home.

But where was home now? Beka realized she didn’t want to face a return to System alone.

The dialogue lasted for some time. In the end, Tholan arranged for a transfer of Jens’s remaining soldiers to his ship and for the two Colonizer stone-ships to travel back to the light-line terminus at the location of the Second Fleet.

“It is a beginning,” Rine told the others when Tholan had signed off and Jens’s soldiers departed. “Something perhaps has been initiated, the first foundation of an eventual understanding. We did something together here, even if it was only to mitigate the result of our mutual hatred. Perhaps this is the beginning of the end of that hate.”

A tiny shuttle rose from one of the stone-ships to latch onto the side of the
Clerke Maxwell
like a silver lamprey. It would take Rine and Glaucon.

“I will not see you again,” he said, embracing Beka briefly. “Remember your sister, and she will indeed remain my Survivor. May all your crossings be fair.”

The twin stone-ships lumbered off into the darkness, dwindling to specks over a period of hours.

Beka, Cam, and Donovan studied each other.

“Paul isn’t here, is he?” Cam asked.

“His body is,” Beka said softly. She explained what Paul had done. “He was conscious, in the Brick. But he’s gone now.” She paused. “Do you want to see him?”

“No.” Cam closed her eyes.

Cam didn’t want to see him. She didn’t want her last memory of him to be a face beneath glass, like the face of Donovan, who had been the body in their attic. She would remember his voice instead, the last things he had spoken to her when she was alone in the tunnels.

“I’ll tell the girls,” she said, opening her eyes. Agnes and Perry had left the command deck some time ago and were sleeping in one of the nearby barracks. “But not yet.”

“What about Tholan?” Donovan asked.

“I don’t trust him,” Beka said. “I don’t want to go back to the shipyard and spend the next few weeks in debriefings. And who knows what they’ll do if they decide the military needs to cover this whole thing up.”

From the set of her jaw Beka saw Cam was in agreement.

“Doesn’t this ship have a jump-set?”

“It did,” Beka began, “or rather, it still does, but we wrecked it to collapse the light-line and maroon the Fleet here. Paul and I—”

She trailed off, looking at Donovan.

“You don’t think . . .” she began.

Donovan shrugged. “He was doing a lot from inside the Brick. He had integrated himself into most of the ship’s systems. Reviving Davis was more or less a miracle.”

“Our ghost in the machine,” Beka snorted. “It’s worth a shot.” She looked at her companions. “Where do we go?”

“Anywhere,” Cam said. “But first: home.”

Beka fed numbers into the jump-set apparatus. The processors outside the hull of the ship hummed with effort, then fed the equations back into the quantum foam around them. Space flinched, and they were gone.

D
onovan would not give
her time to grieve. “Not yet,” he insisted. “Follow me.”

Beka obeyed, still feeling a heavy grey emptiness. Donovan led her down to the science bay. She was tired and drained enough to trail behind him without question. Nothing seemed to matter anymore.

She still didn’t understand, even when she was staring at the empty res-pod.

“I broke the
Luke Howard
mandate. We both did.”

The res-pod wasn’t empty, Beka saw now. There was a thin ribbon of something floating at the very center, nearly invisible.

“She didn’t want to,” Donovan went on, “but I made her, before she left.”

“You sampled my sister?” she asked dumbly.

“She argued. There was only one res-pod, and there wasn’t much time. I told her she owed it to you.”

The res-pod was active, stitching together her sister’s body before her. The ribbon of material flexed and grew, drifting in the current of the nutrient mix, as she watched it.

“But the memory scan . . .”

“The Brick was stable. Paul was gone.” His face was impossible to read. “It was worth the risk.”

Beka was overcome with weakness. There had been too much, too quickly – too much loss and recovery and then loss again. And now this. Her knees buckled and she collapsed beside the res-pod, braced against it and crying onto the glass. In a moment, Donovan was beside her as well, holding her, whispering words she didn’t hear.

Jens Grale grew in silence.

“
I
t’s me
.”

The voice was Paul’s. It startled Cam when she re-entered Station from the elevator car.

“The ship’s coming for the pod, which is what you were worried about, and I’m sure you know that.”

It was the message he had recorded when she let him be abducted by the
Clerke Maxwell.
When she had – ultimately – sent him to his death.

“I wish you would have trusted me.”

The habitation below was empty. There weren’t many personal belongings to gather, but she had gotten what she came for. There were things to remember him by, things the girls would need wherever they ended up. The terraforming agency would send new settlers to take their place when they stopped reporting in.

She wouldn’t try to cover their tracks. There was no need; Tholan knew she was still out there.

“I wish you would have explained what was going on, what you’re afraid of and why you and the girls are hiding.”

There was no accusation in his voice. He had trusted her, even when he didn’t understand what she was doing.

“What you want me to do.”

The
Clerke Maxwell
hung outside the window of Station. Beyond, the curve of Onaway cut into the expanse of stars. She squinted and could almost make herself believe she saw the thin haze of atmosphere soften the planet’s edge.

“I think I know though. I’m not angry. I love you.”

Cam sighed and floated in the empty cargo bay. When they arrived, it had been filled with the latest shipment of supplies. Donovan and Beka loaded them into the
Clerke Maxwell
. They would need supplies, wherever they ended up.

“Station,” she said.

“Yes, Cam?”

She took a deep breath. “Delete final message.”

“The message is deleted, Cam.”

She paused at the airlock back into the
Clerke Maxwell
. She had lived her life in hiding, trying to escape from a past she could not remember. Now that the past had returned to her – at least pieces of it – she realized she couldn’t run forever.

One day there had to be a reckoning.

“Record another message, Station.”

He might return here, searching for her.

“Tholan, this is Cam Dowager. If you’re hearing this it means you’re still looking for me. I don’t want your answers. I want to be left alone. Maybe it’s not fair, but I have to hold someone responsible for what was done to me – and to the creatures whose backs you built the light-lines on – and I’m going to pick you.”

“One day we’ll talk,” she went on, “but later – much later. I want to raise my daughters. If you come after us before I seek you out, I swear to God everyone in System will learn the truth about your technology.”

She paused.

“Got all that, Station?” she asked.

“Yes, Cam.”

“Good. Save it and play if you’re ever boarded by military personnel.”

“Yes, Cam.”

Cam glanced one last time at the surface of Onaway.

It was a big galaxy. There were lots of worlds to help create.

She kicked off toward the airlock and closed the door behind her.