First Fleet #1-4: The Complete Saga (7 page)

C
am was in the attic
, staring at the body in the pod. There was only a week left now until resupply. Though the process was largely automated, there was simply no room for it. The cargo units that contained the water, food, sundry, requested tools, and medical supplies would completely fill the room.

She had to decide what to do with the body. Soon.

The regeneration was nearly complete. There were no longer signs of facial or cranial trauma. There was simply a sleeping man, in perhaps his thirties or very early forties, suspended in the blue-green gel of the res-pod. The power drain to Station had dropped in sync with the near completion of the regeneration, and the major tissue damage all over the body had been repaired. Now it was drawing just enough to keep its occupant suspended and alive. Soon it would be ready to wake.

She and Paul had discussed their options that morning while the twins were in class. The week before, Paul had finally prevailed on her to take the elevator up to station and investigate the pod herself.

“I was right,” she had explained to him. “It’s far too small to have a jump-set. It must have made its way here via the light lines.”

“So we can just send it back the way it came. Won’t it keep the guy alive until it finds a military ship or something?”

“It will have logged its time here. And before you ask—no. No matter what you say about how wonderful I am with computer logs, I can’t re-construct or alter the trajectory and manifest logs of a military transport. Which means whoever finds it could trace it back to us, and ask why we didn’t report it.”

“Can we bring it down here?”

“It’s too large for the elevator. And the pod looks like it’s built for space travel only: evac from heavy suits to medical transports. No capabilities for surface transport or landing at all.”

“Okay. So we get the guy out of it and bring
him
down here, then chuck the pod into the atmosphere and let it burn up on its way down.”

“Paul, what are we going to do with a brain-dead body? We don’t have the medical facilities or the proper training to keep it alive. It would waste space, air, and food. And that’s assuming we could even get it to eat.”

And so it went on for the rest of the morning.

She finally convinced Paul to leave for his maintenance tour with a promise that she would figure something out while he was away. He’d departed for a tour of the rock-burners to the far north of their plantation that morning and would be gone for three days.

Figuring things out, that’s what I do
, she kept reminding herself and thought briefly of all the figuring out she had done in the past few years. After she had died and regenerated for the first time, she had realized what it had done to her, and she had figured out how to get away. Everyone had said was impossible to desert, but when it became clear that the military would not let her go so easily, she had figured out how to create a new life for herself. When System began to get too uncomfortable for her, she had figured out how to get posted to a brand new terraforming colony, where her old life was unlikely to come looking for her. And along the way she had figured out how to make Paul fall in love with her and offer her a License.

Paul, her husband. Actually, he had tried to get her to marry him. It was an indication of how old-fashioned he was in some ways. He settled for an extended License, but he still talked about it sometimes. He was hardly frontier material. Yet here he was, with her, working to pump oxygen and nucleic particles into an atmosphere that would likely never generate a raincloud until long after they were both dead and gone.

I will figure this out. I have to.

Floating in the attic, Cam stared down at the body in the pod. She hefted the rail-pistol in her left hand. It had no weight up here, obviously, but it still had mass and thus had inertia. It still felt solid. Paul didn’t even know it existed, but she still disassembled and reassembled it at her workbench when he was gone overnight and couldn’t sleep. She knew its components so well that they came apart and found their places again effortlessly, like an extension of her own hands. Its feel in her palm was reassuring. She had not fired it in years.

It would only take one shot from it. She imagined the dull recoil and the EM flux coursing through her hand as the magnetic field lobbed its tiny slug at near-relativistic speeds. The shielding had never worked right, no matter how much she tweaked it. A discharge always left her hand feeling numb for a moment.

One shot.

She would release the canopy afterwards. The stasis fluids would drain away. The gun would fire, her fingers would tingle, and she would close the pod and disconnect the power before it could start the regeneration cycle again. It would only take a few minutes to rig the power cell to drain itself completely. Re-constructing its logs or circuitry was definitely beyond her, as she had told Paul, but basic sabotage was not. Then when she would eject it from the airlock, it would disintegrate completely falling onto the thin skin of their young world.

Even if the military did trace it, and even if the tracer in the pod survived an uncontrolled planetary descent—which Cam highly doubted—there would be nothing to link it to their habitation, nothing to link it to them.

Nothing to link it to Cam.

Cam checked the charge on the pistol for perhaps the fourth time.

It wouldn’t even be murder. There were no memories in that organic shell sleeping in the res-pod. There was no personality. It was a blank. She had gone through training to kill active, thinking beings with more going on behind their eyes than this empty body ever would have again.

Cam’s eyes fell on the stenciled label on the res-pod’s side.
Mountstuart Elphinstone
. It was a medical frigate. That meant the body most likely belonged to a doctor.

It didn’t matter. She would not let them find her and possibly destroy the life she had created here with Paul and her kids. If they found her here, they would take her.

She drifted over to the body and keyed the release on the pod’s side. There was slight hiss as the pressurized lock disengaged and the blue-green fluid disappeared into the pod’s interior. With one arm she pulled the pod’s cover up and out of the way. With the other she extended the rail-pistol.

How long had it been since she fired it?

“Mom?”

Cam froze. It was Perry. For an instant, Cam had the craziest thought that Perry had stowed herself away in the car and rode up the elevator with her. She spun, half expecting to see her daughter waiting at the door or floating beside one of the wide portals.

“Mom,” the voice came again, over Station’s speaker. “Where are you? I had a bad dream.”

They should have been asleep. It was nearly midnight. Knowing that what she was doing had to be done alone, she had checked on them both. They were sound asleep when she left. They were usually deep sleepers. She hated leaving them alone, but their habitation was secure. Even if they woke up, there was nowhere they could go. The twins were smart, but Cam didn’t believe they were to the point of bypassing the habitation’s safety locks.

Nonetheless, her stomach clenched with anxiety. They were awake, and she had left them below. Alone.

“Mom?” Perry’s voice was rising in tone. “Where are you? I had a bad dream.”

“I’m here, sweetheart,” she said. “I’m in the attic.”

Her mind raced. Station would alert her if there was any danger down there, but the presence or absence of actual danger made no difference to a frightened child. She cursed her hesitation, her desire to spare Paul any part to play in this. It had made her wait until she was alone with the twins to act.

“There’s someone here, Mom. There’s a man.”

She looked from the pod to where the car waited at Station’s entrance. The rail-pistol was still in her hand.

“Station!” she barked. “Is there anyone down there?”

“Your daughters are currently in the habitation.”

“Anyone besides them? Any stranger?”

“No.”

“Perry,” she said, struggling to keep her voice calm. “You were just dreaming. Wake your sister up if you’re scared. I’m coming down right now.”

She glanced back at the body,
Damn, damn, damn!
She slammed down the lid and pushed off back toward the entrance.

“I’m on my way, Perry. Don’t worry.”

“I’m not worried, Mom.” Perry’s voice had the maddening exactitude of a five-year-old. “I’m scared.”

“Talk to me about it.”

The car began its long climb back down the carbon-cable tether. Cam had made some modifications to its engine in the past, frustrated that it couldn’t climb up and down from the surface faster. She pushed the engine as far as it safely could go now, feeling the tiny carriage shudder as it lurched down its beanstalk.

“There was a man inside. He was trying to tell us something.”

“Here? Inside the habitation?”

There was silence for a moment on the other end, and Cam could imagine Perry nodding solemnly in the dark. “There were other people too.”

“Did you dream about me and your dad?”

The face of their naked world was growing slowly, the blistered brown and black features resolving themselves out of the distance.

“You weren’t there, Mom. Just Agnes and me. And a bunch of other people outside the habitation. In the rain.”

“The rain?” Cam said. Perry was calming down. She could hear it in her voice.

“We never see them. But we know they’re there.”

“We?”

“Agnes and I. We dream together.” Cam waited. Perry’s voice was starting to sound sleepy. “He wanted our help.”

“Who did?”

“The man who came inside.”

The whine of the car’s engine became a shuddering lurch, but Cam ignored it. A dark suspicion was growing inside her. An impossible fear.

“What did he look like?”

“He kept trying to say something, but we couldn’t understand him. He was scared.”

“What did he look like, Perry?”

“I don’t know. White, like Daddy. He was wearing a white uniform.”

Cam closed her eyes. It was just a dream. It could be anyone. The twins hadn’t seen the body in the res-pod. They could’nt have.

“I think he was a ghost, Mom.” Perry’s voice was growing quieter. “He wanted his body.”

W
hen Cam
finally returned to the habitation, the gears of the engine’s traction drive screaming dangerously and extremely hot to touch, the twins were both asleep again. Perry had burrowed down into the bed next to her sister. There was, of course, no sign of anyone else in the habitation.

“Damn,” Cam whispered again.

She would have to disassemble the climb-drive of the car and replace the gripping wheels before they made another ascent to Station. The body would be left to its own devices in the attic until then, though it should not wake, even with its stasis fluids drained. But there were only days before resupply arrived.

She was trying not to think of what Perry had said about her dream and what it might mean. The girls couldn’t have known anything about the body in the attic, unless they had been questioning Station about its manifest. Cam was sometimes surprised with the things they had been able to figure out or access. She assumed it was because they were driven by their curiosity and apparently natural inclination to understand and decipher informational systems. They sometimes asked questions regarding the day-to-day operation of the plantation or the terraforming equipment outside.

So it was possible that they knew there was a dead body in the attic.

She would have to ask them when they woke up.

Cam paced along the windows that ran the eastern edge of the habitation. It was still several hours until dawn.

That would explain the dream. That was all it was- a dream. It didn’t have to be anything more than that.

Cam sat, wide awake, waiting for the sun. She told herself her daughter had simply had a nightmare. She told herself that it was not her own past catching up with them at last.

She told herself that, but she did not believe it.

T
he bodies had stopped coming
to the unnamed lab in the shipyard. Beka didn’t question it. It meant that Davis must have taken what she said seriously, that it would do them no good to dump naked memories from the Brick into a blank mind. Part of her was relieved. She never got to be as good as Davis and Tsai-Liu apparently did in tuning out screams, and she suspected that it was best not to ask where the bodies had come from.

No matter what they tried, the blanks all died screaming.

Beka focused on her equations instead, and on her attempts with Aggiz to extract memories directly from the Brick without bringing along the rest of a ghost personality. It was like trying to trace a single line in the whorls of a psychic fingerprint. As the days progressed and her simulations with Aggiz grew more complex, she started to become more confident that it was indeed possible - though still futile. Even if it was theoretically doable, Beka didn’t understand why Davis would push them to continue pursuing that approach. Not only would the procedure destroy the mind from which the memories were extracted, as Beka had explained to him several times, there was no way to integrate the memories into any system in which they could be usefully accessible or comprehensible.

Beka had pestered Aggiz about it for a while. “What does Davis have in mind? There’s no artificial system that could process these memories. Once we pull them out, what are we supposed to do with them?”

Aggiz usually answered with a shrug. It was his stock response to most of Beka’s comments and queries, almost always followed by a lapse back into the silent study of his monitors. Right now, they showed a graphic of the human brain mapped out in a dozen different colors. Even after working beside him for several days, Aggiz was almost as much of a riddle to Beka as Davis was, though apparently a more benign one.

“I can’t imagine what he has planned.”

It had been a long day for the both of them. She sank in the low chair beside Aggiz and propped her feet up beside one of the monitors he gazed into.

“Mm,” his eyes were glued to the highlighted neural pathways before him.

“So who was it, Aggiz?”

He turned to her and blinked. “Who?”

“Your link to the Fleet, of course,” she gestured at the lab around them. “Who do you know buried in that Brick? Why are you here?”

“Ah.” Aggiz blinked a few more times. He looked up toward the Brick that loomed above them. “It doesn’t matter.”

Beka realized with a start that he was blinking back tears.

“I’m sorry, Aggiz.”

“She wanted to renew our License. She was young.” He shook his head. “But I said no. I told her I wanted to focus on my work.”

They were interrupted by Eleanor.

“I don’t understand,” she was fuming. “I don’t understand why it can’t just be a computer.”

Beka asked, “What do you mean?”

“The memories. I understand that the amount of information in a human mind must be staggering. But I don’t understand why a computer—possibly with enough memory to hold every book ever written—can’t hold and interpret a single individual’s memories.”

“I don’t think it’s a simple a matter of storage capacity,” Beka said patiently. She looked at Aggiz, who nodded his head in agreement while keeping his eyes firmly on his monitor. “It’s a matter of processing structure,” he muttered. “Even our fastest computer systems aren’t built like a human brain. They don’t work like one.”

“But surely they would be enough for something? All we need is a phrase or an image, just a clue, a lead.”

“Davis would be the person to talk to about that,” Beka said. “There might be a way, but how many ghosts are we willing to vivisect to put together a picture of what had happened?”

“I have already talked to him.” She sighed. “How many minds have we pulled out of the Brick so far?”

“I don’t know exactly how many. But everything we have been doing so far,” she pointed at herself and Aggiz, “has been theoretical. I don’t know if I’m ready to try it on an actual mind unless we’re absolutely sure it’ll work.”

When Eleanor left, Beka slumped back into her chair.

“She scares you, doesn’t she?” she asked him. His eyes had not left his monitor the entire time she had been there.

“Scares me?”

“Come on! You’re terrified of her. You can’t even look at her directly.” Beka watched Eleanor’s departing form across the floor of the laboratory.

“Ah.” Aggiz swallowed loudly and finally glanced up. “She’s, uh,” his brow furrowed as he worked to get the words out right. “She’s used to getting what she wants. Always. And I can feel her, you know. I can tell. She’s probably working out what she wants right now. I don’t know. But she gets what she wants, that much is certain.”

Beka leaned back and studied Aggiz’s face. That had been insightful. She glanced back to Eleanor. She was now outside the lab, speaking with the guards beyond the door. Beka saw her laugh easily at something one of the guards said.

True, she was the admiral’s personal attaché, but who was actually in control here?

A
fter a week
—an infuriatingly long one of simulations, data-parsing and evenings spent trying not to wonder whether her sister was dead in space or her mind had already been carved up by one of the other teams she was sure were working at dozens of other Bricks on various ships— Admiral Tholan appeared in the lab with Davis. Beka had not seen the Admiral since their first conversation, the day after she learned of Jens’s disappearance. He looked much older now, almost haggard. The search for the Fleet must not be going well, Beka mused. If there were indeed other teams working on the same problem, they must not be any closer to getting any answers either.

Davis led Tholan to where Beka and Aggiz sat.

“Are you ready to splice out memories yet?” snapped Davis.

Beka stood. It had become second nature for her to ignore Davis’s tone. “I’m confident that we now have high enough resolution to isolate and extract memories
and only memories
from a ghost—from an uploaded consciousness.” Tholan nodded silently at this. “But I still don’t understand
why
. It would destroy the mind we would use, and—as I’ve explained several times—we have nowhere useful to dump the memories.”

For once Davis was silent. His fox-like face, however, remained sharp and watchful, as he looked over to the Admiral and studied him. The admiral spoke, his face brightening, “But you are indeed sure that you can bring out the memories of a soldier intact?”

“I am. With Aggiz’s help. He’s isolated the right neural networks. I can disentangle them from the Brick.”

“Good.” He patted her arm absently, his eyes still on the Brick.

Davis had a hungry look in his eyes. “So, do we have your permission to proceed?”

The haggard look returned to Tholan’s features. “You do. I’ll have the first receptacle delivered in the morning. But you understand,” he turned to throw a look of such intensity on Davis that the thin scientist flinched visibly, “that if anyone ever finds out about this, I will disavow any knowledge of the entire operation.” The admiral’s voice grew sterner. “Finding the Fleet is critical, of course. But what you are about to attempt violates every military and civilian law in the past three hundred years. And if that ever comes to light, you can be sure that it will not be traced back to me. It will be on your head, Davis. You will take sole responsibility for this.” He looked around the bay and then stabbed his finger at the Brick. “I hope to God that there are some answers in there which are going to be worth it all.”

The admiral strode out of the bay alone, leaving everyone staring on his back.

“What does he mean, Davis?” Beka asked after she had recovered. It didn’t take her too long to absorb all that. Still, the admiral’s grim demeanor had been so sudden and severe that she felt the temperature of the entire bay had dropped several degrees.

Davis was still watching the admiral’s departure, his jaw working silently. When he turned back to Beka, his expression was impossible to read.

“He means that he’s agreed. We’ll have a vehicle for those memories, Beka.” He took a deep breath as though steadying himself. “And now something good will finally come from a very, very old mistake.”

That was all he would say, besides telling Aggiz and her to pack up and call it a day. They would start again early the next morning. Beka thought perhaps Davis was speaking of something from his own past, something that might explain his own interest in the Fleet and his passion for this mysterious line of research.

She was wrong though, or at least for the most part. He was talking about a mistake a few hundred years old. And Beka would soon learn that there were more ghosts in this very shipyard than the Fleet’s sailors trapped within the Brick.

B
eka sat
upright in her bunk, her mind racing. She had finally put the pieces together. Something about what happened today had been bothering her, but she hadn’t been able to figure it out. Now she knew.

She couldn’t shut her mind down; it was her curse. When they were in school, her sister used to wake up in the night to find Beka either wordlessly turning a problem over and over in her mind or bent over a page of calculations.
Give it up
, Jens would tell her.
Let it go
.
Some problems aren’t that important.

Some problems shouldn’t be solved.

But Beka somehow never had that luxury, or rather, her mind did not.

Now that she’d put it all together, sleep was impossible. Instead, she stared out her window. The view was free of the glare of the dwarf star, which was shadowed by the bulk of the shipyard. She had given up trying to locate the yellow point of light the admiral had indicated from his office window after the few days.

Every military and civilian law of the past three hundred years
.

She shuddered involuntarily.

A very, very old mistake
.

Three hundred years ago. That would have been about the time the last of the Colonizers were leaving System. It was ancient past for her, but not more than one generation for the Colonizers, traveling on their relativistic ships from System. She had learned the history of that period in school, and she had read enough to know that the histories themselves weren’t completely accurate. The books were biased. There were things that weren’t spoken of. There were many gaping holes in the narrative.

One of those holes centered on a primary cause of the Colonizer exodus.

She spent the rest of the night staring at the ceiling, waiting.

T
here was
no dawn in space. No grey light came to the expanse beyond her window to tell her that she could finally give up on trying to sleep. Nonetheless, her alarm sounded and she rose, dressed, and brewed herself some coffee. She was weighing whether to take a long shower or skip it to run a final series of simulations for the day when someone knocked on her door.

It was Eleanor.

“I thought you might want some company. And breakfast.” The older woman was holding up a tray with a teapot, a plate of what looked like English muffins, and some dark jam and butter.

Beka nodded mutely and stepped aside as Eleanor entered. She was wearing a floral dress that could almost have passed as a robe, but she wore it like a uniform. Beka watched her set the room’s single small table with graceful efficiency.

“Tholan said he put you on the spot yesterday.” Eleanor smiled. “From the way he talks though, he’s impressed.”

Beka shrugged and dropped into a chair. “That’s nice to hear, I suppose.”

“He’s not overly generous with praise.” She seated herself across from Beka and leaned forward. “He’s pleased with your work. Davis is too, of course you’ll never hear it from him though.”

Beka wasn’t sure why Eleanor was here or what she wanted, but she figured she’d use the opportunity to try to get some information about Davis.

“Who is he, Eleanor? What’s his connection with the Fleet?”

“Davis? He is an enigma. He was the first person Tholan pegged for his idea to build a team of personally-invested specialists, though I’m not sure if it wasn’t Davis himself who planted the seed. He’s never Licensed and has no immediate family, so his connection with the Fleet is not clear to me. I think he’s more interested in the Colonizers than in the Fleet itself, to be honest.”

“The Colonizers?”

“He wanted to be on the Fleet. He was supposed to be a part of a scientific advisory team, but that team was pulled at the last minute. And no one’s going near the Colonizers now until we figure out what they did to our ships.”

“So that’s why he’s doing all this?”

“I don’t really know. I don’t understand the man.” Eleanor shrugged. “You must be very worried about your sister.”

Beka registered the sudden change in subject with wariness. Then, to her surprise, she realized that she wanted very badly to talk about Jens. Aggiz and Tsai-Liu both carried around their personal losses, and that very fact somehow made her own burden seem redundant.

“I am,” she said, taking a muffin, wondering where Eleanor had found such a delicacy.

Eleanor arched an eyebrow. “Do you want to talk about her?”

“I do.”

The words came out slowly, but it was not long before entire stories began spilling. On an abstract level, Beka knew she was not sharing anything profound. These were normal reminiscences from a shared childhood. The jokes Jens would crack, over and over, with the punch lines that never came off quite right until Beka begged her to stop. Trailing Jens through school, always one year behind. Watching her from the sidelines. The long arguments about Jens’s enlistment.

“The only boys who ever came to the house did for Jens,” Beka found herself saying. “She would force me to go to parties, tell me that it was good for me, and then I’d lose her for the rest of the night. She had this way of knowing just what to say, how to talk to people. I tried for years to understand it and emulate it, but it never worked for me like it did for her. We thought for sure she’d . . .” Beka paused.