First Fleet #1-4: The Complete Saga (21 page)

C
am tried
to go back as soon as she realized that the twins were gone, turning to run back the way they had come to search for them. When Jens and the other soldiers restrained her, it was all she could do to force herself to be calm and survey them and their weapons, calculating how hard it would be to break away and seek the girls on her own.

“I told you,” Jens told her, “the caverns do strange things with your perception.”

“They were right here,” Cam said. “Someone must have seen them leave.”

There was no place Agnes and Perry could have slipped away to without being seen. No side tunnels opening into their own cavern were explicit or even apparent. Beyond where they stood, farther in the direction they had been heading, the tunnel opened out and seemed, from the grey light in the distance, to terminate into a chasm or pit.

“I don’t remember seeing them at all,” one of the soldiers grumbled.

“Shut up, Claborn.” Jens shook her head as if she was trying to clear it. “They were there, I think. Two girls.”

“Yes, two girls,” Cam hissed in frustration. “Agnes and Perry. My daughters.”

“It’s the tunnels,” Rine whispered. “They split perceptions and distort them. There might have been two of them. Or one. Or four.”

“There were two girls,” Cam shouted. “I don’t know how we got here, but they were with me.”

Jens placed a hand on her arm. “He’s right,” she said softly. “We’ve been circling down here for hours, maybe days, since we escaped. We can’t . . . we can’t even keep track of how many are in our own party. We count off sometimes. Every time we count, we get a different tally.”

Cam scanned the party. There were half a dozen soldiers in close proximity, in addition to the doctor and his young companion. Beyond that, Jens had spoken with two scouts at different times, one who had been following behind and the other scampering ahead, but it was hard to make out how many shapes waited beyond the circle of their lights.

Right now, it seemed there were at least three figures waiting just out of view, one of which, at the corner of her eye—

“Perry!” Cam called, turning toward where she had seen the shape.

One of the soldiers moved to restrain her, but Cam spun and landed a blow to his stomach that left him doubled over, gasping for air.

“Follow her!” Jens yelled. “We can’t afford to get separated.”

The shape had appeared farther up the tunnel, toward where the grey light filtered down from a wider opening. But when Cam arrived at where she thought she had seen Perry, there was no one.

Instead, the tunnel ended in a vast shaft extending downward and upward as far as Cam could see, larger than Cam would have thought possible for this deep in the planet. A metal docking spur ran from the wall to hang out over chasm. There were other spurs visible farther above. The rift was wide enough, Cam realized, to allow ships to carry what had been mined down here up to the surface of the world.

“It’s a dead end,” Cam said bleakly when Jens arrived beside her. She stared out over the expanse of grey. It was impossible to tell whether the dull glow above her head was the sky or another expanse of stone. “She’s not here.”

The panic of having lost her daughters was already starting to slide away, slipping off into whatever strange angles these caverns drew the human mind toward.

Jens stared out at the emptiness and cursed slowly. “Circles,” she said, tapping her forehead against the rock wall with a pained and eloquent frustration. “We’ve been going in circles.”

A few of the soldiers caught up with them. When they understood what Jens had just realized, they sank slowly to their knees. One held his head in his hands, completely dejected. Discipline was wearing thin.

“Where are we?” Cam asked.

“Where we were earlier this morning . . . or yesterday. We’ve already passed through this way.” She spun toward the doctor. “Damn it, Rine, I thought you said you knew where you were going, that it was always easier going down!”

“Nothing is easy here,” Rine said.

“It’s one of the low docking terminals for the mine,” Jens explained wearily. “This shaft goes all the way to the surface. We jumped down one of these in our initial attack.”

“Are you sure it’s the same spur?” the doctor’s assistant asked. “They all look the same to me.”

“It’s the same one. See that spent flare tracer over by the arch? I dropped that there hours ago. We’ve been ing in circles,” Jens said.

“We’re going to die here,” one of the soldiers muttered darkly.

“Maybe we already did,” another said.

Cam turned to Jens, waiting for her to take command, to say something about no one dying and about being able to get them all out of this, but Jens simply stared into the chasm in front of them.

“Fuck this,” Cam told everyone and no one.

As usual, if someone was going to fix things, it was going to have to be her.

She reached down and ripped a plasma-rifle from the hands one of the despondent soldiers, spun the weapon in her grip, and shoved the end into his mouth, which hung open in surprise.

“I don’t care how long you’ve been walking around these tunnels,” she said in an even voice. “I don’t care what the Colonizers did to the Fleet or what kind of monsters they dug out of these caverns and brought back to life. What I care about are my daughters, and you’re going to come back with me down this cavern and help me find them or you are going to find out exactly what being dead feels like.”

The soldiers stared at her.

Cam walked forward, forcing her hostage backward into the tunnel the way they had come. “The rest of you can go to hell,” she said, without looking at them. “Or just continue wandering around in it. Whichever your prefer.”

“Wait.” It was Jens.

Cam glanced at her, but Jens was gazing up the chasm shaft.

There was a whistling coming from above, growing in volume and pitch until Cam could feel the rocks under her feet vibrating.

“There’s a ship coming down,” Jens said.

A huge, white form punched through the mist of the chasm’s upper reaches. It fired stabilizing thrusters, slowed, and grated against an upper rock wall, sending down showers of dust and stone fragments that fell past the entrance of the tunnel in which they stood, watching.

It grew larger as it approached, still hundreds of meters above. A hollow boom echoed down the shaft as it tore through one of the docking spurs above to ricochet off the opposite wall.

“One of ours,” Jens added.

She pushed the rest of the soldiers deeper into the tunnel as the vessel fell toward them, now near enough that its shape filled the entire shaft above. Cam pushed her hostage away and moved up beside Jens to watch it descend.

The sound of metal scraping against stone filled the chamber. The ship fired its stabilizers a final time before slamming into the last docking spur that extended out from the opening of their tunnel into the shaft. The metal of the spur groaned and began to buckle, but the ship wedged between its supports and the opposite wall of the chasm and held fast.

“Do you recognize it?” one of the soldiers asked.

Rine tried to flee back up the tunnel, but two of the soldiers grabbed him.

“Pull yourself together,” Jens shouted. “It’s not from the Fleet. It’s one of ours, but it didn’t deploy with us. They might be here to help.”

“It looks like they need help themselves,” Cam said, stepping forward and studying the ship’s exterior closely. Jens eyed her warily but made no move to take her weapon. Suddenly, Cam’s eyes widened. “I know this ship.”

It was immense, lodged between the stone of the chasm wall and the twisted metal of the docking spur. Its white hull plates groaned, either from the strain of gravity and its angle of repose or from cooling after its transit through the atmosphere.

“How could you
know
it?” Jens asked.

Cam pointed at the ship’s stenciled designation, visible in the grey light in large block letters that were a relieving contrast to the twisted runes of the tunnels. “It came to my planet, several days ago.”

“What’s it doing here, now?” Rine stood beside them, trembling and peering upward.

“I don’t know,” Cam shook her head. “But if there’s anyone inside, they’ll be in the command deck, in the center of the ship. It will take them time to make their way out.”

“If there’s anyone in there alive,” Jens said, emphasizing the word “if” in a tight voice.

Cam’s stomach clenched, thinking of Paul. But anything could have happened in the days since this ship departed Onaway with him aboard. He might not even be on the ship now.

Jens was scrutinizing the girders of the docking spur. “I wouldn’t trust these to hold for long. But if we could get inside and reboot the systems, we might be able to anchor it.”

She tossed her rifle to one of the soldiers. “You wait here. I’m going aboard.”

Cam stared up at the white bulk of the ship. Steam from the re-entry port billowed from it in thin wisps that made her think of the smoke of the rock-burner and the face she had seen. Paul could be inside, maybe injured, maybe dying.

She looked back toward the tunnel. But the twins were still nowhere to be seen.

“What do we do with this one, Sergeant?” It was the soldier whose weapon Cam had stolen. He held another now, leveled at her chest.

Jens paused on the docking spur that now formed a twisted bridge between the face of the tunnel and the damaged ship. Below her the grey stones stretched downward until they were lost in a haze of distance.

“Let her go,” she said. The white surface of the downed ship hung behind her like the face of a moon. “I’ve got a sister. If I were lost, she’d find me. Let her go.”

A few of the soldiers glowered as Cam pushed past them. She raced down the stone corridors the way they had come, looking for some curving passage that they had missed, calling for Agnes and Perry. Their absence haunted her. Maybe this was what Karma felt like, she thought to herself.

She remembered Paul in the same situation not long ago, calling their names as he passed through the habitation searching for them, with her and the girls hidden in the crawler. Were Agnes and Perry—and the thing that had brought them here—waiting just out of sight, refusing to answer, around some bend of the spiraling tunnels?

Back above, on the docking spur, Jens Grale keyed in a universal open code into the panel beside an access hatch. The hatch hummed for a moment as though considering and then ratcheted open. There was a pair of magnetic boots in a locker just inside, which she slipped on, tightened, and used to climb up the slanted corridor into the bowels of the ship.

After several minutes, pausing periodically to listen to the moan of rivets and bulkheads as the ship settled into its perch, she reached the central command deck. She encountered no one along the way, leading her to believe that the ship was indeed abandoned or that Rine had been correct and it was tainted with one of the bodies the Colonizers had used as weapons. There were still lights on in the command deck, though many of the screens that were its windows to the outside world were bathed in static.

A man lay on the floor between one of the rows of consoles, groaning softly. Strapped to the command chair itself was a woman—

Jens swore softly.

“Beka. My god. Beka, what are you doing here?”

A
dmiral Tholan stared
into the white glare of the dwarf star around which the military shipyard orbited as though willing it to blink. Its angry heat on his skin reminded him that he did not stand before screens projecting a view piped down through hundreds of meters of bulkheads: these were true windows looking out onto empty space.

The shipyard had changed its orientation so that the huge transparent wall of his office now faced the star. His shadow lay sharp and dark on the wide desk behind him.

He had read the reports. Now he pondered them.

Cam Dowager was no longer on Onaway.

It had been a surprise, to be sure, when the ship sent to recover the res-pod from the Fleet had encountered an individual claiming to be Dowager. The name had immediately sent up red flags on all the military channels. Dowager had been AWOL for some time, and she was one of the last people the military wanted to lose track of. There was some confusion regarding the actual identity of this individual. But before Tholan had a chance to clarify things, Dowager had disappeared again.

This time, however, she had taken an entire ship. The
Clerke Maxwell
, instead of returning with the Fleet survivor to the shipyard, had been ordered to dump the survivor’s memories
en route
. And whatever that survivor had revealed, it was gone now, along with the ship itself. The best that military intelligence could tell was that the
Clerke Maxwell
had continued to the last known coordinates of the Fleet and collapsed the light-line behind it, marooning it and any answers it held.

Tholan turned away from the star and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

“Admiral.” A face appeared over his desk.

“Yes, what it is?”

“The forge-ship is docked.”

Tholan sighed and nodded. He hated traveling aboard forge-ships, the vessels that carved the light-lines through side-space. Even as heavily shielded as their reality-curdling engine cores were, being near one always set his teeth on edge. But if he wanted answers, he was going to have to use a forge-ship to tunnel a new line to the Fleet’s final coordinates.

He keyed a communication channel to the forge-ship, and another face appeared in the space above the desk, this one clearly lined and ragged-looking. Tholan frowned. The forge-ship engineer would need to be replaced soon. They never lasted long.

“How long will it be until the ship is ready to forge a new line to the Perseus Limb?” Tholan asked.

“That depends, sir,” the face answered, blinking bulging eyes slowly. “The engine’s been testy lately.”

“What do you mean?” Tholan furrowed his brows. He knew what formed the core of a forge-ship engine, so he did have some idea of the implications of such a statement.

“She’s always a mite temperamental,” the engineer explained, “but something big lately has been giving her fits. Give me and my men a few hours, and we’ll try to have her sorted.”

Tholan understood what this man meant. These things were not an exact science. The engineer would likely be dead before the forge-ship departed again anyway.

Along with the existence of surviving Synthetics, the workings of a forge-ship were among the military’s best-kept secrets. But Cam Dowager knew—or she had guessed at one point—which now made finding the
Clerke Maxwell
about much more than the fate of the First Fleet alone.

“There’s more.”

Tholan glanced back at the face. He had forgotten for a moment that the engineer’s holographic visage was still there.

“What is it?” he asked.

“We might have some idea what riled Clara up.”

The previous engineer, Tholan recalled, had referred to the forge-ship’s engine core as Clara. Tholan found the personification understandable but distasteful.

“Yes?” Tholan prodded.

The face blinked again, the bulbous eyes retracting noticeably as the lids closed over them. “From the data we got—and we’ve compared it to a few other forge-ships, we all felt it—it looks as though there was a new tunnel run. Someone else was, um, forging a light-line.”

Tholan sat down. “That’s not possible.”

“That’s what I said,” the engineer agreed. “All our forge-ships are docked, as per your orders, until we figure out what happened to the Brick and the Fleet. But there it was. Something, somewhere, carving a tunnel through space.”

Tholan turned from the projected face and looked back at the glaring white star. The forge-ships and their engine cores were the only means humanity had for building their non-relativistic transportation system through space. The Colonizers did not have the capacity, and every forge-ship in the Fleet was accounted for. The coincidences—the Brick blanking, Cam Dowager reappearing and now this, an unknown excursion into side-space from an unknown source—were too many too fast.

Something was happening. These were no coincidences.

“Get her settled down,” Tholan said, slipping into the engineer’s idiom. “We leave today. One way or another, we’re going to get to the bottom of this. Clear me a line to the Fleet.”

Tholan heard the tone that indicated the transmission with the engineer was cancelled. He did not turn. He continued to stare at the baleful star.

Bodies in motion
, he said to himself.

There were answers out there, he knew, but right now they were as heavy and unseen as the heart of an angry star.