First Fleet #1-4: The Complete Saga (22 page)

T
he flesh
of space groaned around the forge-ship. Tholan felt it through the hull, felt the heaviness of quantum foam, the tensions of space itself, resisting the ship’s motion.

There was a time, Tholan knew, when ships had moved across the emptiness of space in perfect silence. They still did, on occasion. They still, and for short distances, skidded across the skin of space. Very short-range shuttles in inner System did, for example. The courier ships that transported men and materials between a fleet’s capital ships. Soldiers in heavy-suits.

Tholan recalled from his own days as a soldier the feeling of moving through space in a suit: the absolute freedom of knowing that you could, in theory, continue forever on your set trajectory. There was a comfort in the feeling of simple objects in motion, as poised and uncomplicated as billiard balls on a frictionless surface.

But that was crawling. That was inching across the surface of space. To reach anywhere, to move faster than light, one burrowed through its flesh.

The forge-ships bored the path that other vessels could follow. They spun the filigree that spread across space like webs and bound every planet and moon within System as well all the habitable worlds and stations beyond. Pushing through space – instead of only passing along its skin – was not always smooth.

Yet, this journey was different. The forge-ship strained, the motion more violent than Tholan had experienced before. It was almost as if he were on the deck of an ancient sailing ship at sea, lashed by a storm. Space was not simply sheering away from the bulkheads of the forge-ship; it was actively resisting. The wailing of the hull pushing through space set his teeth on edge.

He pressed the spot on his desk that would send a message to the engineer working at the forge-ship’s core. Within a few seconds, a pasty face came into view in the space above the desk.

“Admiral.”

“What’s happening?” Tholan asked.

“We may need to shut her down and run some additional diagnostics.”

The desk in his quarters aboard the forge-ship was identical to the one in his office on the shipyard. Tholan studied its polished black surface, visible through the translucent holograph of the engineer. “Is it the engine?” he asked.

The face nodded. “She’s running hot.”

He was not the engineer Tholan had spoken to from the shipyard. That engineer was almost certainly dead by now. They lived brief lives that close to the engine.

But with the Brick dead, it meant the previous engineer would not live again. His memories, his experiences – those were lost forever.

“We don’t have time for another stall,” Tholan told him. “The Second Fleet is waiting for us to get this line run and anchored.”

“I understand, sir.” For a moment, the engineer’s pale, almost leprous hand entered Tholan’s view as the man scratched at his cheeks. “But we’ve never seen anything like this before. The engine . . .”

The engineer paused.

“Yes?” Tholan prompted.

“You ought probably come down to see for yourself, sir.”

Tholan suppressed a shudder. He had been to the core of forge-ships before, but never for long and never more often than absolutely necessary. And never without paying the price of jagged, broken dreams for weeks afterward.

As if anticipating his hesitation, Tholan felt the slight lurch of an exit from Sidespace and the slow pull toward a vertical orientation as the ship resumed its spinning in normal space. They could not be at their destination already. The engine must be in worse shape than the engineer was letting on.

“Why have we stopped?” Tholan barked.

The engineer’s face disappeared from the space over Tholan’s desk for a moment. When it reappeared, it was wearing an anxious frown that made the man look even more grotesque.

“I’m not sure, sir. We’re working on it.” He repeated his view that Tholan should come down to see the situation for himself.

“Fine,” Tholan said. “Fine. I’ll be down there shortly.”

He broke the connection and stood.

Tholan tried, for a moment, to recall what it felt to have one’s body embraced by the gravity of an entire world. It should not have been different from the sensation he had now as he planted his feet against the floor of his quarters. Physics said that centripetal gravity was indistinguishable from mass-induced gravity, from the gravity of a world, but somehow the bones knew. A world bent time and space. That was real gravity. What held his feet to the floor now was simply spinning in darkness.

The climb up to the center of the ship seemed to take an hour. There were few personnel this deep within the vessel. Forge-ships did not carry many soldiers anyway, and the few that were on board waited in their barracks near the ship’s skin, close to the heavy-suit bays.

At the top of a ladder, Tholan paused. The hatch above opened into the ship’s main axis. Simulated gravity was weaker here, and it would be nearly nonexistent once inside. This was the final shielded bulkhead between him and the engine.

He took a deep breath and keyed the door open.

A wave of heat washed over him, along with a dizzying, sickly-sweet smell of decay overlaid with preserving chemicals.

He pushed himself beyond the hatch and floated up into the cavernous, ovoid central chamber of the forge-ship, its long axis oriented along the length of the ship. Steam billowed around him, making it difficult to see in any direction and masking the far walls of the chamber.

Someone drifted toward him through the fog.

“Admiral, sir, if you’ll follow me.”

It was one of the sub-engineers, the half-dozen or so crewmen who lived in the interior of the ship and assisted the engineer. They tended to last longer than the engineer did, having less direct contact with the central core. They also represented the pool from which the new engineer was always chosen.

Tholan trailed the figure upward into the chamber. A huge network of wires and cables stretched across its center, like a loose braid of metallic vines or roots floating along the central axis of the forge-ship. The sub-engineer twisted and turned, weaving through them, heading toward the absolute center of the chamber. Some of the cables were as thick around as his arm.

Tholan followed less deftly, uncomfortable as always in this area of his ship.

The huge braid of cables thinned out as they pushed deeper into them, the cables decreasing in diameter and changing in nature from thick, shielded wires to hair-like transparent threads carrying visible pulses of light.

At the center of the braid they formed a gossamer net of threads linking the thicker, exterior weave of cable to a single shape at the absolute center of the ship.

It was an arm.

“I’ll let him know you’re here.” The sub-engineer disappeared back into the tangle of cables.

Tholan swore under his breath. This was calculated. The engineer was trying to prove a point by making Tholan wait in the shadow of the one thing he knew would make the admiral most ill at ease.

The arm squirmed, writhing, twisting.

It was huge, nearly as long as Tholan was tall, and as thick around as a man’s waist. Besides its size, its shape clearly showed that it was inhuman. There were too many joints, for one thing, and the skin was pale grey with ribbons of blue that seemed to shift as the arm moved. Where a hand might have been, several appendages sprouted and terminated in the cluster of threads that linked the limb to the web of wires. A similar cluster sprouted from the arm’s other end.

“She’s never thrashed like this,” the engineer said, coming up behind Tholan. Paler in person, with limbs nearly as long and thin as the cables he moved between, he trailed his own network of threads emerging from the base of his skull, identical to those linked with the grey limb.

“You brought me down here to see this?” Tholan asked.

Tholan had seen the central node of the forge-ship before, though few others had. The functioning of the forge-ships was known, apart from their tiny crews of engineers, only to the top levels of System military.

The ability to rip light-lines through space was not, as almost everyone assumed, a purely technological innovation. It was biological.

It was based on bodies.

“Do you know how many of the Grey Limbs we have, Admiral?” the engineer asked. He had positioned himself between the admiral and the arm.

“One for each forge-ship in the fleets,” Tholan muttered.

The sight of the arm had, as it always did – as Tholan knew it would – brought a wave of memories. They were not his own. It had taken Tholan years to piece together the story of whose memories they were and why they surfaced each time he was forced to venture into a forge-ship engine.

The light-lines were built on bodies.

No, Tholan corrected himself silently. Not bodies.

Just one body.

Over and over.

“She writhes like this if we get too close to another forge-ship,” the engineer said. “They feel each other, you see. They reach for each other in space. But all the other forge-ships are docked.”

Tholan was impatient. They could have had this conversation over intra-ship communications. “I understand what you’re implying. Your predecessor hinted at this before we left the shipyard, that there was someone else running light-lines. I assure you, the Colonizers haven’t the capability. If they did, they would have spilled beyond the Reservation Worlds long ago.”

The limb flexed again.

For a moment the pale light of the forge-ship’s core was replaced with the blue-white glow of ammonia ice under starlight.

Tholan gritted his teeth over a wash of memories.

The cold bite of a comet’s surface gnawed beneath him, along with a rising fear. A ring of suited humans surrounded him. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t escape.

“Not the Colonizers, sir.” As though beckoned, the engineer turned toward the thrashing arm. Tholan looked away from the back of his head, from the peeling whiteness that marked all engineers. “I know we don’t live long down here, sir,” he went on, his back turned, “but we live longer than you realize, in directions you can’t see. We live in the memories.”

The ring of suited figures halted, but one was close enough to see clearly. He shouldn’t have been able to see faces at this distance, in this darkness, but he could. Her eyes were wide, and he could almost understand what she was trying to say to him.

Tholan shook his head to clear it.

The engineer had turned toward him again, watching. “That’s why I wanted you down here, Admiral. She’s more awake now than I’ve ever seen her, and she won’t be driven any farther. She pulled us out of Sidespace. We can’t tunnel all the way to the original terminus.”

“How close are we?”

The engineer touched the arm’s grey skin. “We’re anchored to the mass of a brown dwarf a dozen light-years from the target.”

“That’s as close as we can get?”

“It looks that way.”

Tholan rolled a curse around in his throat. With the original light-line collapsed, transporting the Second Fleet to the Perseus Limb required running a new line. But if this was as far as the line could reach, the numerical superiority of the Second Fleet was useless.

There were only a handful of jump-ships in the Second Fleet, but they couldn’t ferry an entire armada across the final distance. It meant Tholan would face whatever was on the Grave Worlds with only a few vessels instead of an entire fleet.

He swallowed the curse and turned to leave.

“Admiral, do you realize what this means?” the engineer called after him.

Tholan pushed through the web of wires without answering.

“It means she’s not alone!” he shouted. “It means there’s another somewhere out there. Somewhere near.”

Perhaps the engineer, bonded as he was with the scrap of flesh that powered the ship’s drive through Sidespace, found this an exhilarating thought. Tholan did not, and he left the core with set jaw and stony silence.

A single organism with the ability to tunnel through space – killed and dissected on an outer-System comet a century ago – had been the catalyst and cornerstone for the light-lines, for all effective large-scale faster-than-light travel within and beyond System.

Res-pod technology – the backbone of the System military – was originally developed to clone pieces of that single original organism, pieces that could be used in dozens of forge-ships, tracing a network of light-lines throughout the galaxy.

But if there were more out there – and if the Colonizers could get their hands on them – this conflict would take on an entirely new dimension.

B
eka woke
, believing for a moment she was home. Her older sister was staring down at her. In another moment Beka would get up and join her in the kitchen, where they would sit and argue about nothing over eggs and toast until their parents joined them.

“Jens,” she said. Her voice sounded wrong. It sounded old.

“What are you doing here, Beka?”

Her sister’s face was worn, tired and dirty. The red hair Beka had spent much of her life envying framed Jens’s face in an angry halo, like prominences thrown out by a dying sun. Beyond her face was not Beka’s remembered bedroom ceiling but instead the charred walls and broken monitors of the
Clerke Maxwell
command deck.

In an instant everything resurfaced, pushing away thoughts of home: the news of Jens’s death, her time on the shipyard, the descent through the Fleet, and the final, overwhelming wave of pain.

“Jens,” she said again. “You’re alive.”

Beka realized Jens was blinking back tears. It was hard to read her sister’s expression; it seemed to be wavering between frustration and a pained disbelief.

“I was looking for you,” Beka said, as though it were all the explanation needed.

She tried to sit up, but the ship seemed to spin around her felt. She couldn’t tell if the dizziness came from her own head or the odd angle at which the ship was resting, which made it impossible to determine whether the surface Beka reclined against now was floor, ceiling, or wall.

“Did the ship land? Where are we?”

Jens continued to stare. Beka recognized her expression now. It was one Jens had worn over and over growing up, usually when Beka followed her somewhere Jens had tried to go on her own, somewhere Beka was either too young or too much of a liability to be.

“How did you get here?” Jens finally asked.

Beka briefly recounted what had happened, from the time she learned of the Fleet’s disappearance, to when she blacked out during their fall toward the Grave Worlds. The words came out quickly, buoyed (despite Jens’s puzzling expression) by the joy of seeing Jens and speaking to her again.

Beka was here. She had succeeded. It was as though the universe had accepted all the chances she had taken – the crazy gambit of collapsing the light-line and then plummeting toward an enemy planet – by allowing her to regain consciousness at Jens’s very feet.

Of course Jens would have been in command of whatever System forces still had a claim on this rock. Of course she would have seen Beka’s ship arrive. Of course she would have found her.

It had worked. It had all worked out.

But Jens’s face didn’t mirror the relief Beka felt her own must certainly be radiating. By the time Beka finished, Jens had lowered herself to the tilted deck plates beside her. Beka laid her head against her sister’s shoulder.

“And you’re not dead,” Beka finished, simply. “I found you.”

“So you did, Beka.” Jens kissed the top of her head, something she hadn’t done in years, but her voice sounded bleak and worn. “And here we are.”

“You’re not happy to see me.”

“We’re in hell, Beka,” Jens said slowly. “The Fleet is gone, and from what you say – which corroborates what I’ve been told – it’s even worse than gone. It’s filled with a mind-warping ETI, it surrounds these planets, and you nearly killed yourself getting through. There’s no way out. And things aren’t much better down here. So, no, I wish you weren’t here.”

She paused. “But I’m glad you are.”

“And you’re proud of me.” Beka found that her own eyes were burning.

“Damn it, Beka.”

“Say it,” she repeated. For a moment, Beka felt twelve again, goading her older sister. “Say you’re proud of me.”

Jens pushed herself to her feet. “I’ve always been proud of you.”

“So what do we do now?”

There were lines at the corners of Jens’s eyes and mouth Beka had never seen before. Even the slope of her shoulders seemed wrong.

“You came here to save me, little sister. I hope you have some kind of plan. Like I said, my soldiers – those I have left – think this place is hell.”

“There’s no such place,” Beka reached up and let her sister help her rise. “I did bring a ship. A pretty good one too, from what I can tell. Originally piloted by a crew of Synthetics.”

“There are Synthetics here too,” Jens said. “I’ve met one.”

“It’s possible they’re immune to the effects of the ETI.”

Jens nodded. “They seem to be.”

“So there’s that.” Beka flexed her fingers. The dull ache was still there, but nothing like the agony she had felt as they passed through the Fleet. Someone must have injected her with the antidote to Donovan’s pain treatment. “Let’s list our other assets. You have soldiers, apparently.”

Jens nodded her head slowly. “And a medic. A Colonizer.”

Beka arched an eyebrow, and Jens explained her own situation, beginning with the initial assault and ending with the arrival of Beka’s ship. “My men are getting the ship secured. The damage to the ship itself, from what we can tell, is significant but not catastrophic. I sent Rine – that’s the medic – to look for more survivors on board.”

“And my crew,” Beka said. She thought of Aggiz and Tsai-Lu. “What’s left of it.”

“To see them, “Jens said, “you will have to walk.”

They started along the slanted corridor, half climbing and half walking up the sloping deck, Beka leaning heavily on Jens.

“We’re using the main barracks as our staging area,” Jens explained as they went. “I want my medic to take a look at you.”

A head emerged from around a corner of the corridor, though from the direction of the ship’s repose it appeared to be emerging from a hole in the floor. It belonged to an angular figure that seemed to Beka composed primarily of gangly legs and bent elbows. The man moved down the inclined corridor toward them in a manner that reminded her unpleasantly of a large spider.

“This is Rine,” Jens said.

“Two bodies,” the man began in a rush. His accent was thick, though Beka could understand it. “One in the command room just below us, and one in a corridor several levels up. And then there are . . .”

He trailed off, and his eyes darted between the two women for several seconds before a wide grin split his weathered face and sent bushy grey eyebrows toward his hairline. “Sisters! My Survivor, you have found someone who must either be your sister or an altered clone, or I will waive my not-insignificant medical credentials immediately.”

He paused and pushed closer. “What are the chances? Is it now customary in System to inject sibling pairs with homing chips?” He craned his neck as though looking for implant scars.

“Her name is Beka,” Jens said. “My younger sister.”

Beka stared. She had never seen a Colonizer before. Even the news feeds they received back in System rarely actually showed them, instead providing footage of their lumbering metal walkers or blurry shots of stone-ships in orbit of the Reservation Worlds.

He looked like an image from the historical feeds of the first generation of System spacers – faded, dusty clothing and angular features. His clipped, precise speech sounded strange to Beka.

“The bodies?” Jens asked him. “Are they dead?”

“Not beyond hope, though both quite damaged. But there are others.” The man spread his arm in an expansive gesture that took in the ship around them. “This ship is host to a small army of paper dolls. Glaucon is nearly beside himself, the poor fool. We had no idea there were any Synthetics still active that had not left System with us in the initial exodus.”

“Neither did we,” Beka muttered.

Rine barked a laugh and turned to Jens. “You imagined us as the fossils, my Survivor. And now you find you were carrying them with you the entire time. You cannot run from what you create.”

“Our Synthetics were deactivated – damaged,” Beka explained. “I don’t know if they can be repaired.”

“We shall soon find out,” the man said. “Glaucon is with them now.”

“Take a look at her, Rine,” Jens said, moving aside so he could examine Beka. “Make sure she’s all right.”

“I’m fine,” Beka said.

Rine moved closer and shined a light into both eyes. “How do you feel?”

“My ribs ache.”

He grunted. “The System preoccupations with pain once again, as though it is a bad thing. It means you are alive.” He touched her ribs gently, and she groaned. “Probably bruised from the restraining straps when you crashed. There appear to be no fractures or internal injuries.”

“You were hanging from your seat,” Jens said wryly. “It took a bit of work to get you down before you regained consciousness.”

“Paul,” Beka said. “He must have administered the antidote as we were falling. It was enough to let me land the ship before I passed out again.” She paused. “Or at least crash the ship. He was in the command deck.”

“We found two human crewmen, as I said.” Rine shrugged. “I have set up an infirmary in the only barrack that’s more or less horizontal. They are both still unconscious, but with some time we will likely be able to bring them around.”

“Right now I need to make sure the ship is securely anchored,” Jens said. “Then see exactly how bad the damage is and whether we can use her to get back to the surface.”

“Him,” Beka corrected. “It’s the
Clerke Maxwell.
”

“Did anyone follow you down?” Jens asked. “Were you being trailed by any of the Fleet?”

They climbed back the way Rine had emerged. The command deck where Beka had been revived sat near the outer edge of the network of corridors composing the flesh of the oblong ship. They moved to the barracks near the ship’s nose that was now the lowest portion of the vessel.

“I don’t know,” Beka answered as they went. “I don’t think so. It was hard to tell with them, whether they were going to follow or whether they would just drift. We hadn’t moved so closely past them before though.” She shook her head. “I don’t know. The effect they have . . .”

“I know,” Rine nodded. “Like a disease on the mind.”

“No.” Beka shook her head stubbornly. “It’s not like that at all. It can’t be biological. The distances involved are too large, and it propagates through empty space. It’s something else, something I can’t quite put my finger on.”

“We need to get the sensors online too,” Jens pointed out.

“What we need is to maneuver this vessel into a reasonable orientation,” Rine said, “though that may be too much to ask of a System ship, designed as they were by people pathologically addicted to a sense of up and down.”

They walked along what had been the wall of a corridor. “All the furniture must have locked into configuration as you crashed. Restraints activated on the sleepers as well. It makes for a rather strange infirmary though.”

They moved into a barracks Beka immediately recognized. This was where they had placed the deactivated Synthetics, though now the row of beds rose up before her in a gentle slope. The Synthetics were wrapped in restraint-blankets like flies in a spider’s web, with only their heads visible.

There were two temporary cots set up as well, one of which held Paul’s body. Two soldiers that must have belonged to Jens’s platoon were entering another door, carrying between them the form of Donovan.

“This is everyone?” Jens asked.

“There were two others,” Beka said softly. “They didn’t make it. And there’s a body in a res-pod in one of the science bays.”

Rine moved away from them to consult with another man at the edge of the row of beds. Beka could still hear him complaining about the ship design. “Idiots never thought their ships might land in a gravity well, so they gave them
permanent
internal configurations. Never thought to pivot the rooms, build them on flexible axes? And they think we’re the primitives.”

“He’s right,” Beka said to Jens. “The ship was never designed to land. Even if we orient its axis so it’s horizontal, only a thin strip of rooms will be right-side-up.”

“Then we’ll need to get it into space again, soon,” Jens said.

Beka moved to the cots where Paul lay and where the two soldiers had just placed Donovan. Both men looked much the worse for wear, with livid blue bruises covering much of their exposed skin.

Beka remembered the pain. It was more than simply recalling it in her mind. Her body remembered it as well, the burning in her limbs and every joint, as though it was still lurking somewhere just below the skin, waiting to reemerge. They had lived in pain for years, it seemed, as they tried to find their way down to the surface and their only chance of rescue.

In a few moments Rine and the other man – who looked young enough to be Rine’s son – returned from consulting near the row of deactivated Synthetics.

“What can you do for Donovan and Paul?” Beka asked him.

“I have already done what I can,” Rine said. “I treated them with the appropriate medications I found aboard, though I must say this ship’s supply of basic pharmaceuticals is woefully inadequate. Nor are there many of the resuscitation pods your sister seems to put so much stock in.”

“This isn’t a hospital ship,” Beka pointed out.

Rine waved the comment away. “What they need now is rest, which is what I am providing. Your Synthetics, however, are a different story.”

“They’re old,” the young man said.

“Yes, they’re old,” Rine agreed. “This is Glaucon, my astute and ever-insightful assistant. He is also what you would call a Synthetic.”

He turned to Glaucon. “But you are certainly correct. They have aged three centuries while you were in relativistic transit from System. Yet they do not look it by a day, except that one.” He pointed to where Eleanor lay. “And that is purely cosmetic. They have three hundred years’ worth of experience on you, Glaucon, but they will not have even begun to approach their central core capacity. Unfortunately, it will not do any of them any good.”

“You can’t help them?” Beka looked toward Eleanor, stricken. “You can’t repair them?”

Rine glanced at her as though he had forgotten she was there. “So you can enslave them? Delete them? I believed they were illegal on your worlds.”

“We didn’t know there were any left.”

He snorted. “It was an effective genocide then, no?”