First Fleet #1-4: The Complete Saga (29 page)

Cam realized that they had passed her. The girls were suspended at the center of the ship, their outstretched fingers barely touching each other’s, their opposite hands against the living cables snaking around them. The creature rode behind them, powering, propelling, or obeying their commands, Cam couldn’t tell.

All she knew was that she herself was now only a passenger.

T
he strangeness faded away
, and Beka Grale began feeling at home in the command chair on the command deck of the
Clerke Maxwell
. Stranger yet, she was curiously at ease even though staring apparently-intractable dilemmas in the face. She had piloted the ship – burnished and white around her, like a bleached bone – through the jagged ruins of the First Fleet.

Then they had lain – buried, trapped, hemmed in – beneath the skin of the broken world. Now they were rising again, finding the sky above them as broken as the surface of the Grave World beneath.

A shattered sky.

Beka, back from the surface with Rine and Glaucon to find Davis awake and Paul truly departed, stood between her sister and Rine and stared at the display showing the expanse of sky above them. The
Clerke Maxwell
floated low and just above the lip of the chasm in which they had been sheltered.

“They’re growing,” Beka said. “They’re tearing at space more strongly. If what Paul explained is true, they’re furrowing space around these planets like . . .”

She paused.

“Like what?” Rine prompted.

Beka shook her head, still trying to work out the implications.

“Like a few hundred forge-ships with no direction and no shielding,” Jens finished dryly.

“It’s more than that. Space itself is starting to cave.” Beka pointed at the display. “Look at the stars.” The stars making up the studded background wavered and flickered as though seen through bubbled glass. “Gravimetric lensing. If space collapses and those things scatter into Sidespace, they could emerge anywhere. And if they pop out near an inhabited world . . .”

Beka paused again.

“The more minds are affected, the stronger the resonance is. This was a single fleet and an outpost.” She shuddered. “If one of those things found its way back to System, I can’t even imagine the consequences. A mental conflagration.”

Jens eyes were on her. “We’re just trying to get out of this alive, little sister.”

Beka shook her head stubbornly. “We were. Not anymore.”

“No heroics.” Jens closed her eyes. “That was me, and this is where it got us. A pointless war and a biological weapon out of control. A lot of dead people.”

You don’t know the half of it
, Beka thought.
If you knew what they did to you – with you – on those ships . . .

Rine’s eyes were on her as well, his face begging her to keep his secret.

“We have nothing,” Jens continued.

“We have them.”

Beka pointed. The huge Colonizer stone-ships, which had tumbled out of the Sinks almost immediately after Rine sent his message, swung into view low in the sky, between them and the Fleet above. They orbited the planet like renegade moons. From this distance the tangle of steel spires on their surfaces marking ports, communication relays, and weapons turrets jutted from the angled rock skin of the ships in all directions like the towers of small cities.

“They have sent the entirety of the surviving Crossers from the Asiatic Hetmantate,” Rine said, shaking his head in wonder. “They are some of our largest.”

“They’re asteroids,” Beka said.

Rine nodded proudly. “They were our cities in System, our homes for generations before the Crossing. You thought perhaps we had fled System in immense ships, but you were wrong. We carried our homes with us.”

“But we’re still trapped,” Jens pointed out.

Jens was correct, but despite their position, Beka felt poised and somehow in control. One the one hand was this strange new force from the Colonizers, in some ways even more alien than the broken ships of the Fleet above. On the other were the approaching System ships – two in number, from what they could tell from their sensors – that had apparently just tried to destroy her vessel.

She had little doubt about who was on board and the lengths to which he would go in order to keep the
Clerke Maxwell
out of enemy hands. She was at the moment stationed in a sort of bridgehead, between two forces that hated and feared each other, facing a threat that defied easy analysis or quantification.

But Beka realized that she was not afraid. Her sister stood on her left, Jens looking rested now, tall and in control, with the red mane Beka had always envied spilling down around her shoulders. Her grey uniform was the worse for wear, but she still wore it with the easy grace of a professional soldier.

On her right, still an enigma, stood Rine in the even dirtier brown and green fatigues of a Colonizer, with his leather medical bag slung over his shoulder. His probing questions on the surface had given Beka a new respect for him, one that reinforced her sister’s trust.

She was among friends.

“I’ve finally established contact with the System ships at the edge of range,” Jens said, stirring her from her reverie. “It’s the
Mustafa Kemal
, and the flag officer is indeed Admiral Tholan.”

Beka nodded, setting her jaw.

“You might ask him,” Rine put in, “why he felt it necessary to order the destruction of the only functional System vessel he has on the Grave Worlds. Is it standard procedure for System officers to remotely destroy their ships?”

Beka waved him to silence and turned her attention to Jens. “Tell him everything,” she said. “Explain what’s happened here. Make sure they keep their distance from the Fleet. Explain we signaled the Colonizers.”

A misunderstanding at this point would be disastrous. All parties involved needed information and as quickly as possible.

Jens nodded and turned to her display. In a few moments a holographic projection of Tholan’s head and torso shimmered to life in the space beyond Jens to Beka’s left. Briefly, Jens recounted their situation in the precise, disciplined format of a military report, while Beka and Rine looked on.

Tholan remained mute until Jens finished. Then he looked past her to where Beka was standing.

“Beka Grale,” he said slowly, his expression vaguely bemused. “It seems as though you found your sister.”

Beka nodded. “But I’m afraid we didn’t find many others. Aggiz and Tsai-Lui are dead. The Fleet . . . Well, you can see the Fleet.”

“I can see it,” Tholan nodded. “But I don’t understand it.”

One of the stone-ships swept again across their screens. It slowed and, as Beka watched, swung so that a cluster of communication dishes – bulging from its surface like a blister – turned to face their location. A screen on her right, beside Rine, blinked to life and displayed a large face trimmed in static.

Beka again had the feeling of standing in the middle of a bridge.

The two-dimensional face was obviously that of the commander of the Colonizer vessel above. It dominated the screen, its features as wide and stony as the ship that tumbled above them. Tholan’s holographic image stared at it from across the command deck.

Beka wondered how she looked, situated at the center of this unlikely assembly. She tried to make her shoulders as squared and firm as her sister’s, tried to hold her head at the angle of simultaneous grace and repose Jens held with such apparent ease. She tried to make her face as earnest, as sharply focused, as Rine’s, his gaze darting back and forth between the admiral’s form and the Colonizer’s face on the screen.

“Who is this?” bellowed the Colonizer commander.

Rine inclined his head toward Beka’s ear and whispered quickly. “Do not identify yourself. It is among the Hetmantates a grievous breach of etiquette to not introduce oneself upon initiating communication. My assumption is that you are being tested in order to determine if you are someone who can be intimidated.”

Beka furrowed her brow but leaned forward into the speaker’s field of view.

“Who is this?” she repeated, trying to make her tone match her words. “If you start a conversation, I expect you to make the introductions.”

The lines of the craggy face rearranged themselves into something approaching a grin. “I am Patton Hsu, commander of the
Novy Vostok
of the Asiatic Hetmantate. With whom do I speak?”

“My name is Beka Grale.” Beka paused for a moment before continuing. “I’m in command of the System ship
Clerke Maxwell.
”

“You signaled us,” the commander answered. “You say there are Colonizer survivors. You ask us to bring our manufactured soldiers.”

“There are survivors,” Beka answered. “There may be more on the surface.” She turned slightly, motioning the doctor to come forward. “This is Rine,” she said.

Rine explained their situation to the commander using language as florid and obsequious as Jens’s had been terse and technical.

“And now we are here,” the commander said, when Rine’s story was complete. “We must find a way to break through the blockade above, no? We can return with survivors, perhaps through the System light-lines by which this egregious offensive against us was launched?”

The words rolled out like stones, large and rounded and hard. Beka realized he was baiting Tholan, but the admiral for the moment held his peace. “I wonder, perhaps,” the command continued, “if the poison of these creatures would penetrate the deepest cellars of our Crossers? We could carry you through the Fleet, perhaps, and return to the Hetmantate Worlds, should you wish it.”

Tholan finally broke in. “It is a violation of Reservation Treaties for any Colonizer ship to utilize a light-line. Nor do I think it necessary to remind you,” he went on evenly, “that it is also illegal for Colonizer ships to be outside the perimeters of the Reservation Worlds.”

The huge eyes of the commander moved toward the edge of his view. “Who is this one speaking?”

Beka spoke before Tholan had a chance. “This is the commander of the System ships waiting beyond the Fleet. They’re here to find out what happened to the Fleet – not to start a war.”

It was the wrong thing to say.

“This they have already done,” the commander growled, “by sending their Fleet against our outposts, without warning and without provocation.”

“You had no right to be in this space,” Tholan interjected. “Treaties clearly stipulated—”

“Treaties!” bellowed the Colonizer captain. “Treaties imposed upon us! Treaties in which we had no say if we desired to preserve even the pittance left us! Treaties confining us to the galaxy’s ghettos!”

“You destroyed an entire Fleet!” Tholan thundered back.

Things were unraveling. Jens stood beside her, awaiting orders. Rine was wringing his hands and shifting his weight back and forth between his feet.

“We defended our territory!” the Colonizer commander shouted.

For the moment, communication between both ships was routed through the
Clerke Maxwell
, which was positioned to receive the focused tight-beam from Tholan and the more primitive short-range signals from the stone-ship.

It meant Beka had a modicum of control.

She reached forward and cut both communication channels. Tholan’s image disappeared, and the screen beside Rine blinked off.

“Give me information,” she told Jens and Rine. “Tell me what they need to hear.”

It was all entanglement. It was balancing parameters and resonances, just like playing with the condensates in the Brick. If she could find the right equation, the right point of leverage, she could solve this.

“Tholan needs to know exactly what’s at stake,” her sister said. “He can’t see beyond the Colonizers, but if you show him there’s a clear threat to System if this thing spreads, you can get through to him.”

“Speak directly,” Rine added, “to the Commander. Do not plead or attempt to negotiate. State what is needed and request assistance. They have already committed the Crossers; you but need to show them their services are required for the safety of all.”

She nodded, counted slowly to five, and reestablished the links.

“Gentlemen,” she said, when both their faces – still angry, but for the moment silent – reappeared, “none of this matters at the moment. What matters is what happened here when the Colonizers were attacked and what we do about it now.”

She motioned upward, a universal gesture whatever the relative orientations of the viewers. “The sky is falling. The Fleet is filled with a hostile ETI, an intelligence that destroys minds and erodes space. And right now the space around these planets is being
undermined
by their activity.”

She turned to Tholan.

“If we do nothing, they’ll disappear into Sidespace and be a threat to anything they come across. Statistically speaking, System is the center of our light-line network – and that’s likely where they’ll end up. Ready to infect a hundred billion minds.”

Before he had a chance to respond, she turned to the Colonizer commander.

“Please,” she said evenly. “Help us destroy them.”

The commander shook his huge head. “We cannot destroy so many. We perhaps may be able to push through them, and this is why we came. We will take your ship, we will take any survivors, aboard our vessels. We will transport them home via the System light-line terminals.”

Tholan opened his mouth to speak, but his response was lost, because at that moment space ripped open above them.

T
he ship moved
beneath Donovan and he realized they must be leaving their shelter in the crevasse. He knew the Colonizers were on the way. Things had slipped outside of his purview; he was once again the medic, tending patients, while those in command – while Beka, he amended – dealt with the motions of ships and the questions of strategy.

He was, Donovan admitted to himself, proud of her. She would have been a good captain.

But right now there were Davis and Eleanor to deal with.

As Donovan watched, Davis rose from his glass coffin slowly, coming to a vague cognition of the room around him. Donovan wasn’t sure if there would be any side effects from the way in which Paul had orchestrated his regeneration, but if Davis were anything like the hundreds of military regenerations Donovan oversaw on the
Mountstuart Elphinstone
, he would regain his bearings only very slowly.

“Davis,” Donovan said gently, “can you hear me?”

Eleanor stood a few paces beyond him, watching Davis with the cold concentration of a snake eyeing its prey. Beka had given no instructions regarding the Synthetic. Donovan knew what she was, and he knew she was used to getting her way.

She had been created to elicit very specific emotional and physical responses from those around her, and Donovan had no illusions of his own capacity for resistance if she were to turn her attentions on him. His sympathies, he had to admit, lay with Davis. He was almost as fearful of Eleanor as he was the creatures on the Fleet above.

But there was no remedy for that now. For the moment, he had a patient, and he tried to ignore her. Besides, he had no idea what Eleanor’s intentions were, so there was no use wasting time worrying about it.

She would most likely get what she wanted anyway.

Davis’s eyes focused gradually. He tried to speak, licked his lips, and finally croaked a question.

“You’ve experienced a partial regeneration, non-necrotic,” Donovan explained, using the soft tones but exaggerated enunciation he used with newly-regenerated patients. “You are still aboard the
Clerke Maxwell
.”

“I don’t know you,” Davis rasped. His eyes moved past Donovan and focused on Eleanor. They widened, and he brought his arm up.

Donovan caught it before Eleanor could do anything drastic.

“There’s no need,” he said, gently but insistently. “You killed all the others. She’s the only one left.”

“She’s enough,” Davis whispered. There were still scars around his jaws and neck where the burning had been most severe. They writhed as he spoke.

Donovan kept his hand on Davis’s arm.

“You’re safe,” he said, hoping it was the truth.

Eleanor watched them both in perfect silence. It was that patience, Donovan realized – the silent waiting and watching with the motionless poise of a statue – that would have convinced him she was not human if he still harbored any doubts.

“He’s right, Davis,” Eleanor finally spoke, coming up beside Donovan. “I don’t want you dead.”

“What do you want?”

She smiled. It was a dazzling smile, but as devoid of warmth as a star’s light falling on a world with no atmosphere. She was showing her teeth, metaphorically as well as physically.

“What do I want, Davis?” she asked. “I want you punished.”

A
new form
joined the conference of minds on the command deck of the
Clerke Maxwell
. A woman Beka had never seen before – but whom Jens identified as the civilian they found in the tunnels of the Grave World with her daughters – was visible as an additional holographic avatar, standing facing the semicircle composed of Tholan’s image, Jens, Beka, Rine, and the two-dimensional projection of the Colonizer commander.

“Let me be clear,” Cam said, “I am not in direct communication with the creature. My daughters are.”

The wash of the newly opened light-line terminal had blanked the displays temporarily. Now the view came back on, revealing a sky above the Fleet with a seam indeed ripped into space. It was a white gash, large enough to swallow the entire Fleet, it seemed, and centered on a single System forge-ship.

“We collapsed the light-line to
prevent
the ETI from spreading,” Beka protested.

Tholan’s expression as he watched Cam’s form was inscrutable but somehow deeply troubling. He looked as if he was not the least surprised to see her. The Colonizer commander viewed it all with a slight frown, though he appeared gratified to find there was indeed a light-line terminus at such close proximity. The glowing white curls of the terminus’s spatial distortion bled out into the very edges of the Fleet itself.

“I know,” Cam said, nodding. Then she paused. “Actually, I don’t. But I can imagine. However, this is different. The creature creates its own light-line. In fact—”

Cam briefly glared at the admiral’s display, then continued, “In fact, our own light-line technology
depends
on this capacity. The point is the creature is forging this line to take the ETI away. To remove them from the equation.”

“Where?” Tholan finally spoke up.

“I don’t know.” The image of Cam ran its fingers through its short-cropped hair. “But they won’t be here.”

“Why should we trust you?” Tholan’s voice was reasonable, almost cajoling. “Or why should you trust the creature? This might simply be an excuse to harvest the hardware on those ships. Or to collect the Bricks.”

“Why should anyone trust anyone?” The rumbling voice of the Colonizer commander sounded distant yet vaguely threatening.

“You don’t know what those creatures can do,” Beka said. “Either of you.”

Tholan was not convinced. Beka could read it on his expression, even through the haze of holographic projection.

“If we don’t do something soon,” Cam interjected, “we’ll lose the opportunity. Beka is right; they’re thinning space in this region. If they punch through to Sidespace on their own, they could re-emerge anywhere.”

The ragged edges of the white fissure above them snapped and snagged at space. The outflow of random energies made the displays on the
Clerke Maxwell
blur for an instant into static.

“Very soon,” Cam said again. “The girls don’t know how long the creature will be able to hold this rift open.”

That was enough for Tholan. It was the same reason Beka had given, but he gave it more credence coming from Cam, though Beka wasn’t sure why he should.

“There are hundreds of ships,” the Colonizer commander rumbled. “We cannot tow or push so many. How can we force them into this light-line?”

Beka snapped her fingers and then leveled one at Tholan. “Your carrier wave. The way you tried to blow up this ship. You can still send commands to the Fleet, can’t you?”

“The Puppet-Master Protocol,” Cam muttered.

The admiral smiled. “Very good, Cam. I see you haven’t forgotten everything.”

Cam scowled.

“If we can get a clear signal to all the ships,” Tholan admitted slowly, “I can take control over whatever propulsions systems they have left. At this distance, it wouldn’t take much to push them into that rift. But I would need to be broadcasting from the center of the Fleet.”

His holographic image stroked the blurred outline of his cheek, considering. “But it would need to be a
clear
signal. I don’t know that we could punch through the interference generated by the ships themselves or by that rift.”

“We can position a ship in the midst of the Fleet,” the Colonizer commander growled, rubbing his own chin in echo of Tholan’s gesture. “This would not be a problem. We could clear a path.”

“It will be us,” Beka said shortly. “You’ll piggy-back your carrier wave through the
Clerke Maxwell
.”

“Fine,” said Tholan. “What about the interference?”

“An EM pulse,” she said. It was a half-guess, but it should work. “A strong enough pulse should punch through the interference, long enough for the carrier wave to propagate through the Fleet. You’ll only have clear signal for a few moments, but it should be enough to send a command directing the ships.”

“There’s nothing on board our ship though,” Jens pointed out, “to generate a strong enough pulse.”

A memory surfaced in Beka’s mind: Davis’s outstretched arm, writhing Synthetics, and an explosion of green flame.

“You’re wrong. We do have something. And I think he just woke up.”

D
avis appeared
as Beka recalled him, wearing the same expression of mingled disdain and distaste, though now it was colored with a certain hesitation and fear as well. He stood beside the res-pod as Donovan took him through his paces, making sure he had full use of all his regenerated muscles, when Beka approached them.

“I’m delighted to see that you are unarmed, Grale,” he muttered in greeting.

“The thing in your arm,” she snapped, unwilling to be baited. “How strong is it?”

He stared at her.

“We need your help,” she began and launched into a brief description of their situation and the plan to regain control of the Fleet. Davis’s face remained expressionless, but Donovan watched with interest.

When she finished, Davis was silent, stroking the deep furrows of scars running up and down the forearm that sheltered the device – the forearm Beka’s shot had reduced to charred flesh and shattered bone.

Beka waited for a response, knowing she was asking a great deal from someone who had just regained consciousness, had little grasp of the actual situation, and seemed to have a predisposition to hate everyone else, especially Synthetics.

In the end, it was Eleanor who answered for him.

“He’ll do it,” she said.

Davis scowled and cursed with a strained elegance that impressed even Donovan.

“Why?” Beka asked, glancing between the two of them.

“Because it is who he is,” she said. “He has taken an oath to protect humanity. All his exterior bitterness, all of the hate he radiates, is only the passion of a true zealot. He will protect his species. It is in his programming.” Eleanor’s lips curled at the last word.

“Is she telling the truth, Davis?”

“Grale,” he began with evident annoyance, and then stopped. He flexed his arm and glanced at Eleanor. “I hate being surrounded by idiots,” he began again. “And I hate the fact that you’ve let that viper live and no one seems to realize how stupid a decision it was. I told you before, you picked the wrong side. But if Tholan judges this new threat accurately, the Synthetic wench is right.”

Beka felt the color rise to her cheeks. Davis held up his hands.

“You’re going to argue with me about its humanity,” he began. “Save your breath. That’s exactly my point. It’s programmed to elicit that response, and that’s why it’s so dangerous.”

He flexed his arm again. “But none of that means it is incorrect now. I have indeed taken an oath, and I will protect my species, even in the face of the idiocy of particular members of it.”

He shrugged. “I thought I was coming here to kill Colonizer Synthetics. I assumed they had decimated our Fleet. But if that’s not the case, I can adapt.”

“Good.” Beka kept her voice level by force of will. “So it can generate the needed amount of energy?”

“Of course not,” Davis snapped. “Not enough to punch through a fleet’s worth of interference. I’ll need to link up to an external energy source.”

“The
Clerke Maxwell
’s core?”

Davis shook his head. “Wrong again. If I detonated it on board, it would leave this ship dead in the water. Too much energy. You couldn’t broadcast Tholan’s signal. I’ll need to be overboard. One of the Fleet ships should suffice.” He smiled bitterly. “Add that wrinkle to your plan.”

“So we push back into the Fleet,” Beka said, ticking off steps. “We transfer you to one of the wrecks. You find a power supply, send the EM pulse, and then Tholan sends his signal, which we piggy-back to the Fleet.”

“Not too complicated.” Davis’s tone was sardonic. “Though, from what I understand, you can’t get close to any of those ships without going mad. Might make the transfer difficult.”

“We’ll do an EV-pass to one of the ships,” Eleanor said.

Beka turned back to her. “We?”

Eleanor nodded. “I’m going with him.”

“But it will kill you,” Beka said. She felt color rise to her cheeks again, this time from a choking anger. “If he detonates that thing again and you’re with him, you’ll be dead.”
I already saved you once
, she added to herself.
Don’t make it have been for nothing.

“It will kill him too,” Eleanor said softly.

Davis grimaced but nodded slowly. “Almost certainly, yes. With that amount of discharge.”

He barked the familiar, harsh laugh Beka had heard so many times in the shipyard. “How do you like that, Grale? You save your lovely Synthetic so it can sacrifice itself alongside its murderer?”

Beka spun away from them both. She was embarrassed by the hot rush of tears to her eyes. Did she love Eleanor? If Davis was right, there was never anything there to love. But she had been a friend, and she had lost so many already – Tsai-Lui, Aggiz, Paul.

She thought she had saved Eleanor.

Beka felt a hand on her shoulder and turned to find Eleanor beside her. She let herself be held for a moment and buried her face against Eleanor’s neck as though she was a child. Eleanor’s skin was soft, and Beka clearly felt the beating of her pulse in her neck, soft and furtive as a bird.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“You don’t have to,” Eleanor whispered. “Whatever else Davis says, I have a choice.”

Davis groaned audibly. “It’s playing you, Beka. It knows the buttons to push to get what it wants. It knew you were the member of the team to connect with, to gain confidence. Just like it did with Tholan.”

“Shut up, Davis,” Donovan growled.

Beka wiped her face, kissed Eleanor’s jaw, and moved away. “You’re wrong, Davis. What does she hope to gain from self-sacrifice?”

“Seeing me die,” he answered, grinning like a fox.

Beka shook her head and gathered herself. When she spoke again her voice was steady. “Get yourselves ready. We’re about to head back into the midst of the Fleet. Donovan, we’ll need a final pain treatment for Davis. The rest of us should be fine.” She shuddered. “The Colonizer stone-ships think they can clear a wide enough path to avoid the worst of the influence.”