First Fleet #1-4: The Complete Saga (5 page)

Her hands were on her cheeks, fingers cradling her long face as she leaned forward. She used to talk like this when they first met. Though back then it was stuff like politics and conscientious objecting, plans for a little mining or agro operation of their own where she would have time to putter and he would have time to paint, maybe they’d even have kids. She had never talked about the action she had seen. It was always pushed in the background, a dark shape never quite outlined.

“It happened to me, Paul. Mortar fire. Likely a mag-rail by the trajectory. I don’t remember it, of course.” She laughed hollowly. “I was dead. I didn’t wake up until I was in the pod and they dumped my memories from before the mission.”

“The Contract.”

“The Contract.” Cam echoed. “The guarantee that keeps the recruits coming.”

“What did it feel like?”

She flexed her fingers. It was silence in the next room.

“Like waking up after a long nap. You know that something’s happened, because the last thing you remember is lying back in the pod. Maybe you’re sore because you sprained your shoulder in the gym or you’ve got an itch from a bad whore in the last port. You get that sense of déjà vu when they scan your memories. And then suddenly you’re in the pod again, but you feel like a newborn. Clean. Your legs don’t quite remember how to walk. But everything that happened after you were scanned, all the details of the deployment in which you were killed, you have to learn about from debriefing. Because you don’t remember any of it.”

Paul swore softly.

“But your friends do.” Cam straightened up and pushed her short, straight hair from her forehead. “Those that made it back in one piece. They saw your suit go up in flames. Maybe they were close enough to see what actually happened to you inside it. And when they look at you, their eyes are haunted.” She paused. “I was a pair of legs, Twalish. Everything from the thighs up was gone or burned to black paste. They regrew me from my fucking legs.”

“So you’re . . .” Paul trailed off, staring at her. He knew her. He knew her intimately, yet he had never known that. “You’re not—” He swallowed. “You’re not the original Cam Dowager?”

The laugh came again, this time dry and sharp. “I have her body and her memories, Paul. And some of her original legs too. I feel like me. I was only ever regenerated once. Some of the guys in my unit had been through those pods three or four times.”

“Why not just bank soldiers’ cells before each mission?”

“Two words:
Luke Howard
.”

Paul stared at her blankly.

“Jesus, Paul, didn’t you ever watch the newsfeeds as a kid? What were you doing growing up, anyway?”

“Probably drawing pictures. Who’s Luke Howard?”

“It was a ship. The
Luke Howard
. One of the first forge-ships that ripped open those tunnels in space we call light lines. It went missing. But it had gone out just when regeneration technology was being perfected, and the cells of its crew were all banked back in System.”

Paul nodded.

“Seven years passed. The ship was declared lost, the crew deceased. Their families had been pressuring for their regeneration for years, and the military finally consented. But then the
Howard
showed up again.”

“And the crew had been—”

Cam nodded. “Replaced. Imagine- twenty-five soldiers and scientists coming home to find out that they were already there. Their own bodies, their own memories, living with the families they had left behind.” Cam shuddered. “It’s the one thing a soldier fears more than not being regenerated—being replaced. It’s why the Contract forbids cloning, why regeneration can only take place with post-mortem material.”

“And the thing upstairs . . .” Paul trailed off as footsteps approached the doorway.

“We’re done with class,” said a small voice from behind.

The change on Cam’s features was instantaneous. “Okay, girls. Go help your dad get supper ready.” She smiled at them and motioned to the mechanism on the workbench. “I’m going to see if I can get this bit of scrap to do what it’s supposed to.”

The twins nodded solemnly, and Paul shooed them into the kitchen. There were vegetables from the hydroponics, which he cut while he had them set the table.

He asked them what they had done in class.

“Geometry,” Agnes said absently. “Perry couldn’t remember her triangles.”

“Neither can I.”

“Dad?” It was Perry.

“Yeah?”

“Do we have to stay here forever?”

He laughed. “God, I hope not.” Perry’s expression remained unchanged, so he sat down at the table across from her. “No, we don’t have to stay on Onaway forever. When we’re done here, another crew will come live in the habitation, and we’ll go back to Attica or New London. Maybe even System.”

“What will we do then?”

“You girls will go to any university you want. That’s why we’re here. If your mom and I both do a full terraforming service term, your education is going to be completely funded.”

There were solemn nods again.

Cam came in soon after, and they ate in silence. After the twins were put to bed, Paul checked the nightly status from Station.

“Odd. The solar array surplus is down to positive fifty percent.”

“It’s the pod,” Cam said slowly. She was seated at a monitor, checking the day’s output levels from the rock-burner exhausts. “You said it had integrated itself with Station’s power supply.”

“I assumed it was programmed to do that. It’s obviously preserving the body.”

“Not anymore.” When Paul didn’t answer, Cam continued, her face framed by the growing darkness as Onaway’s sun set beyond the windows. “If there’s sufficient power, the res-pod will resume its normal operations.”

Darkness came quickly on a planet with almost no atmosphere. It was as though someone outside had flipped a switch. Cam’s face remained luminous in the pale glow from her screen.

“The body in the attic,” she explained. “It’s not going to stay dead.”

P
erry and Agnes
slept beside each other under a steel and glass canopy on an empty world below the stars. They dreamed beside each other as well. However, they did not dream separate dreams in separate minds. They dreamed in tandem.

And lately they had been dreaming before an audience.

Agnes and Perry were slowly learning, from their independent research and from the troubled expressions that their comments elicited from their parents. These expressions occurred because other people did not dream the way the twins did. From what they could tell, other people sometimes dreamed of being alone. Other people were at times terrified in dreams, and often the terror was of this very loneliness. But dreams were like colors. It was hard to say how another person saw them. And it was impossible to say how another person perceived the world while asleep. Nonetheless, the twins were beginning to learn that they seemed to perceive shades others did not.

They never dreamed alone. They always dreamed together.

At first, it was simply the two of them. There was nothing strange in this. It had always been this way. They would talk about things that they had experienced while asleep in the same concrete manner that they would discuss events of the day. Wherever they were in their dreams, they were always together. They interacted with their parents or their teachers or strangers in dreams. Yet it seemed that their parents, for example, had no knowledge of these exchanges when they came in for breakfast in the morning.

Perry and Agnes had eventually realized that when they dreamed of their mother or father, they were not actually there. They were simply images, stitched together of memories and imagination. They were not actually
in
the dream in the same way that Perry and Agnes co-inhabited the dreaming.

Slowly though, very slowly, others began to join them. It was almost gradual enough that the twins did not notice. But there were silent watchers in the dreams, and they multiplied. They never spoke, but they were always there.

Perry and Agnes dreamed in front of a crowd.

The strangers were crowding closer. Over the past few nights, the twins had woken with the memory of forms outside the walls of the habitation. They stood in the rain- a rain which was impossible on this naked planet. Their features couldn’t be seen, but their presence was clearly defined. They waited beyond the habitation walls like ghosts.

Agnes and Perry were not afraid. They had each other. They woke each morning to a quiet, empty world. But they were curious. They went to sleep at night wondering what was ahead. They waited for the message they felt was on its way.

T
he morning
after her meeting with Admiral Tholan, Beka sat in the mess with a hundred or so soldiers and ate a pale yellow egg-substance pathetically enlivened with bits of red and green. Some of the soldiers were no doubt technicians, Beka mused. Some must be overseeing the construction of the ships below. There might even be other entanglement experts, constructing the Brick for each new ship and locking it into resonance so it mirrored the information in every other Brick scattered throughout the fleets. Some might even be members of the team she was supposed to meet at “oh-nine-hundred” in a lab near the shipyard’s core.

She finished her eggs and left without speaking to anyone.

There was what felt like miles of corridors to walk to the lab Tholan had described. She would have been hopelessly lost in the shipyard’s branching grey corridors were it not for the information badge she carried, which emitted a faint, dissonant tone when she turned the wrong direction at any intersection. Presently she came to a wide hatch with two uniformed guards positioned in front of it.

Someone was screaming. The sound grew louder as she approached.

The guards checked her badge and moved aside to let her through.

“The screaming,” she said, pausing. “Shouldn’t you check on that?”

The first guard remained impassive. The second coughed apologetically. “We’re not cleared to go inside, ma’am. And to be honest,” he paused. “We hear that a lot.”

She took a deep breath and stepped through the doorway, bracing herself for what she’d find beyond.

Beka had only a moment to take in the surroundings: a wide laboratory bay with low walls partitioning it off into smaller sections. Above and beyond them, in the bay’s center, sat a Brick and its concomitant banks of conduits and coolant systems. In the nearest booth, two men were bent over a low table on which a naked man lay strapped.

This was the source of the screaming. Blood frothed all over the man’s mouth.

“Davis, he’s bit his tongue! Get him sedated!”

“He’s already sedated!”

One of the men pressed something to the neck of the writhing figure on the table. The screaming continued. Warning chimes sounded on some nearby monitors.

“He’s slipping! We’re losing him!”

Beka moved to help. She tried to imagine what Jens would do in this situation. CPR? Both of the men had stepped backward when Beka moved past them. Neither of them looked as though they were going to attempt resuscitating the unmoving body.

“It’s a meat sack, you idiot!” one of the men yelled as he caught her by the arm. “A blank!”

“Not a person.” The second man’s voice was softer. “It’s just a body rejecting a mind.”

She watched helplessly as the body had one last spasm and then was completely still.

“You must be our entanglement expert.” The first man released her arm. He wore a soiled white lab coat and blue gloves and had a face that reminded Beka of nothing more than that of an angry fox, long and pinched. “It’s about time.”

“He’s Davis Germaine, our project manager, as it were,” the second man told Beka, gesturing toward the first apologetically and extending his own ungloved hand. His eyes were tired, and he seemed old enough to be the other man’s father, but his handshake was firm. “I’m John Tsai-Liu.”

“Beka Grales.” She shook his hand slowly.

Davis clicked his tongue with impatience. “Didn’t realize it would be this messy?”

“I didn’t realize you’d have bodies.”

“We don’t have the right bodies,” he barked.

Beka stared at the form on the table. It was a human male, perhaps in his early twenties. The face was twisted into a grimace of pain, but other than that the body looked healthy and without signs of trauma. “You called this a meat sack, a blank. But cloning is…”

“Illegal?” Davis snorted. “I don’t think that’s much of a problem here.”

“They were more likely grown as test subjects or organ donors,” Tsai-Lui said quietly. “We don’t ask.”

Davis saw Beka’s expression and rolled his eyes. “Look, the entire First Fleet is lost. There are no bodies to dump memories into. Maybe they’re dead. Maybe they’re floating cold in space. We need a way to find out.”

“We’re not killing them,” the other man said. The lines about his eyes bespoke his own doubts on the issue. “They never had minds to begin with.”

Beka took a deep breath. Her own specialty extended no further than the information encoded inside the Brick and mapping that information onto the Brick’s vibrating particles and condensates. “But the memories you pulled out of the Brick to dump. . .”

“Are gone now.” Tsai-Liu nodded gravely. “Irretrievably. We just tried to put the mind of one Ensign Karl Mizadi into that body, and now it’s lost. It’s not like a computer with infinite offloads. The copying is always a one-to-one transfer off the Brick, and then it’s gone forever, whether it succeeds or not .”

Davis took her by the arm again. His right hand flashed out, almost snakelike, and closed on her arm like a vice. He steered her toward the interior of the bay.

The Brick, draped in conduits and wiring, rose up over the low partitions like a black monolith. The Brick itself was rectangular, roughly two by two by three meters, oriented horizontally. Naked, it would have indeed looked very much like a huge, absolutely black brick suspended in a harness in the center of the broad laboratory bay. Its auxiliary systems extended another meter or so in each direction. These secondary systems consisted of snaking tubes of coolant and webs of fiber-optics, as well as the processors for encoding and decoding the information into the condensates within the Brick.

Tsai-Liu followed them. Beka saw more tables with other bodies in the bay. They passed a few as they neared the Brick. “Ensign Mizadi is gone now,” Tsai-Lui was saying, “Erased from the Brick.” He whispered it like a man giving a confession.

“The real Mizadi might still be out there,” Beka offered softly. She wasn’t ready to relegate her sister permanently to the past tense. “We don’t know what happened to the First Fleet yet.”

“Rotting in a Colonizer prison?” Davis snorted. “Marooned off the light lines? It’s been five months. The First Fleet is gone.”

“Along with whatever information Mizadi might have had about where it went,” Tsai-Lui added.

“There are still nearly fifteen thousand more ghosts to tap,” said Davis.

“Do you have that many bodies?” Beka asked mildly.

Davis scowled and didn’t answer.

They had arrived at a bank of screens at the base of the Brick.

“This is where you’ll be working.” Davis pointed. “Aggiz, meet your new detangler.”

Aggiz, a startlingly young man wearing in an ill-fitting lab coat, rose from where he had been hunched over on a monitor. He stood awkwardly, hands in his pockets, and nodded at Beka.

“Aggiz is our neuro-specialist,” Tsai-Liu explained. “We’ve obviously been able to isolate the portion of the Brick’s condensate that correlates with the memories of the crews and soldiers from the First Fleet. And of course the system can download the memories of any individual we specify.”

“Any Brick can do that.” Davis was still scowling. Beka started to feel that it was probably his default expression.

“But we want more specificity... to be more specific,” Aggiz put in. His words came out stammered and uneven, like they were working their way from his brain out of sequence and misfiring through his mouth. “We want the complete memories, the complete consciousness, of an individual. We can’t - we haven’t been able to successfully download that much.”

“You can’t put someone’s mind in someone else’s body.”

“Right.” Aggiz nodded with vigor. “Mind over matter. It turns out—we knew it would—that matter is just as important, equally important, as mind. As the information. How do you map memories, based on physical—on real—neural pathways, and then force that onto a completely different terrain, onto a new map? You heard the screams.” He grimaced. “They always scream.”

“But we don’t need the whole personality, do we?” Davis held his fingers up like a pair of tweezers. “Just the memories. We just need to know what happened to the fleet. And now,
finally
, Tholan has brought us an entanglement expert.”

Beka stared at him. “You think I can dig into the Brick and parse down to specific sub-sets of someone’s stored personality? You want to splice out memories, dump
pieces
of a mind instead of a whole one into one of your bodies?”

Davis’s barked laugh came again. “She’s quick, folks.”

Beka’s mind raced. After her conversation with Tholan, she had assumed that she would be working on extracting information from the Brick. That was her specialty. Entanglement experts translated information into the dance of particles and waves inside the Bricks; creating the codes for putting it there and bringing it back into the regenerated soldiers’ brains.

“But that’s mental vivisection,” she said. “You would be pulling someone’s mind apart. Even assuming it could be done.”

“That’s where you come in. Detanglement at its finest level- make those entwined particles pirouette.” Davis leveled a finger at her and then turned it into an expansive and somehow dismissive wave across the bay. “But we’ve got some other ideas. This is just one avenue.” He spun on his heel and walked away.

“Who the hell is he?” Beka asked, staring furiously at his departing form.

Tsai-Liu shrugged. “I haven’t figured out his tie to the Fleet yet, but finding it seems to be all he cares about. All his—ah—
shortness
is an expression of that intensity. Tholan picked him first for the project.”

“So we’re it?” Beka stared around the cavernous lab bay. “This is the military’s plan to find their missing fleet? Just the four of us?”

Aggiz coughed at her elbow and Tsai-Liu smiled. “Davis says that we’d be pretty naive to believe that they didn’t have their own teams working at half a dozen Bricks on other ships. But we’re an entirely civilian team. That means we work largely to decrease liability. If the public finds out what’s happening here- what the military is willing to do to get at these memories- we’re the ones who take the fall.”

Beka thought of other teams on other ships pulling personalities out of the Brick and forcing them into foreign minds. She shuddered. How many ghosts from the Fleet had already been lost? What if they had already pulled Jens out, mentally kicking and screaming, to dump her into the alien territory of a stranger’s mind? The bulkheads seemed to sway beneath her feet.

B
eka dreamed
of her sister that night. She had often dreamed of her during Jens’s deployments. Beka had never understood Jens’s drive, her desire to enter the academy, or her climb through tactical and transport corps to active deployment. When Jens was away for years at a time besides the rare holidays or shore leave, Beka had a huge variety of nightmares: Jens asphyxiating in a broken ship, shattered hull plates all around grinning like jagged teeth; Jens burning in the atmosphere over a Colonizer world; Jens adrift in darkness like an orphaned cloud; Jens writhing in pain in a suit buried under rubble or melting in a hail of enemy fire; Jens all alone, injured and afraid, waiting for her.

Tonight was different.

Beka dreamed she was at sea, in a boat so small that parts of her body were always hanging precariously over the edge. Below, the water was a complete black, but she saw things swimming in the depths. Some of them came very close to her boat. They trailed through the water like ghosts, and Beka realized with a start that they were exactly that. She was not on an ocean, but on the surface of a vast quantum-tethered Brick. She knew that below her, down in the vast coldness where the black of the water bled away to empty sparks of stars, her sister was waiting. If she could find her, if she could call her, Beka could bring her back.

No one died in space, not really.

A wind picked up, and her boat swayed dangerously.

Something was rising from beneath the water. Someone had seen her, had seen her boat crossing the roof of its watery sky. Someone knew she was here. For a flashing moment, Beka felt a surge of hope. Jens was coming home. A shape broke out of the surface. It was something white, with tresses of tangled hair that fell down around it like smoke, writhing in agony. There was a face, wailing terribly. Even as it broke the surface it was falling apart, dissolving into flecks of silver and bone that shivered and separated as Beka watched until there was nothing but a thin phosphorescent sheen on the black water that mirrored the stars above.

This is a nightmare, Beka thought. I need to wake up now. Right now.

Then it was over, and the sea was still again.

T
ime passed in the shipyard
. The shipyard had a name, after a dead general or someone like that. Beka hadn’t bothered to learn it. The group in the lab had their own separate, tiny commissary, and Beka began taking her meals there with the others. This evening they were joined by a fifth member of their party, a woman who was introduced to her simply as Eleanor, special attaché to the admiral. She was, Beka guessed, perhaps in her fifties, with striking features and thick, dark hair she wore loose.

“She’s here to pick our brains, check our status and report back to Tholan,” Davis sneered.

Tholan had explained to Beka that each member of the small team had a personal link to the missing ships and some expertise that explained why they were there. Tsai-Liu, for example, had been one of the pioneers in the interface aspect of regeneration technology—the conduits that transferred memories from the body to the Brick. He came out of retirement when the Fleet went missing.

“My son was captain of the
Biddell Airy
,” he told Beka as they sat to eat, sad but clearly proud.

The commissary was much smaller than the soldiers’ mess where Beka had eaten her meals when she first came to the shipyard. It was buried down in between the lab and some of the engineering modules that made up the lower levels of the shipyard. There were no windows and the only furniture was a single, long table.