by Stephen Case
First Fleet #1-4
The Complete Saga
Stephen Case
Contents
Copyright
The Rewind Files
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Dedication
First Fleet Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
First Fleet Part II
Prologue
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
First Fleet Part III
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
First Fleet Part IV
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Epilogue
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About the Author
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The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright (c) 2015 Stephen Case
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
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When a bookish junior agent at the U.S. Time Travel Bureau stumbles across a massive conspiracy with roots in 1972’s Watergate, she is forced into her first-ever field assignment - to expose the conspirators and avert World War III.
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This is for Christine, for all the wrong reasons.
First Fleet Part I
Bones
One
Our job was putting together the bodies they sent us back from the Limb. It rarely involved more than watching and monitoring the corpses in their res-pods: adjusting the nutrient matrix a bit here, tweaking a bone or a muscle graft there. For the most part, we were left to our own devices on the medical frigates.
The Mountstuart Elphinstone was a standard ship with a crew of around fifty, half of us medical staff, though the vessel was large enough that I sometimes passed an entire shift without seeing anyone else. I had worked in several hospitals back in System before deployment. It was a graveyard shift with only a skeleton crew in a hospital where it was always night. We were tethered to a cluster of singularities far from the front with the other support vessels, so it was unlikely we would see any action ourselves. The only things to see were the winking lights of the fleet outside the portholes and the growing, sleeping forms of the regenerating dead encased within their long rows of glass and steel cocoons.
Few officers visited the frigates, though they would sometimes inquire about the status of specific soldiers. When they did, I would translate tissue growth rates into the number of days or weeks remaining until the soldier awakened.
“The cluster of pods we received from the battle over Aleph? Most of those soldiers will be ready for a memory dump and re-briefing in three days. You should have them back on the line by the end of the week.”
And so on.
In my mind, the war was fought by faceless men and women in large armored suits. When the suits were destroyed and the flesh within burned or broken or shattered, the cockpits became res-pods (“rescue, resuscitation, and resurrection”), ejected, and found their way back here. And then the regeneration units would stitch them back together so they could go fight again.
It always surprised me when officers came in person to see about a specific regeneration. Usually they simply inquired by message. We’d been told that officers couldn’t spare the time for a shuttle-flight back from the front.
“Ensign Jens Grale.”
The tall, dour-looking man wore the uniform of a pilot, which meant he commanded a whole wing of suits. I didn’t look closely enough to see whether his insignia designated air or ground assault. I consulted the display before me.
“She’s in C-47,” I read. “Regeneration only twenty-four percent complete.”
“Can I see her?”
I glanced up at him again. It was hard to read expressions in the dim light of the medical bay.
“We usually recommend against it. The deceased don’t develop skin until the final stages of the process. Most find the sight of a regenerating—”
“I’d like to see her.”
I shrugged. He had the appropriate clearances. “Follow me.”
The medical bay was large and divided by long rows of res-pods. There were dozens of such bays on the Elphinstone, each with the capacity for perhaps four hundred units. Bodies were suspended in the pods horizontally, so those near the end of the process seemed to simply sleep under a canopy of glass.
The form in C-47, however, was nowhere near that stage. In her res-pod there was only a hint of bones and tissue drifting in the nutrient fluid with groupings of bud-like organs still too small to identify.
I heard the man’s intake of breath behind me.
“Will she remember?” he asked after a moment.
“The deceased have no memory of their time regenerating.” I wasn’t sure if that was what he meant. “She’ll remember everything up to her last memory scan. We get the files sent over from Command, and we re-structure them into the patient’s cortex just before we revive.”
“Memory scan,” the man mused, aloud.
I nodded. “The ones you usually do before each mission.”
“So she won’t remember …”
“Dying? No.” He was staring at the form with an ambivalent expression somewhere between pain and wonder.
“How did it happen?”
“We were over one of the Colonizer worlds, well outside of atmo. You’d have thought,” he said absently, “our Mother would have seen a whole wing
on her screens, but they came out of nowhere and cut through the entire van before we had formed up. She held off an entire squadron of Colonizers for the minutes it took us to pull back.” His voice grew in strength. “I wouldn’t have made it back if it wasn’t for her. I saw her suit go up, and I thought, ‘Oh God, there’s not going to be enough; they won’t be able to get her back.’”
I checked the display on her unit, and feeling oddly relieved, said, “There was plenty of residual material. Usually we obtain a successful regeneration with as few as half a dozen sound cells.”
He blinked. “I appreciate you letting me see her.”
When he was gone I went back down the rows, checking and rechecking the monitors of various active pods. Some, like hers, contained only rumors of flesh and bone, tendrils of tendon and congealed blood. Others near the end of regeneration slept fitfully. Muscles twitched under naked skin as they were slowly reconditioned.
Two
“You have a soldier we’re looking for here,” said someone.
I glanced up from checking the levels on a unit that had consistently been reading low. There were more navy men. The tall man from the day before was not among them.
“I’m sorry?”
“An ensign.” The man in the center checked a digital readout he held. “Jen Grales.”
“Ah. Yes, sir.” I had to check my own display again. “C-47.”
He handed me the readout. “This is an order to discontinue regeneration until further notice.”
I took it without looking at it. “May I ask why?”
“Command jurisdiction.”
One of the other men leaned forward and muttered something, and the first nodded. “May we see Ensign Grales?”
I walked them to her pod.
“Will it kill her, stopping the regeneration?” one asked.
“She’s already dead.” When I saw that wasn’t the answer they were looking for, I shook my head. “Removing the growth catalysts won’t destroy what’s already re-formed, but it will retard the re-growth until the order comes to resume.”
The men were staring through the glass at the form beneath.
“Has there been anything unusual in the process?” another asked.
I looked down at the unit. “Right now there are almost two hundred deceased in this bay alone. The regeneration process is controlled largely automatically.” I touched a few buttons on the pod’s display. “Everything seems to be in order with this one.”
They thanked me and left, conferring among themselves.
When they were gone I stared down again at the form inside. Her heart had begun to pulsate, and crimson threads were pushing into still-translucent extremities. I hovered uncertainly and then made the adjustments to suspend regeneration.
Three
“Did you hear what they’re finding on the campaign worlds?” Donovan said, taking a seat across from me in the mess. He wore the brash grin he usually did when he was looking for an argument. Most of the other tables were empty.
I shook my head. We were as tightly linked with the feeds as any other ship, and news usually traveled fast.
“Ruins,” he told us. “There are ruins on those planets.”
“Colonizer ruins?”
“The Colonizers are saying they don’t know anything about them. These worlds weren’t even in the first wave of colonization anyway. And the eggheads they’ve sent down with the troops are saying they’re old as anything they’ve ever seen.”
I cleared my throat. “How old is that?”
The grin became a frown. “Don’t you see? They haven’t released a lot of images, but from what I’ve seen they’re sure as hell not natural. Twisted. Weird angles. Something out of a bad dream. But definitely artificial.” He barked a laugh. “We find the first irrefutable signs of alien intelligence right here in the middle of a war.”
Tsun-Chan had joined us and spoke at my elbow. “I saw them too. Carbon dating won’t work, because there’s nothing organic down there predating the Colonizers.” This was her first deployment. Her eyes had the hollow look of someone still getting used to always seeing night outside the windows. “Uranium-lead dating, though, puts estimates on the order of billions.”
“Four or five billion years old!” Donovan bellowed, waving his fork over his tray. “There was something out here building on these planets before Earth had even fired up its own plate tectonics. It’s like the Mariana Trench,” he muttered, suddenly sedate. “We blunder on out here, and we find something like this and realize we have no idea how deep things really are. How old. How big. Billions of years. Just sitting here. These planets don’t even have suns anymore.”
Soon the images were on all the feeds. I saw what he was talking about. The campaign worlds were honeycombed with caverns and chambers and within them—laced up and down the walls and even hanging impossibly from the rocky ceilings themselves—immense ruined cities. The size of the cities was only magnified by the expanse of the caverns themselves, gulfs that opened into carved abysses large enough to swallow an entire troop transport.
“They’ll quarantine them,” Tsun-Chan said a few days later when our paths crossed again between shifts. “Folks back in System aren’t going to like it if we wipe out the first proof of ETI in the process of bringing the Colonizers in line.”
Donovan shook his head.
“Those res-pods we’re getting in right now? They’re coming from one of those worlds. They’re saying the Colonizers have dug into the cities like warrens. Whatever alien architecture is out there, you can bet it’s going to get smashed to hell if they’re hiding inside it.”
“It seems a shame, them lasting so long,” Tsun-Chan said, “and us just kicking them over like anthills now.”
But no one was kicking over anthills. From what we could tell from the information released, the ruins were huge. Their images filled me with a sense of dread. I had nightmares of wandering through them, lost in the half-light of those dead planets. The angles of the stones didn’t sit right in the eye or mind. Their roots ran deep, and if the Colonizers had dug into them, it was going to be hell pulling them out.
Four
“Is Ensign Grale still here?”
It was the tall man again. He seemed slightly breathless as he leaned over my console and squinted at the readouts. Did he think she would have already been discharged, or had he heard that her regeneration was suspended?
“She’s here,” I said.
“Can I see her?”
I nodded. It was unusual but not unheard of for someone to make repeated visits to the regeneration units. I wondered about him, though. He was a pilot, which meant that even if he were stationed on another ship in the fleet he would be able to come to the Elphinstone regularly. And he obviously had clearance to do so, or he wouldn’t be here now.
But something about him bothered me besides the unusual interest he was showing in this particular regeneration. His eyes had a clouded, distant look I had occasionally seen in patients suffering from post-traumatic stress. His face was strained.
His brow furrowed when he saw her.
“Shouldn’t she—is she healing correctly? I mean, shouldn’t she be making …”
“Better progress? The regeneration units are a tricky business,” I explained truthfully, trying to sidestep his question. “Often it takes quite a while to determine the correct cellular patterns for optimal growth.”
He nodded absently, his grey eyes scanning her form. I followed his gaze.
Odd.
I had indeed cycled down the growth catalysts in the pod when I received the order to halt. That had been a couple days ago now. Yet there were clear signs of further development. What had been gauzy wisps of tissue yesterday had firmed into ribbons of ligament. Threads marking the questing ends of regenerating veins and arteries quivered in the circulating fluids and seemed to extend even as I watched.
The man stared hungrily.
“She was important to you?” I asked, prim
arily to cover my own sudden interest in the form under the glass.
“She saved my life down there,” he said distractedly. “Our wing had gone pretty far into one of the caverns. I thought I’d be buried when the Colonizers brought the rocks down, but she burned her way through and held them off long enough for us all to get out.”
“Buried? I thought you said her suit was destroyed in space.”
He tore his gaze from the pod and focused on me with some effort, as though he had forgotten I was there. “No, we were in the tunnels.”
A low warning klaxon sounded, indicating another cluster of res-pods had been received and was enroute from the adjoining docking bay. I hurried off to see to them, and when I returned the man was still there, leaning over the glass.
He seemed not to hear me when I told him he needed to leave.
“She sleeps,” he whispered, “for so long. She sleeps so deep.”
Below, the half-formed flesh hung suspended.
Five
“Have you ever had a regeneration go wrong?”
Donovan looked up from the screen in his cramped bunk. “What?”
“A regeneration.” I stepped through the doorway. “Have you ever had one go wrong?”
“What kind of first-year question is that? Of course I’ve had them go wrong. Not enough cellular material left, or the units don’t get the patterns matched in time to sustain. Lots of flatlines.” He paused. “Oh God, don’t tell me you’re all the way out here and you’ve never lost one before?”