by Stephen Case
The terminal made contact, and his eyes glazed with the brief but overpowering sense of déjà vu that a memory scan effects. The nearest blunt object was a canister of flame retardant. Before his eyes cleared I brought it down with all the strength I could. I was not strong, but I was a doctor and I knew where to strike. He struggled. It took longer than I would have liked. When he was finally still, my arms ached and her voice was hissing even louder in the back of my head.
My plan would not work with a live body. The pods weren’t lifeboats.
They were tombs.
I pulled Donovan’s body along the long row of sleeping soldiers, some barely more than pulsating bundles of nerves and tendons. This was a charnel ship. This had always been a charnel ship.
The voices in the corridor were louder, and there were screams as well.
At the end of the row, I found an empty pod and put what was left of Donovan inside. I set it for stasis and watched the nutrient bath flood up around his broken form. There was a code to enter that would reverse the evacuation process, push the pod back into the space-side bay and launch it. With any luck it would find its way to another frigate away from the fleet.
I stared at the keypad, trying to recall what I was doing.
The screams outside continued, but now there was singing as well.
Donovan had seen her. Wherever his body was resurrected, his memory would find its way, and he would be able to warn others.
I pressed the buttons, and the pod slid away.
Behind me, the door to the corridor opened, and I heard her clearly. It was cold and piercing, like starlight.
First Fleet Part II
Wake
Prologue
There are graveyards in space. Some say that all of space is itself a graveyard, that the dark between the planets is simply the dark of the tomb. It is, after all, where the stars and the worlds go to die. It holds them all in darkness.
The darkness of space is an endless tomb where the dead are never still. A graveyard on a world holds bodies locked in the embrace of soil and gravity. They do not stir. They do not move. They sleep the quiet and inexorable sleep of decay.
In space, the dead wander. Torn ships leak debris and detritus like gauzy filaments. They are ghosts, wandering along listless trajectories. Even the bodies within them drift. And the bodies without, the bodies scattered beyond the metal wrecks, each take a different course determined by their particular momentum when hulls were breached, when suits or ships were ruptured.
War has always been a comrade to death. Fallen soldiers lay wasted on shorelines, buried in mass graves, or at the bottom of dark seas. War in space, however, scatters its dead in an eternal dissipation, a random retreat along a thousand black and trackless pathways. Ships and bodies slip away, a broken army fleeing into the darkness, each picking its silent way, alone.
*
Far from System, far from the Reservation Worlds, far from all habitable planets, amidst the drifting refuse of a battle lost there was a single point of purposeful motion - a sleeper. Alone he was carried, directly and resolutely, on a straight pathway back through the expanding cloud of the dead. The glass and steel cocoon in which he was encased pulled away from a single dark vessel and launched itself out into the night.
He was not a survivor. There were no survivors. He was dead.
At the graveyard’s edge, the sleeper’s pod reached a light line terminus and, in a nearly instantaneous flash, disappeared within the light line, disregarding the laws of relativity to slip through space. The sleeper did not choose his path. He glided down the lines randomly, a broken twig in the currents and eddies of a stream in which time and space go awry. Presently he reemerged, in a region of space that was not scattered with the dead.
The sleeper’s pod needed power. It had exited the light line near a large and mostly empty world that held only a handful of energy signatures. The pod locked onto the nearest one and approached.
There was a station in very low orbit, apparently unmanned. The pod sent the appropriate signals: the imperative to render aid, to assist in upholding the Contract. The signal was binding on all civilians, biological or mechanical. The governing intelligence of the station opened an airlock accommodatingly. The sleeper’s cocoon entered, tethered itself, integrated with the station’s energy system and began its work, regenerating and repairing.
The sleeper slept. It was an absolute sleep. There would be no dreams.
How could there be? Theorists had argued about the possibility in the past, before ruling it out as impossible.
He was, after all, dead.
Nine
Beka Grale was tired. She was tired of the grey bulkheads and corridors of the shipyard, of taking her meals in a mess filled with flint-faced soldiers who would not speak to her, of the isolation and the confusion. She had been here for a week. But, apart from meals, she had been confined to her spare quarters with no explanation of why she had been summoned from System and no outside communication.
She was tired of this endless space.
There was nothing to see out here. The shipyard orbited the furious dot of a dwarf star of interest only for the metal-rich asteroid belts ringing it. The only sight out of any porthole was the iron ribs of ships being built and the robotic constructs swimming between them. The entire scene frosted like ice in the star’s white glare. Its light burned like an arc lamp. It didn’t matter how much she reduced the transparency of the porthole in her temporary quarters, the light of that angry star gave her a constant headache.
She considered asking again about messaging her parents. She had written a few just in case she ever had an opportunity to send one, mainly as an activity to keep herself busy. However, her letters always read like log entries. She couldn’t write like her sister - long, descriptive missives home from wherever Jens happened to be stationed. Beka’s mother would read them aloud to Beka and her father over and over. Jens could always capture the look and feel of a place and pour her teasing personality into the words as well. She knew how to connect with people. Beka only knew how to connect information. And right now she had very little.
She had almost convinced herself to write another letter nonetheless when a faint chime with a flash of static over the table signaled an incoming transmission. The torso of her superior back in System resolved from the dancing particles of noise.
“Eduardo, where the hell have you been?”
She was relieved to finally see a familiar face but angry as well. She had been pulled from her work at the Entanglement Center ostensibly with his permission, though he had never offered an explanation on what her assignment at the shipyard would be.
His image smiled apologetically, “They’re being pretty tight on whose transmissions they let into the shipyard. Apparently there could be Colonizer sympathizers anywhere.”
“So what am I doing here?”
“You know as much as I do. You’re there because they wanted an entanglement expert. You’re one of the best.”
Beka pushed her fingers backward through her short dark curls and swore, “It’s been a week and they haven’t told me a damned thing. They only let me out for meals, and none of the soldiers would speak to me. The only information I’ve been able to pick up is what I’ve overheard them talking about.”
“What are they talking about?”
“About the Colonizers, mainly. About the war. And about how quickly we’re going to win it.”
“Anything about the First Fleet?”
Her eyes narrowed. “No one here talks about that. And you shouldn’t either, especially not on an open channel.” She flopped down into a low chair beside the table and sighed. “And no, I don’t think there’s a chance in hell that they brought a junior entanglement expert all the way from System to help some admirals find their missing fleet. That’s a bit above my pay grade.”
“Maybe they’re just bored. All those lonely officers floating in their tin cans. Maybe they like smart women.”
“Screw you, Eduardo.”
He spread his hands. “You never would.”
“Is there a good reason I’m enduring this?”
“It’s—” His gaze dropped suddenly and he grimaced. “A stab at levity. I’m sorry. I’ve once again made a mess of personal communication.” He paused for a breath. “The message came to the office, and I took it as the senior staff member. You got notification.”
Like everything else in space, the shipyard spun to generate its own gravity with centrifugal force. For an instant Beka felt certain it tripled. Her stomach clenched.
“It’s her,” she said. “Oh god, it’s Jens.”
“I’m sorry, Beka.”
“She wasn’t even—” Beka’s mind raced as she tried to run through her most recent conversations with her sister in memory. “She wasn’t even anywhere near the front. They had her stationed at a fuel depot. Sentinel standby. Nothing to do. I made fun of her.”
Eduardo tried to keep his voice neutral. “Apparently she was reassigned. Or the front shifted. You know what they’re like with information. The notification didn’t say anything, just the usual. They did fulfill Contract. Her uploaded memories were intact. However, though all attempts at regeneration were made, they were unsuccessful.”
“This is just …”
“I’m so sorry, Beka.”
He may have said goodbye or signed off, but Beka wasn’t listening. When she glanced up again his form had winked out.
Beka stared, out the porthole, into the unblinking eye of the dwarf star.
You weren’t supposed to die in space, she thought to herself. That was what the Contract was all about. The military guarded their regeneration technology closely. No matter where you were killed, your pod would take you back to a ship where you would regenerate, and you’d get your memories back. You’d get your life. Every ship, all the time, everywhere, held every sailor’s memories in the quantum-tethered Brick. If they could save just a hair, or just a fingernail, they could bring you back.
Sometimes there was nothing left to save. An entire ship might go down. Or someone’s suit might be hit so badly there was not enough cellular material to work with. Even afterward, if you got sufficient organic matter back, sometimes—rarely, but sometimes—there were problems with the regeneration process itself. The nutrient matrices wouldn’t align properly or the memory scan would, for some reason, be corrupt.
Some soldiers still died, but so very few.
And now her sister was gone.
Forever.
The star winked balefully.
Beka cried with a stubborn and silent fury in her room aboard the shipyard, but her tears did nothing to soften its glare.
Ten
They gave her a full day before they summoned her. This time it was an admiral Beka had not yet met. She could tell he was of high-rank. The huge back wall of the office in which he waited contained more window space than Beka had seen so far during her whole week aboard the shipyard. It did not overlook the harsh star or the inner shipyard. Instead, it looked out on the whorled band of the galactic plain. The angry light from the dwarf star was invisible here. In its place, there were a million stars, undimmed by atmosphere or artificial illumination.
“Coffee?” he asked by way of greeting. He was sitting behind a large, ebony desk, and he looked very much the part of an admiral. His face could have been that of an iconic grandfather figure-wise and understanding though deeply lined and with a long, faint scar crossing his temple. His shoulders were square and stiff, even as he leaned backward in his chair and sipped from a ceramic mug. He had the simple, nondescript uniform on him that Beka had come to learn was worn by only the highest-ranking military officials.
“No, thank you.” Beka took the single chair opposite him without waiting to be offered it. She was tired, and she didn’t mind using her position outside the military chain of command to ignore certain subtleties of hierarchical etiquette.
“I’m Admiral Tholan. I’m very sorry about your sister.”
“You were monitoring my transmission?” She was unsurprised and too emotionally drained to register anger.
“Of course we monitor transmissions, but we knew before that. We knew—” He winced as though embarrassed. “We knew the day before we brought you here. That’s why you were summoned from System. But we thought it would be best to hear the news from someone you knew and trusted.”
Beka felt like she was processing information slowly, still filtering everything through the sudden fact of her sister’s now irrevocable absence. “You brought me here because of Jens?”
“Because of her death, yes.” The admiral took a moment to sip his coffee. His cup was—incongruously in this place—tiny and white. “I’m sorry that we had to keep you in the dark, but, again, we thought it best that the news come from someone close to you. And we wanted you here when you heard it.”
“Why?”
The admiral set the cup down and turned toward the huge windows.
“Did your sister tell you where she was stationed? Anything about her mission?”Beka followed his gaze. The stars anywhere outside System were an inaccessible Rorschach image of twisted, distended constellations for her. A stellar cartographer might be able to point out and identify some of the stars seen from home, but most soldiers—and certainly Beka—could not.
“Yes,” she answered.
The admiral nodded. “Then I apologize on her behalf for the lie. Her wing was moved to aerial assault three months before terminal deployment. They were under orders, of course, to keep their new assignment confidential.” The admiral turned back toward her. “She was assigned to the First Fleet.”
Beka’s curiosity warred with her fear. Rumors abounded regarding the fate of the missing Fleet. Everyone had a theory, each more outlandish than the next. But here was someone in a position high enough to have real information. And now the fate of the First Fleet—the Ghost Fleet, as some of the feeds were already calling it—was bound up with that of her sister.
“What do you know of the war with the Colonizers?”
“Only what the newsfeeds report, which is not a lot.” She chose her words carefully. “That after some initial and rapid gains, we’ve scaled back operations. That both sides are exploring diplomatic options.”
Tholan grunted. “All are more or less true, and of course are vague enough to be completely useless.” He held his cup again and stared into it. “If you drew a circle containing all of the specialists—communications, tactical, entanglement, both government and civilian—who might be able to help us figure out what happened to the Fleet, that would be a hell of a lot of people.”
Beka nodded blankly.
“If you drew another circle around all the people who had a vested interest—a personal interest—in helping us find the Fleet, that would be a pretty big circle too. Seven hundred ships. Fifteen thousand personnel. Representing a lot of family members to keep in the dark. A lot of people who are starting to ask difficult questions.”
The admiral’s office was chilling. Beka had been cold since leaving System. On her first day on the shipyard an aide she had not seen since had given her a surplus flight jacket. She pulled it tighter around her shoulders. “What happened to the Fleet?”
“It was our first major deep space deployment against the Colonizers, near the Perseus Limb. They had dug into a cluster of dead worlds that weren’t part of their treaty-allocated territory. Intelligence indicated it had become the Colonizers’ main tech hub.” He snorted. “Though tech for a Colonizer usually doesn’t mean much beyond rail-guns and hollowed-out asteroids.”
Jens had said nothing about any of this in her transmissions home. Neither had it been on any of the newsfeeds. Beka wondered what else Jens, and what else everyone out here, had been keeping quiet.
The admiral stood and walked to the transparent wall, beckoning her to follow. She rose. Close to the windows and still hunched in her jacket, Beka experienced a sudden sense of
vertigo. The stars seemed to curve around them so the points of light were above and below as well as in front of them, as though the two of them were hanging in their midst. As though intuiting her earlier thoughts, Tholan pointed.
“There’s System.”
There were a few yellow specks. It was impossible to tell which he was indicating.
“I know it’s not comfortable here,” the admiral said slowly. “We’re all a long way from home. There are other planet-side military installments that are more pleasant. Comfortable, almost. We can move you to one of those if you prefer.” He paused. “Because you’re not going home until this is all over.”
Beka blinked and stepped away. “I’m a prisoner?”
Tholan waved the word away. “I want to make your situation clear, and you’ll understand you can believe what I tell you. I’m going to give you information, right now, that certain people would kill to have. I’m going to do it because I need you to make a decision. If you decide not to help us, that’s fine. I won’t compel compliance from you. But you’ll be kept safe and out of the way until we’ve found the Fleet and the conflict with the Colonizers is resolved.”
Beka paused to absorb this, taking a breath. “Can I sit down?”
He nodded. When she was seated again, he continued, still standing. “Those two circles I mentioned earlier. There are a lot of people in each. But where they intersect—people who could make a real contribution to helping us find the First Fleet and people who have a deep personal interest in doing so—it’s much smaller. A handful, really.”
“Including me.”
He nodded again.
“But you must have—” She motioned vaguely. Her mind swimming, she noticed her nails, never terribly well kept, had worsened in space. Her hands seemed tiny against the darkness beyond the admiral’s windows. “You must have hundreds of people you can order to tackle this problem. Probably people better than me and whoever else you’ve found.”
“You’re an intelligent woman. You couldn’t be an entanglement expert if you weren’t. But I’m not going to bore you with the ins and outs of the military command structure.” Tholan sat again and sipped from his cup. It had to be cold by now. “Suffice it to say that there are certain advantages to be had by utilizing people outside of that command structure. Certain questions of culpability and—” He paused as though searching for a word before finally sighing and settling on one he was clearly displeased with. “Certain questions of culpability and ethics are avoided. Officially.”