First Fleet #1-4: The Complete Saga

by Stephen Case

  The wave of suits drifted downward into the huge mining shafts, searching for the Colonizer bunkers.

  Things started going wrong long before the first salvos opened up from emplacements along the chasm walls. It was the rifts themselves. The shafts seemed natural near the surface and for the first several hundred meters, the only signs of mining activity were the metal docking spurs that protruded from the walls and marked the entrance to small side-tunnels. Transports likely docked there to take ore up to the surface, though there was no sign of activity now.

  The shaft down which they descended appeared to be a huge volcanic vent, an immense stone throat wide enough that their carrier could have followed them down. But deeper down—in contrast to what the radiographic surveys taken from orbit had established—it opened even wider.

  “My god,” someone whispered on the channel. “These aren’t natural.”

  Jens checked her helmet display. “Out of line, Lars. Keep the channel clear for tactical only. Commentary to yourself.”

  But he was right. Jens switched to a closed command line.

  “Forbes, this is Grale.”

  There was a wash of static that made Jens uneasy, and then a voice from the ship hovering above cut through.

  “This is Forbes, Grale. Go ahead.”

  “No resistance yet,” she said, “but relay to Command: We have clear signs of ETI down here, sir.”

  There was a moment of silence against another background surge of static.

  “Can you confirm evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligence, Grale?”

  The cavern opened out around them. The beams of the clustered suits played along the walls as they continued their controlled descent. It felt as if they were falling underwater, as though Jens were back in her initial suit training in the seas under the icy crust of an outer-System moon. Even as darkness thickened around them, the walls their light beams revealed were becoming angular, carved with spiraling geometric figures. It was hard to see details in the darkness, but they were clearly artificial.

  “Grale?” the voice from the ship asked again. “Can you confirm that what you’re seeing was not done by Colonizers?”

  The darkness faded as they fell. The stones themselves gave off faint grey phosphorescence. And still the cavern opened out wider around them. Spires of stone extended from the walls like fingers.

  “Copy that, Forbes,” Jens said. “I don’t think it’s human technology, let alone anything the Colonizers have done.”

  Jens could hear more chatter coming through on the open channels. Pearson told them to shut up and spread out, to keep looking for any sign of Colonizers. They appeared to be a few hundred feet from the cavern floor.

  There was silence again on the closed channel.

  “Pearson, are you getting any clear reading for depth?” Jens asked on the open channel.

  “Negative,” Pearson replied. “And I’ve got a host of sensor ghosts as well.”

  So did Jens. There may have been interference from the walls, which were still glowing in a way that made the rocks look like gravestones at dusk. The suits of her wings had shut down their beams and were descending into a thin grey fog.

  The chasm wreaked havoc with depth perception. Its angles seemed incorrect, almost illusive; features that looked like they were a few dozen yards away turned out to be much farther distant.

  “Tighten up the formation,” Jens told her wings. “McClaire, your suits are drifting down too fast.”

  “We’re still in formation,” came the reply through a thick wall of static. “You guys are spreading out above us.”

  The spires of stone that split the shaft here made it hard to tell whether they spanned it like branches or whether the chasm itself was splitting into smaller rifts. Yet the view down each branching seemed larger than the shaft they were falling through.

  “Gods, how far down do these things go?” someone asked.

  “Jens, I’ve lost five of my suits,” Pearson radioed. “They’ve just disappeared from my scanners.”

  Jens fired her thrusters to slow her own descent. “Everyone pull up and regroup. Cease descent. Abort. I repeat, abort.”

  Something was definitely interfering with transmissions now, because only half her wing and perhaps half a dozen of Pearson’s appeared to receive her transmission. The rest continued their steady fall. Several were already out of view.

  “Do we even have a clear path back to the surface?” It was Pearson again.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” Jens snapped. “We just dropped down a huge hole.”

  She looked up, though, and immediately saw what Pearson meant. Impossibly, the view above mirrored that below. There were no signs of stars. Instead, there were more branching chasms, stretching upward. Jens couldn’t tell which shaft they had dropped through. Even more disconcerting, looking up seemed to shift her center of gravity until she had the feeling she should be falling down one of those shafts above. She could see some of the suits of her wing falling—or rising—through them now.

  “Seismic didn’t show anything like this,” she said. “Is the whole damn planet honeycombed?”

  The suits continued drifting.

  “Keep it tight, people,” she snapped and flipped back to a private channel. “Forbes, this is Jens. We need a recall beacon. These caverns are really messing with our sensors.”

  Static was her only response.

  “Forbes?”

  The Colonizers had no need to spring a trap. Whatever this place was, it was enough of a trap itself. Half her suits continued to drift downward. There were now only a dozen still in sight. There was chatter on the open channel, faint enough that she couldn’t make it all out, but it sounded panicked. They were getting lost. She switched on her own homing beacon, hoping to cut through some of the interference and draw her wing back together.

  It was hard to concentrate. The angles of the chasms and their branching, the way the carved spirals of stone split and divided like roots, kept drawing her eyes down and away from the other suits in her unit.

  It’s a fractal, she thought to herself. There’s no sense of scale. Like clouds. You could hide cities down here.

  Maybe the Colonizers had been waiting for her to activate a beacon, or maybe they were just waiting until the entire wing was disoriented and divided, because suddenly they did indeed spring their trap. Rail-gun mortars lanced out from the walls, and two of her wing’s suits exploded into flames, their pods ejecting instantly and drifting upward.

  “Form up!” she hollered on all channels. “Activate phase shielding!”

  The familiar blur of deflective plating appeared around those suits closest to her, and the view beyond her screens took on the familiar shielded haze as her own plating went up. It would buy them time, but without scanners they couldn’t get a lock on where the firing was coming from. Lines of arching light crisscrossed the chasm.

  She was hit several times before her own shield plating finally failed. Another round of mortar fire drove her suit down onto a plane of weirdly slanting stone. After some struggling to make sense of which direction was up and which down, she scrambled to get up. She finally found some footing and rose, only to find that she was standing upright on an upper wall of a chasm, looking down at the continuing fight below. At least, that was how it seemed. Her mind told her she must be on the floor of the shaft, that gravity could be pulling her only toward the planet’s center. Yet as she watched, she saw one of her wing’s suits fall slowly to an opposite wall.

  It was impossible that the Colonizers could have the technology to alter gravitational fields. Nothing on their preliminary surveys had indicated anything like this.

  What was this place?

  Suddenly, something caught her from behind and blew out the pistons in both of her leg units. Her suit crashed forward, and she tasted blood.

  Any minute, she thought, the pod will evac. I’ll wake up again on one of the med ships.

  Forms were swarming over the outside o
f her suit, hammering at the exterior. She activated her engagement foils, but there wasn’t enough power in her upper arm units to do more than flail the huge blades at her attackers. They fell back for a moment, and she felt another shuddering concussion as another surge of mortar fire destroyed her shoulder units.

  They were grappling the pod out of the ruins of her suit now. In another moment, they would shatter the screens and pull her out. She keyed for an automatic evac and felt the pod begin to lurch. Something hit it again. Everything went black.

  I’m dead, she thought. Again.

  Twenty-Six

  Weeks after the assault on the Grave Worlds failed and the Fleet was lost, Beka Grale sat at the helm of the warship Clerke Maxwell and surveyed the wreckage of the First Fleet. The Maxwell was home to a rather ragtag crew. There were four other humans aboard beside herself: Tsai-Liu and Aggiz (the remaining members of her team), Paul (the prisoner Eleanor had picked up from the planet), and Donovan—the only known survivor of the First Fleet. There were also a dozen comatose Synthetics on the ship.

  She sat with Donovan now, looking for patterns.

  The assault on the Colonizer planets in the Perseus Limb had ended in complete defeat. Her sister, as Beka had been informed, was most likely dead. Records indicated that the conflict on and below the surfaces of the planetoids had lasted several days; yet somehow the Colonizers had not only defeated the ground forces but also infected and neutralized the entire supporting armada as well.

  And all that Command had to go on now to piece together the riddle of this disaster were the scanned memories of fifteen thousand soldiers stored in the Brick. Beka had been summoned from System to disentangle those memories and extract information about the Fleet’s fate.

  She had failed miserably.

  Memories could not be retrieved from the Brick without a host, and it seemed that there was not a single survivor from the debacle. Despite the best efforts of Beka and her team, they could not find a way to tap the memories without a re-grown template of the minds from which they had been extracted.

  In the end, their only success had come through finding a single body, killed in the hours before all the ships went dark and ejected into space. His memories were the only way to possibly shed some light on what had happened in the skies over the Grave Worlds.

  Beka glanced at their survivor, Elias Donovan, across the command deck where he sat, hunched in the command chair. He caught her gazing at him. His memories were what had brought the Clerke Maxwell and its unlikely crew here to the Fleet’s last known location.

  “I’ve just figured something out,” he said.

  “What?” she asked, noting how distant his voice sounded.

  “Normally a ship like this would have a hundred sets of eyes and ears.” He looked around the cavernous command deck that held only the two of them. They were nearly lost amidst rows of panels and displays, many dimmed but dozens still blinking information from the ship’s stations and sensors. “But now it’s just us.”

  “I know that. Did you figure anything else out?” Her eyes drifted back to the holographic display in front of her, to the shifting maze of light that delineated the location of the various derelict ships of the Fleet.

  “I know you blame me for stranding us here. But I’m a doctor. I was only preventing the spread of infection.”

  “We’re light years from anywhere, Donovan,” she answered, keeping her voice steady. “You convinced us to collapse the light-line behind us. We’re marooned. It would take a hundred years to get to any nearby settlement at relativistic speeds.”

  “I know.” He pointed at a display in front of him. “But that’s what I’ve just realized: There is someone alive down there.”

  She looked back up. “’Down’ as down in the Grave Worlds?”

  He nodded.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because there’s a beacon,” he said. “We’d picked up the signal for a while, but the ship’s AI didn’t pay any attention to it. It’s a frequency-modulated signal, something we haven’t used in centuries.”

  “They’re definitely Colonizers,” Beka said. “They’re three centuries behind the rest of the galaxy.”

  “Right. But it means that someone is still alive down there. Maybe there are survivors from the Fleet as well.”

  She turned back to the display projected above her console, thinking.

  It wasn’t like they had anywhere else to go. Without a light-line terminal, space yawned out around them endlessly. But getting to the Grave Worlds would mean passing through the remains of the Fleet. And passing unscathed was the challenge.

  “The ships aren’t drifting,” she said slowly. “Even adjusting for random initial trajectories, their motions don’t fit any orbital parameters. They’re moving intentionally. Something is controlling them. I don’t know how we can break through to even get to those planets.”

  Donovan rubbed a hand across his weathered face. His visage had been young and unlined when he awoke from the res-pod in the Clerke Maxwell’s science bay, but the memories he had inherited immediately upon waking had aged him visibly. He looked tired, but there was something more there as well.

  It took Beka—who had difficulty reading anything without numbers attached to it—days to realize that it was terror, tightly restrained. Donovan had served as a medic on one of the Fleet’s medical frigates. He was still terrified of what he had seen on board before he was killed and his body ejected.

  Yet he was the one who had compelled them to come to the Fleet’s last coordinates, to collapse the light-line and prevent whatever had decimated the Fleet from spreading to the rest of the galaxy.

  Donovan was a doctor, but Beka was an entanglement expert. She knew patterns. She understood the shifting systems of data and coding that translated human consciousness into dancing particles stored in the Brick. That understanding of hers had brought her from System to attempt retrieval of the Fleet’s memories.

  But now the Brick was empty and because the Brick was quantum tethered, because every Brick mirrored every other Brick, they were all empty. Now that the Fleet’s memories were gone, she wondered vaguely what function she could serve.

  So she studied the swarming dots of the derelict ships, hoping they might spell out a clue. Hoping she could find a pattern.

  Donovan touched her shoulder, startling her so badly that she flinched.

  “Beka,” he said, “you need to sleep. We don’t have enough on board to stand double shifts. And we don’t know how long before another one of those … ships will come into range.”

  His voice broke on the word, the fear rising up for a moment to grasp at his throat. The ships, the ghost ships. The entire Fleet was still out there, but from what they could tell—and from what Donovan believed—they were all devoid of human life. There were no life sign readings. There were no answers to communications.

  Beka shuddered and rose. “Fine,” she said. “Fine, I’m going.”

  Donovan placed his hand on her shoulder a second time. “Don’t forget this.” He held out a thin plastic vial topped with a tiny needle, a standard medical injection pen. “In case another comes within range.”

  Beka reached for the syringe as though it were a snake coiled up in Donovan’s hand. “Will it work?” she asked.

  “It should.”

  Beka nodded. Pain was the only thing that blocked the psychic influence exerted by whatever was on those ships. They had been lucky during their first encounter.

  She took a deep breath and nodded again.

  “Inflammation,” Donovan said. “That’s all it’ll be. You’ll feel like you have a serious case of arthritis.” He pushed the syringe toward her. “I’ll alert you if anything comes into range.”

  Beka walked to the doorway of the command deck. “I’ll sleep,” she told him. “I will, really. But first I’m going to go check on Tsai-Liu.”

  She left the command deck with its cavernous walls of illuminated monitors and desce
nded to the exterior levels of the spinning ship. Their vessel was now a tangled network of quarters, docking bays, and various ancillary chambers that in normal operations would have hummed with life. But when it departed from the shipyard with Beka and her team, it had carried only a skeleton crew and their numbers were even fewer now.

  There was a reason Beka did not want to sleep. Whenever she closed her eyes, she vividly saw the horror from days earlier. She saw Davis, the scientist who had been their steady team leader in the science bay, his arm engulfed in green flames and the Synthetic Eleanor writhing on the floor at his feet.

  When Beka dreamed, she saw herself, over and over again, pulling the trigger of a weapon aimed at Davis. Flames licked at Davis’s face. Eleanor watched them both with glass eyes and the melting countenance of a wax doll held too close to the flames.

  Beka shook her head and walked farther down the empty, curving corridor.

  Paul, the vagabond they had picked up from the world where they had found Donovan’s body, shared quarters with Donovan on this level. Beka had an entire barracks to herself one level deeper. Aggiz, the scientist who had been Beka’s partner on the memory project, would not leave the Brick and Tsai-Liu, the last member of their team, was confined to quarters here. She reached his door and knocked softly. When there was no answer, she keyed the door’s release and stepped inside.

  “Tsai-Liu? It’s me, Beka.”

  His soft reply came from somewhere in the darkness.

  Had the Clerke Maxwell embarked with full crew compliment, this might have been the captain’s quarters. The room was wide and open with curving furniture of a soft, polished wood Beka could not identify. Tsai-Liu was lying on his back on a polished kidney-shaped table near the center of the chamber. The room’s lights brightened as she entered.

  “Beka,” he said, “are the others gone?”

  It was difficult for her to meet his eyes. Tsai-Liu was the oldest member of the team. When they had come together to pull memories from the Brick, his eyes had been soft and deep, yet also weathered, bright, like stones polished by years and wisdom. They were empty and wandering now.