First Fleet #1-4: The Complete Saga

by Stephen Case

  “The others, Tsai-Liu?” Beka asked.

  He rose from the table and shuffled away from her, deeper into the chamber.

  “The ones out there. The ones … in …” His voice faded out. Beka sighed.

  Donovan kept him locked in these quarters not because he was dangerous, but because he would wander the ship aimlessly. They had all been affected by their first encounter with one of the Fleet’s ghost ships. But unlike the rest of them, Tsai-Liu’s mind never recovered.

  “Do you need anything, Tsai-Liu?” she asked.

  “The rubber people,” he said, still on the other side of the room. Beka walked toward him.

  “What?”

  “The rubber people,” he repeated. “Are they still there?”

  “The Synthetics,” Beka nodded. “We moved them all into one of the barracks, remember? Davis’s weapon—his kill-switch—seems to have overridden their higher functions. They’re still catatonic.” His uncomprehending eyes blinked at her.

  She continued, pretending she did not see the emptiness in his gaze. “Eleanor will cry out sometimes. Unless Donovan can resuscitate Davis or figure out what he did to them, I don’t know if they’ll ever recover.”

  “A ship full of rubber people,” Tsai-Liu giggled.

  Of all the things that had happened to Beka over the past few weeks—from the report of her sister’s death to their eventual marooning among the wreckage of the Fleet—the fact that the Clerke Maxwell had been crewed by a hand-picked staff of Synthetics was the hardest for her to comprehend. Synthetics had been outlawed and assumed to be extinct for generations, and yet here they were, a whole group of them apparently functional and hiding within the structure of the military itself. The one person who had shown—or appeared to show—true kindness to Beka at the shipyards had herself been a Synthetic named Eleanor, a three-hundred-year-old human facsimile.

  And Davis, the leader of Beka’s team, had possibly destroyed them all.

  “Your medicine, Tsai-Liu,” Beka said, pointing to where a syringe sat on another burnished table near the door. “If Donovan sends out the alarm, if another one of those ships approaches, you need to inject it yourself. I might not get here in time to do it for you.”

  “Rubber faces,” he muttered.

  “It will hurt, but it will be worse if you don’t take it.”

  The older man lay back down on the table.

  “I’ll bring you breakfast when I wake up,” she told him.

  He ignored her.

  Beka moved to the wide, sloping window display along the chamber’s farthest wall. It was not a real window. An actual view would have been spinning dizzily as the ship rotated to generate its centripetal gravity. It was instead fixated on a steady exterior projection, lifelike enough that it felt to Beka as if she were gazing through the bulkheads of the ship into the calm and still night beyond.

  Tsai-Liu stirred. “Where are we going?”

  “Through the Fleet, into the Grave Worlds.” Beka touched the display at the corner of the screen and swung the view so it showed everything directly ahead of the ship. “Donovan detected a signal. There may be survivors of the initial assault. ”

  The old man did not say anything.

  “I gave Donovan a flight-path that I’ve calculated as the lowest risk of intercepting one of those ships.” She paused, looking out into the darkness. There was nothing to see. “But it’s like trying to navigate through a snowstorm without touching a flake. Maybe I could do it, given enough time. And if I knew how the wind was blowing. But these ships—”

  “Creep,” Tsai-Liu whispered.

  “Yes. It feels random, but it’s not. It’s not a snowstorm. But I can’t see the pattern yet.”

  She strained her eyes, trying to find some hint of the drifting wreckage out there. There were no nearby stars to illuminate the tumbling metal. There were no flashing lights winking like boats out on the water. The ships of the Fleet were dark. To the naked eye, they sailed on a sea of ink.

  “Beka,” Donovan’s voice came through the room’s speakers. “Computer said you were still awake and in Tsai-Liu’s room. We have one incoming.”

  “How long?”

  “A few minutes until it’s in range,” he answered. “Can you administer Tsai-Liu’s dose?”

  “I’ll take care of it,” she said.

  Tsai-Liu sat up again on the table and stared at her with frightened eyes. She picked up the tiny syringe and walked toward him.

  “This will protect you,” she told him when he pulled away. “Tsai-Liu, it’s me. Trust me, please.”

  He held out his arm slowly, his gaze focused firmly on her face.

  Touching the tip of the injector to his upper arm, the needle lanced out too quickly to see and then just as swiftly disappeared within the pen.

  Tsai-Liu giggled. “It didn’t hurt.”

  Then he screamed, arched his back, and fell off the table.

  “Donovan!” Beka shouted. “Tsai-Liu’s having a reaction!”

  The all-ship alarm sounded, followed by Donovan’s voice, which echoed in the corridors outside the room as well. “All hands, proximity alert. Administer protective treatment. Repeat, all hands, self-inject immediately.”

  “Donovan!” Beka shouted again.

  Tsai-Liu was thrashing on the floor. His eyes bulged.

  Beka felt a keening note throb somewhere in the back of her mind. For a moment her vision swam. She fumbled in her pocket for her own syringe as the psychic pressure grew. It was as though there was an overwhelming otherness pressing on her consciousness like a weight, bending thought along directions it was not meant to travel.

  She touched the pen to her own arm. For a moment she felt nothing. Then suddenly, a fire flared in her elbows, shoulders and the joints of each finger. They all throbbed with a dull, red ache that washed out every other thought. The psychic pressure was replaced by the sharp immediacy of pain.

  Tsai-Liu was lying on the floor, breathing rapidly.

  “Donovan!” she yelled again. “Get down here! Something’s wrong with Tsai-Liu.”

  “I’m trying to get us away from this thing!” Donovan’s reply came ragged, as though he were speaking through gritted teeth. “I can’t … What are his symptoms?”

  Beka’s knees felt lined with jagged glass as she crawled to where Tsai-Liu lay. “His pulse is racing. He’s sweating. Unresponsive.”

  “He’s having a reaction to the inflammatory. I was worried about it given his age. I gave him a reduced dose.”

  Beka couldn’t move. It was as though every joint were pinioned with steel burrs. She knew Donovan could not climb all the way out to this level. He was too busy trying to put some distance between them and the approaching ship.

  She cradled Tsai-Liu’s head in her lap and held one of his hands. Every movement burned. His breath was becoming shallower bit by bit.

  When the All Clear from Donovan finally came, Tsai-Liu was long gone.

  Beka stood up, trembling, staring down at Tsai-Liu’s lifeless form. There was nothing she could do, nothing she had been able to do. Just like with her sister and all the others. They were gone and she had been powerless to help them.

  “No,” she said softly. “Not again.” Helpless. Just like all the other times. Helpless and useless. She was so tired of feeling useless…

  She had been carried along for long enough, first at the shipyard and then here on the Clerke Maxwell. For years before that, she admitted to herself, she had moved in the shadow and the wake of her sister. She had followed the instructions of others, she had done the job assigned her, she had played her role as an expert crunching numbers in her tight, tidy universe.

  But not anymore.

  This was cold and dark and messy. And getting them through it was on her shoulders now, hers alone.

  “I’ll get us through,” she said suddenly. The words sounded ludicrous, like the boasting of a small child. But somehow, as soon as she said them, she felt better.

&n
bsp; She looked out the empty window on the wall of Tsai-Liu’s chamber. “I’ll get us home. And I won’t lose another.”

  Twenty-Seven

  Cam fielded the first call from a neighboring habitation a week after Paul left.

  “I’m sorry,” she told the face on the screen. “Paul can’t help this season with the sea-changes.”

  The shallow, manmade seas of Onaway needed to be drained and their mineral baths re-seeded twice a season. It was the only time most of the plantation families came together. “He’s gone.”

  The face—a lined visage of one of the elder matrons from a habitation two or three worlds to the west of them—took on an expression of puzzlement and vague concern.

  “What do you mean, gone?” the face inquired. “He ran off?”

  Cam shrugged. “It appears so.”

  The woman was not buying it. “Does this have anything to do with the military transport that came to your Station a few days ago?”

  “It does indeed.” Cam chose her words carefully, trying not to appear as though she were choosing her words carefully. “He had stolen something from them,” she decided to say. “And they came to get it back.”

  The woman on the screen clucked her tongue, a sound that did not translate well through the communication system. Agnes and Perry raised their heads from their coloring.

  “He always seemed a bit off,” the woman confided to Cam. “Like he was thinking most of the time of something in the back of his head that he didn’t want you to know about.”

  Probably light and color, Cam thought to herself. Framing and context. He was a goddamned artist. He didn’t belong out here.

  But Cam had brought him here. And now, she had abandoned him.

  When the screen finally, mercifully, blanked out, Cam turned to the twins still coloring quietly at their table.

  “That wasn’t true,” Agnes said. “About daddy.”

  “No,” Cam shook her head. “It wasn’t.”

  “He didn’t leave. We hid.” That was Perry.

  Both of the twins had Paul’s pale features and dark hair, but they had their mother’s wide eyes. Cam sighed as she tried to meet both sets now.

  “Because they would have taken us too if we hadn’t,” she told them.

  The twins nodded silently. Cam slid into a seat between them.

  It would be difficult but not impossible to run the habitation and its concomitant plantation by herself, Cam knew. However, she would not be able to make Paul’s maintenance tours, which would require her leaving the girls alone for days at a time.

  Now, she would have to hope that the rock-burners, mineral baths, algae lakes and the long, straight rows of engineered high-altitude conifers would be fine until the girls were old enough to ride along.

  “What are you coloring?” she asked them.

  Their pages were almost uniform in color and tone. Paul had switched the girls from crayons to oil-based pastels shortly before he left, which had cost them a fortune in trade credits to have shipped. The pastels made vivid splashes on the paper that the girls meticulously blended and blurred to form hazy, dream-like images.

  “It’s outside,” Perry explained.

  Cam looked closer. The black and browns could be the rocks of the canyon vista surrounding the habitation. The marks of red were where the stones were touched by sunlight. The grey shapes above those, with a little imagination …

  “They’re people,” Cam said.

  Agnes nodded. “We used to see them outside. They’re gone now though,” she added.

  Cam knew the girls had never seen anyone outside their habitation. Their planet was empty, and the nearest habitation was over a hundred kilometers to the west of them. Cam felt that they had seen something though. There was a certainty growing inside her that the girls had inherited some iteration of the abilities that had driven Cam away from the military and into hiding on this desolate planet.

  “You can see them,” Cam said slowly, watching the girls’ faces for some sign that she had guessed correctly. “The people in the Brick. I only ever heard their voices.”

  “Not now.” Perry looked at her with disappointment. “We don’t see them anymore.”

  “What voices?” Agnes’ face held the question.

  “From the Brick,” Cam explained. “That’s the device that stores the memories of dead soldiers. Before they can be regenerated.”

  “Like the body in the attic,” Agnes answered. “When did you hear voices? When the ship came for daddy?”

  Cam shook her head. “Only when I was serving aboard a ship. Before I met your father, I was a soldier.”

  Cam was not sure she wanted to explain that her neurological twist had taken place after she had been killed and her body regenerated. Not to her two young daughters.

  “I … woke up one day, and I could hear the voices in the Brick, whispering. Wherever I went, on whatever ship I was on, they were there.” She shuddered, remembering the constant voices and the dreams that had come in the midst of them.

  When she had realized her own ability, she had read every piece of scientific or pseudo-scientific literature she could find on the subject. There was not a lot about it out there and much of it was beyond her. The quantum resonance that governed the links between all the Bricks—that made them very literally instantiations of the same physical Brick—seemed magical to her.

  So did human consciousness. It was not too much of a leap to imagine a human mind somehow tuned to this resonance. In Agnes and Perry, this simply appeared to be augmented. For Cam, they had mercifully faded the farther away she was from any military ship.

  “What did you do?” Agnes still held a pastel loosely in her hand, but the picture in front of her was forgotten.

  “I ran away,” Cam said.

  “Why?”

  Cam leaned forward and rested her chin on her hand. Perry had stopped coloring as well and was watching her.

  “Because I was afraid,” she answered. “First I thought I was going crazy, but when I realized what had happened, I was afraid that people—soldiers, or scientists, maybe—would come after me. Try to figure out what had happened to my mind and how to understand it, use it. I didn’t want that. I wanted to be left alone. So I came here, after I met your father.”

  “Why did you let them take daddy?” asked Perry.

  “I had suspicions that you were like me,” Cam said. “And I thought that if they found me, they would find you too. I wanted to keep you safe.”

  “From what?” Agnes asked.

  The orange light of evening was slanting through the windows and across the table where they sat. Days on Onaway were long. The planet had a rotational period of almost thirty-five standard System hours. They had adapted to its cycles, but by this time every evening, Cam felt as though she had been awake for weeks.

  “From people who might …” Cam sighed and blew air through her lips. “I’m not sure. I ran from the military, which is illegal. If they found me here with that body, they would have asked questions. They would have found out what I could do. And then they would have found out about you two.”

  Agnes nodded slowly, but Perry continued to stare.

  “So I altered some records. When they arrived, they found your father and they thought he was me. So they arrested him.”

  “You made us hide in the crawler,” Perry said. It was clear now that this frustration had been growing in her. “We didn’t even get to tell him goodbye.”

  Cam closed her eyes. “I’m sorry. It had to be that way.” She paused. “He would have wanted it this way too. He would have wanted to protect us.”

  “He would have wanted to say goodbye!” Perry shouted.

  It was the first time in years Cam had seen her so angry. Usually the twins were almost troublingly sedate. Their eerie calm was, Cam and Paul had believed, part of growing up here alone, in isolation from other children and any non-simulated vista but the rocks and sky beyond their windows.

  Perry stoo
d and left the room. Agnes watched her go.

  “I’m sorry,” Cam said again.

  Agnes bent back to her coloring. “She’s scared.”

  “We’re safe here,” Cam said.

  Agnes looked up at her. “She’s scared because the people are gone. We’ve never been alone before.”

  “You didn’t just hear voices,” Cam said. She tapped the forms on Perry’s drawing. “You saw them too. But you don’t see them now?”

  Agnes shook her head and walked away to find her sister.

  Cam ran her fingers through her short black hair and continued to speak even though the girls were both gone. “That doesn’t make sense. If you heard—saw—them before, then the distance from the Brick doesn’t affect you, like it did me. Why would they be gone now?”

  Outside the habitation, their star continued its slow crawl toward the horizon.

  We are safe, Cam repeated to herself. Perry would come around. The ship was gone. The Brick was gone, along with whatever had inhabited the twins’ dreams.

  Paul was gone too, but that couldn’t be helped.

  Their planet was empty.

  They were safe.

  Twenty-Eight

  “I need light,” said a voice. “Give me some light, you damned mechanoid.”

  “Sorry,” a second voice answered. “Here.”

  Something flared, and Jens saw a red haze through her closed eyelids. Someone was sweeping a light back and forth in front of her face.

  “Is she dead?” the second voice asked.

  “No.” The first voice softened and took on a professional air. “No, she’s fine. She’s awake. The stimulants are working.”

  Jens felt cast up on the shores of a sea of pain. Each beat of her heart was a wave of dulled agony washing up around her. She groaned and opened her eyes.

  “She’s beautiful,” said the second voice.

  The first voice, which belonged to a long, drawn face peering into hers, laughed derisively. “Is that your professional opinion?”

  “Sorry.” The second voice sounded young, but Jens could not see beyond the light the first speaker held and was shining into her face.

  “Can you hear me?” the first asked. “My name is Rine. Rine Westdweller. I’m a doctor. How do you feel?”