First Fleet #1-4: The Complete Saga

by Stephen Case

  “Gordian,” Donovan said. “A Gordian knot. There was this general back in System. And he had conquered a city, or wanted to conquer it.” Donovan’s voice shook. It sounded as raw as Beka’s thoughts felt in her own mind. “But there was a prophecy or a story or something that the ruler would be the one who untangled this knot. So he cut it in half. He sliced through it.”

  The shapes representing the wreckage of the Fleet hung suspended on the holographic monitor before them. Beka had watched its shifting pattern for so long, with an intensity approaching that of Aggiz before the Brick, that she saw the swimming forms whenever she closed her eyes.

  She massaged her temples. Either the pain was fading or they were growing so accustomed to it that their nerves no longer bothered carrying the signals back and forth. Now all she felt was a dull weariness in everything she did.

  “What does this have to do with anything, Donovan?”

  He stabbed a trembling finger at the cluster of shapes hanging between them. “That’s your knot.”

  Beka raised her eyebrows. “You mean give up? We’re on the verge of understanding something, Donovan. It’s not just about getting to whatever aid might be on the planets below. It’s about the pattern to the motion of the Fleet.”

  She reached forward to revolve the three-dimensional display and saw her own arm tremble like Donovan’s. “Aggiz thinks we can communicate if we figure out how the creatures on those ships are using the Brick.”

  “Beka, these are the things that deleted the minds of fifteen thousand people off the Brick just to send a message.” Donovan sounded annoyed now.

  “They might not have known,” Beka whispered.

  “It doesn’t matter if they did or didn’t. The point is …” He trailed off and waved his arm expansively. “The point is that we’re trapped. We don’t have the luxury of time anymore. We can’t keep dancing here at the margins. I can synthesize pain treatments to last us a few more days, and that’s it. Then we’re finished as soon as one of them gets close to us again, and there’s no other planet we can reach now that the light-line is gone. Can you guarantee Aggiz will have learned to communicate with them by then?”

  Beka shook her head slowly. “But they’ve already made contact with someone.”

  Donovan snorted. “The face. The face that Paul claims belongs to his wife. We have no idea what that means. And frankly …” He trailed off again as though trying to gather his thoughts. “Frankly none of us is very credible right now.”

  “You think he’s seeing things,” she said, “that he’s seeing what he wants to see in that pattern. But I saw a face too.”

  “Things like this are normal in high-stress situations, Beka. Hell, I’ve caught myself having extended conversations with the comatose Synthetics, even when I’m in the process of …” Donovan caught himself before saying cutting them open and hoped Beka was too distracted to notice. “I’m just saying that we don’t have much time.”

  “There’s a pattern in here,” Beka insisted.

  “You sound like Aggiz.”

  “Aggiz was right!” Beka leaned back in her chair. The ships kept sliding past each other on her display like slivers of glass against a mirror. “The universe is built of patterns and numbers. It’s only a matter of working hard enough to see them.”

  Donovan shook his head. “Your universe, maybe. Not theirs.”

  They sat in silence. The ship drifted. Somewhere on a deck above, the remaining Synthetics slept. Davis hovered between life and death. Paul dreamed of Cam’s face suspended in darkness.

  When understanding came, it came suddenly—a coiled spring releasing in Beka’s mind.

  She gasped. “You’re right.”

  Donovan glanced up at the sudden intensity of her tone.

  “We have to cut straight through. Look at them.” She pointed and he stared at the display. “They’re not a flock. They’re not a fleet. They’re each moving in complete isolation, each hemmed in by the walls of a house of mirrors.”

  She stood, leaning forward into the display until the ghostly ships almost brushed her nose and cheeks.

  “I was looking for a path through, assuming they were a collective or hive mind. I kept looking for a way to insert ourselves into their dance.” She pushed her hand through the middle of the display, feeling the faint hum of condensed light play along her arm. “There’s no way into their game though, because there isn’t one. They’re each moving in isolation. They’re each alone.”

  Across the display, her hand found Donovan’s. He took it and held tightly.

  “Now it’s my turn to tell you I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” he said.

  “It doesn’t matter.” She grinned wanly. “You don’t have to understand. I’m driving. But it’s going to be rough ride. How much pain treatment can you synthesize?”

  “To use all at once?”

  She nodded.

  “Enough to kill us, maybe.”

  “We’ll need it all.” She paused, still holding his hand, staring at the display of ships drifting between them. “There’s no other way but straight through.”

  Thirty-Nine

  There was an overwhelming darkness, followed by the scent of stone and a barely-discernible rumbling.

  “Where are we?” Cam shouted. She still held both twins, but now it seemed even more that they supported her, not the other way around. “What happened?”

  “We moved,” Agnes said.

  Perry echoed her softly, “We came a long way.”

  “Where did that …” Cam paused, her mind still reeling. “Where did that thing go?”

  There were lights ahead of them, approaching steadily. After a moment Cam realized that the stones around them were glowing as well. They were in a long, narrow corridor of rock, the walls only a few meters apart from each other but the ceiling so distant that it was lost in shadows above. It felt as though they were at the bottom of a canyon.

  Beyond the curving walls, farther down the corridor, a cluster of bobbing lights grew. In another instant, there were shouts and outlined forms, armed and clearly agitated.

  “Hold it, McGoverns,” someone bellowed, pushing forward through the knot of people that Cam now saw were soldiers, though ragged and clearly disoriented. “There are kids there, are you blind?”

  “Colonizers don’t have any kids down here,” someone grumbled.

  “Who are you?” The voice was challenging, belonging to a woman who was obviously in command. Her red hair was vivid even in the gloom of the tunnel.

  The lights had resolved into flares and hand-spots held in the palms of perhaps half a dozen dirty soldiers. Cam kept a hand on a shoulder of each of the girls and answered slowly, trying to keep her tone steady. “My name is Cam Dowager. These are my daughters. We’re …” her voice lapsed into confusion.

  “Not Colonizers,” the woman finished. “Your face is familiar though, and I can tell by your accent you’re System. What the hell are you doing here?”

  “We were brought here,” Agnes said before Cam could stop her. “By the creature.”

  “It wants us to speak for it,” Perry added.

  Cam craned her neck, but the huge apparition that had appeared over the rim of the rock-burner was gone. It could be waiting unseen beyond the beam of their lights, she thought.

  Part of her could not accept what had apparently happened, that the creature had transported them elsewhere instantaneously. She wanted to believe that they had simply slipped into a crevasse in the crust of their own world, perhaps a system of caverns hidden at the edges of the rock-burner. The heat was gone though. Even the gravity felt wrong.

  She knew in her gut that they were no longer on Onaway.

  Someone in the midst of the group of soldiers yelled something at the twins’ words, and one of the soldiers cuffed him in the back of the head.

  “Easy,” the leader said. “That one’s our way out. If there is a way out.”

  She turned back to Cam. “I
’m Sergeant Jens Grale. And if you are real—and not just another damned conjuring of these tunnels—then you’re pretty far from wherever home is. These are the Grave Worlds. Colonizers outposts.”

  Cam shook her head uncomprehendingly.

  “This is where it came from,” Perry whispered. “We hear it above.”

  “Too many though,” Agnes stared at the shadows hiding the cavern’s ceiling. “Echoes of the only one.”

  Jens glanced at the girl, her face unchanged. “Whoever you are and wherever you came from, you’re with us now. Follow me.”

  She spoke over her shoulder as they moved down the corridor, the soldiers flanking out on either side as far as they were able. “We can sort you out later.”

  Cam felt herself slipping back into her tactical training. She eyed the ragged bunch in front of her; she also saw the splay of the flankers and the way they held their heads.

  “You’re tired,” she said. “You’re on the run.”

  Jens nodded shortly. “We’re what is left of the assault on this place. We were prisoners. This one let us out of our cells.” She jerked her head at the hunched, frightened man at the center of their party. “We’ve been trying to find others on our way down to the center of these caverns. That, and trying to avoid the Colonizer patrols.”

  “Tell me what’s going on,” Cam said.

  Jens blinked at her for a moment, clearly puzzled by their sudden appearance but trying not to let it show. “How much do you know about the operation against the Colonizers? About the First Fleet?”

  Cam kept one eye on the girls as they walked down the bending tunnel. There was something about the light and the angles that did not sit right against her perception, but the girls seemed unperturbed.

  “I was on the Shore Worlds,” Cam said. “Killed once in action. I left the service before the First Fleet deployed.”

  “Then you don’t know,” Jens answered. Briefly, she recounted their initial assault and what they had learned about the Colonizers’ strategy and its effects. “Now we’re going down. Maybe all the way to the Crèche, where they found the bodies,” she snorted. “Maybe we’ll find a way to undo all this down there.”

  The twins glanced over at that.

  The company halted before a branch in the corridor. One opening appeared to spiral up over their head. Another descended downward. Pale purple light filtered from both.

  “There are …” Cam began, pointing.

  “Runes,” Jens finished her sentence, nodding. “Best not to look too closely. The whole place is riddled with ETI. Messes with your head.”

  “Which way, Sergeant?” one of the soldiers near the front asked. There was an edge of panic in his voice.

  “Downward,” she barked.

  The man in the midst of the soldiers, the one who Jens said had released them, groaned behind them as they descended. He walked half-supported by a much younger man who also did not appear to be a soldier.

  Cam stepped through the narrow cavern opening into the new, downward sloping tunnel and caught herself against the wall. Her sense of gravity shifted so that what appeared to be a steep incline now felt smooth and even before her.

  “We can’t make sense of it either,” Jens said tersely, watching her. “The gravity, the shapes—even the sounds. None of it makes sense.”

  Cam noticed Jens wiping her hands and wrists on the front of her pants. In the dim light, she assumed it was sweat, though the caverns were cool.

  They walked for some time, but part of Cam’s mind suspected they were not moving at all. The pale shade of the tunnel remained unchanged. The spiraled patterns in the stone pulled the eye in one direction and then another so that she had to concentrate on simply walking straight.

  “Why are we going down?” she asked after they had walked in silence for perhaps an hour. She felt this had been explained to her, but the thought had fled, driven out by the winding patterns and the strange glow.

  “It’s the only way we can go,” Jens explained. “Rine—that’s the doctor cowering there behind us—says they pulled the bodies they used to contaminate our res-pods up out of what he calls the Crèche. We want answers, and the passes up top are still held by the remaining Colonizers. Nowhere else to go, really.”

  “You keep saying remaining,” Cam slowed her gait. “How many are we talking?”

  Jens cast a look at Rine, who cringed.

  “There were a few hundred in the mines and garrisons originally,” Rine answered. “We brought a few hundred more from other Colonies to ambush your Fleet. But bringing up the bodies—seeding the res-pods to re-launch and … and poison your fleet-it didn’t just affect you,” His hands shook. “Even in death, the forms … The minds …”

  He shook his head as though to clear it.

  Cam snapped her fingers. “How could the Colonizers bring in reinforcements? They don’t have …”

  “Light-lines,” Jens interrupted, nodding her head. “Apparently they found a system of their own, linking their own worlds with this place. Likely engineered by whatever built these damn tunnels.”

  “These lines are not like yours,” Rine said, shaking his head. “You can’t go back through these. They only allow travel in one direction.”

  “They’re traps,” Cam whispered.

  Jens waved the comment away. “Whatever discipline or chain of command the Colonizers had down here, it was dissolving by the time Rine broke us out. There are still some knots holding the upper reaches, but everything else is chaos.”

  “Then why are we descending?” Cam pressed. “If there’s some sort of contagion in these caves, shouldn’t we be looking for a way out, trying to steal a ship, or something like that?”

  Jens shook her head so violently that a few red strands escaped the twine holding them back and whipped in front of her face.

  “The Fleet is gone,” she said. “I mean, the ships are still there, but whatever woke up in our pods, they killed everyone. If there’s something that powerful down here, we owe it to our dead to get all the answers we can and do something about it.”

  She wiped her hand on her pants again, and Cam realized suddenly that she was wiping blood away. Jens saw her stare and grimaced. “Primitive, but it seems to keep the worst effects of the caverns at bay. You’ll need one soon. These are just bracelets lined with razor wire. Unpleasant, but not as unpleasant as going mad.”

  Suddenly, Cam took a half step backward and looked around her. She stood with the soldiers in a curving tunnel that looked identical to the ones they had been passing through continually since they arrived.

  “The twins,” she said, “where are the twins?”

  Agnes and Perry were gone.

  Forty

  “It’s now! It’s now, Aggiz!”

  Aggiz heard Beka’s voice strong and clear but could not tell where it was coming from. He had left his post before the Brick and was lost in the twisting, sterile corridors of the ship. When, he wondered to himself, had he last seen something green and living?

  He remembered the dahlias his mother used to keep in the large blue bowl on the kitchen table. The image of the flower came back to him vividly now. He turned it over and over again in his mind as he stumbled through the ship.

  “Aggiz!” Beka’s voice followed him. “We’re going to be within contact in seconds!”

  He had left his pen-needle back in the science bay. Why had he left it there? Why had he left the bay? Whatever was using the Brick to communicate had departed. There was nothing left but the emptiness. The Brick was now completely cold.

  All of the voices within were gone.

  The dahlia was unfolding again in his memory. It was a slow-motion explosion lifted up from the dirt. It seemed significant right now—a pattern of life as organized energy, spun together of soil and water and light. The petals arched out and away from the core like the torn filaments of a supernova, the arched bits of matter of a dying star.

  “It’s here, Aggiz! We’re pushing through.�
��

  There was no path through the maze. Beka had explained it to him. They were making their own trail through the corpses of the ships and the creatures waiting within them.

  Aggiz felt them howling inside his skull, and the petals of the dahlia dissolved in his mind’s eye. They were passing more of them—more of the corrosive intelligences—than they had before. They were pushing through.

  Aggiz heard Beka screaming. She must have given herself the last injection, the medication pushed to beyond safe limits, an agonizing attempt to provide a mental shielding as they made a final break through the Fleet to the planets below.

  The ship-wide intercom cut out.

  There was no pain for him.

  There was …

  He felt as though his mind was a book and the ink of the pages was beginning to run. Words and phrases were melting together, memories and consciousness fusing and sliding away like parchment in the rain.

  He stumbled through swaying corridors.

  Someone stepped around a corner and caught his arm. Aggiz recognized a face with difficulty. It was the man from the res-pod. The body they had been searching for. There was a name, but it escaped him.

  “Damn it, Aggiz,” the man said through gritted teeth. The pain must be excruciating. The man was finding it difficult to stand. “Beka knew you wouldn’t take it.”

  He held out a syringe in a trembling arm.

  Aggiz pushed him away and continued down the corridor. The man took a few steps to follow before he crumpled to a groaning heap.

  Forms were swimming in the darkness outside the ship. Aggiz could almost see them. They swayed in black currents like streamers. They darted past one another, almost touching, coming together and then away, like dancers in a house of mirrors.

  That was what Beka had seen: they were all the same.

  There was only one ETI, over and over again, on each of the ships, its memory repeated in mind like the Brick in space.