First Fleet #1-4: The Complete Saga

by Stephen Case

  After several minutes, pausing periodically to listen to the moan of rivets and bulkheads as the ship settled into its perch, she reached the central command deck. She encountered no one along the way, leading her to believe that the ship was indeed abandoned or that Rine had been correct and it was tainted with one of the bodies the Colonizers had used as weapons. There were still lights on in the command deck, though many of the screens that were its windows to the outside world were bathed in static.

  A man lay on the floor between one of the rows of consoles, groaning softly. Strapped to the command chair itself was a woman—

  Jens swore softly.

  “Beka. My god. Beka, what are you doing here?”

  Forty-Two

  Admiral Tholan stared into the white glare of the dwarf star around which the military shipyard orbited as though willing it to blink. Its angry heat on his skin reminded him that he did not stand before screens projecting a view piped down through hundreds of meters of bulkheads: these were true windows looking out onto empty space.

  The shipyard had changed its orientation so that the huge transparent wall of his office now faced the star. His shadow lay sharp and dark on the wide desk behind him.

  He had read the reports. Now he pondered them.

  Cam Dowager was no longer on Onaway.

  It had been a surprise, to be sure, when the ship sent to recover the res-pod from the Fleet had encountered an individual claiming to be Dowager. The name had immediately sent up red flags on all the military channels. Dowager had been AWOL for some time, and she was one of the last people the military wanted to lose track of. There was some confusion regarding the actual identity of this individual. But before Tholan had a chance to clarify things, Dowager had disappeared again.

  This time, however, she had taken an entire ship. The Clerke Maxwell, instead of returning with the Fleet survivor to the shipyard, had been ordered to dump the survivor’s memories en route. And whatever that survivor had revealed, it was gone now, along with the ship itself. The best that military intelligence could tell was that the Clerke Maxwell had continued to the last known coordinates of the Fleet and collapsed the light-line behind it, marooning it and any answers it held.

  Tholan turned away from the star and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

  “Admiral.” A face appeared over his desk.

  “Yes, what it is?”

  “The forge-ship is docked.”

  Tholan sighed and nodded. He hated traveling aboard forge-ships, the vessels that carved the light-lines through sidespace. Even as heavily shielded as their reality-curdling engine cores were, being near one always set his teeth on edge. But if he wanted answers, he was going to have to use a forge-ship to tunnel a new line to the Fleet’s final coordinates.

  He keyed a communication channel to the forge-ship, and another face appeared in the space above the desk, this one clearly lined and ragged-looking. Tholan frowned. The forge-ship engineer would need to be replaced soon. They never lasted long.

  “How long will it be until the ship is ready to forge a new line to the Perseus Limb?” Tholan asked.

  “That depends, sir,” the face answered, blinking bulging eyes slowly. “The engine’s been testy lately.”

  “What do you mean?” Tholan furrowed his brows. He knew what formed the core of a forge-ship engine, so he did have some idea of the implications of such a statement.

  “She’s always a mite temperamental,” the engineer explained, “but something big lately has been giving her fits. Give me and my men a few hours, and we’ll try to have her sorted.”

  Tholan understood what this man meant. These things were not an exact science. The engineer would likely be dead before the forge-ship departed again anyway.

  Along with the existence of surviving Synthetics, the workings of a forge-ship were among the military’s best-kept secrets. But Cam Dowager knew—or she had guessed at one point—which now made finding the Clerke Maxwell about much more than the fate of the First Fleet alone.

  “There’s more.”

  Tholan glanced back at the face. He had forgotten for a moment that the engineer’s holographic visage was still there.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “We might have some idea what riled Clara up.”

  The previous engineer, Tholan recalled, had referred to the forge-ship’s engine core as Clara. Tholan found the personification understandable but distasteful.

  “Yes?” Tholan prodded.

  The face blinked again, the bulbous eyes retracting noticeably as the lids closed over them. “From the data we got—and we’ve compared it to a few other forge-ships, we all felt it—it looks as though there was a new tunnel run. Someone else was, um, forging a light-line.”

  Tholan sat down. “That’s not possible.”

  “That’s what I said,” the engineer agreed. “All our forge-ships are docked, as per your orders, until we figure out what happened to the Brick and the Fleet. But there it was. Something, somewhere, carving a tunnel through space.”

  Tholan turned from the projected face and looked back at the glaring white star. The forge-ships and their engine cores were the only means humanity had for building their non-relativistic transportation system through space. The Colonizers did not have the capacity, and every forge-ship in the Fleet was accounted for. The coincidences—the Brick blanking, Cam Dowager reappearing and now this, an unknown excursion into sidespace from an unknown source—were too many too fast.

  Something was happening. These were no coincidences.

  “Get her settled down,” Tholan said, slipping into the engineer’s idiom. “We leave today. One way or another, we’re going to get to the bottom of this. Clear me a line to the Fleet.”

  Tholan heard the tone that indicated the transmission with the engineer was cancelled. He did not turn. He continued to stare at the baleful star.

  Bodies in motion, he said to himself.

  There were answers out there, he knew, but right now they were as heavy and unseen as the heart of an angry star.

  First Fleet Part IV

  Memory

  Forty-Three

  The flesh of space groaned around the forge-ship. Tholan felt it through the hull, felt the heaviness of quantum foam, the tensions of space itself, resisting the ship’s motion.

  There was a time, Tholan knew, when ships had moved across the emptiness of space in perfect silence. They still did, on occasion. They still, and for short distances, skidded across the skin of space. Very short-range shuttles in inner System did, for example. The courier ships that transported men and materials between a fleet’s capital ships. Soldiers in heavy-suits.

  Tholan recalled from his own days as a soldier the feeling of moving through space in a suit: the absolute freedom of knowing that you could, in theory, continue forever on your set trajectory. There was a comfort in the feeling of simple objects in motion, as poised and uncomplicated as billiard balls on a frictionless surface.

  But that was crawling. That was inching across the surface of space. To reach anywhere, to move faster than light, one burrowed through its flesh.

  The forge-ships bored the path that other vessels could follow. They spun the filigree that spread across space like webs and bound every planet and moon within System as well all the habitable worlds and stations beyond. Pushing through space – instead of only passing along its skin – was not always smooth.

  Yet, this journey was different. The forge-ship strained, the motion more violent than Tholan had experienced before. It was almost as if he were on the deck of an ancient sailing ship at sea, lashed by a storm. Space was not simply sheering away from the bulkheads of the forge-ship; it was actively resisting. The wailing of the hull pushing through space set his teeth on edge.

  He pressed the spot on his desk that would send a message to the engineer working at the forge-ship’s core. Within a few seconds, a pasty face came into view in the space above the desk.

  “Admiral.”
/>   “What’s happening?” Tholan asked.

  “We may need to shut her down and run some additional diagnostics.”

  The desk in his quarters aboard the forge-ship was identical to the one in his office on the shipyard. Tholan studied its polished black surface, visible through the translucent holograph of the engineer. “Is it the engine?” he asked.

  The face nodded. “She’s running hot.”

  He was not the engineer Tholan had spoken to from the shipyard. That engineer was almost certainly dead by now. They lived brief lives that close to the engine.

  But with the Brick dead, it meant the previous engineer would not live again. His memories, his experiences – those were lost forever.

  “We don’t have time for another stall,” Tholan told him. “The Second Fleet is waiting for us to get this line run and anchored.”

  “I understand, sir.” For a moment, the engineer’s pale, almost leprous hand entered Tholan’s view as the man scratched at his cheeks. “But we’ve never seen anything like this before. The engine …”

  The engineer paused.

  “Yes?” Tholan prompted.

  “You ought probably come down to see for yourself, sir.”

  Tholan suppressed a shudder. He had been to the core of forge-ships before, but never for long and never more often than absolutely necessary. And never without paying the price of jagged, broken dreams for weeks afterward.

  As if anticipating his hesitation, Tholan felt the slight lurch of an exit from Sidespace and the slow pull toward a vertical orientation as the ship resumed its spinning in normal space. They could not be at their destination already. The engine must be in worse shape than the engineer was letting on.

  “Why have we stopped?” Tholan barked.

  The engineer’s face disappeared from the space over Tholan’s desk for a moment. When it reappeared, it was wearing an anxious frown that made the man look even more grotesque.

  “I’m not sure, sir. We’re working on it.” He repeated his view that Tholan should come down to see the situation for himself.

  “Fine,” Tholan said. “Fine. I’ll be down there shortly.”

  He broke the connection and stood.

  Tholan tried, for a moment, to recall what it felt to have one’s body embraced by the gravity of an entire world. It should not have been different from the sensation he had now as he planted his feet against the floor of his quarters. Physics said that centripetal gravity was indistinguishable from mass-induced gravity, from the gravity of a world, but somehow the bones knew. A world bent time and space. That was real gravity. What held his feet to the floor now was simply spinning in darkness.

  The climb up to the center of the ship seemed to take an hour. There were few personnel this deep within the vessel. Forge-ships did not carry many soldiers anyway, and the few that were on board waited in their barracks near the ship’s skin, close to the heavy-suit bays.

  At the top of a ladder, Tholan paused. The hatch above opened into the ship’s main axis. Simulated gravity was weaker here, and it would be nearly nonexistent once inside. This was the final shielded bulkhead between him and the engine.

  He took a deep breath and keyed the door open.

  A wave of heat washed over him, along with a dizzying, sickly-sweet smell of decay overlaid with preserving chemicals.

  He pushed himself beyond the hatch and floated up into the cavernous, ovoid central chamber of the forge-ship, its long axis oriented along the length of the ship. Steam billowed around him, making it difficult to see in any direction and masking the far walls of the chamber.

  Someone drifted toward him through the fog.

  “Admiral, sir, if you’ll follow me.”

  It was one of the sub-engineers, the half-dozen or so crewmen who lived in the interior of the ship and assisted the engineer. They tended to last longer than the engineer did, having less direct contact with the central core. They also represented the pool from which the new engineer was always chosen.

  Tholan trailed the figure upward into the chamber. A huge network of wires and cables stretched across its center, like a loose braid of metallic vines or roots floating along the central axis of the forge-ship. The sub-engineer twisted and turned, weaving through them, heading toward the absolute center of the chamber. Some of the cables were as thick around as his arm.

  Tholan followed less deftly, uncomfortable as always in this area of his ship.

  The huge braid of cables thinned out as they pushed deeper into them, the cables decreasing in diameter and changing in nature from thick, shielded wires to hair-like transparent threads carrying visible pulses of light.

  At the center of the braid they formed a gossamer net of threads linking the thicker, exterior weave of cable to a single shape at the absolute center of the ship.

  It was an arm.

  “I’ll let him know you’re here.” The sub-engineer disappeared back into the tangle of cables.

  Tholan swore under his breath. This was calculated. The engineer was trying to prove a point by making Tholan wait in the shadow of the one thing he knew would make the admiral most ill at ease.

  The arm squirmed, writhing, twisting.

  It was huge, nearly as long as Tholan was tall, and as thick around as a man’s waist. Besides its size, its shape clearly showed that it was inhuman. There were too many joints, for one thing, and the skin was pale grey with ribbons of blue that seemed to shift as the arm moved. Where a hand might have been, several appendages sprouted and terminated in the cluster of threads that linked the limb to the web of wires. A similar cluster sprouted from the arm’s other end.

  “She’s never thrashed like this,” the engineer said, coming up behind Tholan. Paler in person, with limbs nearly as long and thin as the cables he moved between, he trailed his own network of threads emerging from the base of his skull, identical to those linked with the grey limb.

  “You brought me down here to see this?” Tholan asked.

  Tholan had seen the central node of the forge-ship before, though few others had. The functioning of the forge-ships was known, apart from their tiny crews of engineers, only to the top levels of System military.

  The ability to rip light-lines through space was not, as almost everyone assumed, a purely technological innovation. It was biological.

  It was based on bodies.

  “Do you know how many of the Grey Limbs we have, Admiral?” the engineer asked. He had positioned himself between the admiral and the arm.

  “One for each forge-ship in the fleets,” Tholan muttered.

  The sight of the arm had, as it always did – as Tholan knew it would – brought a wave of memories. They were not his own. It had taken Tholan years to piece together the story of whose memories they were and why they surfaced each time he was forced to venture into a forge-ship engine.

  The light-lines were built on bodies.

  No, Tholan corrected himself silently. Not bodies.

  Just one body.

  Over and over.

  “She writhes like this if we get too close to another forge-ship,” the engineer said. “They feel each other, you see. They reach for each other in space. But all the other forge-ships are docked.”

  Tholan was impatient. They could have had this conversation over intra-ship communications. “I understand what you’re implying. Your predecessor hinted at this before we left the shipyard, that there was someone else running light-lines. I assure you, the Colonizers haven’t the capability. If they did, they would have spilled beyond the Reservation Worlds long ago.”

  The limb flexed again.

  For a moment the pale light of the forge-ship’s core was replaced with the blue-white glow of ammonia ice under starlight.

  Tholan gritted his teeth over a wash of memories.

  The cold bite of a comet’s surface gnawed beneath him, along with a rising fear. A ring of suited humans surrounded him. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t escape.

  “Not the Colonizers, si
r.” As though beckoned, the engineer turned toward the thrashing arm. Tholan looked away from the back of his head, from the peeling whiteness that marked all engineers. “I know we don’t live long down here, sir,” he went on, his back turned, “but we live longer than you realize, in directions you can’t see. We live in the memories.”

  The ring of suited figures halted, but one was close enough to see clearly. He shouldn’t have been able to see faces at this distance, in this darkness, but he could. Her eyes were wide, and he could almost understand what she was trying to say to him.

  Tholan shook his head to clear it.

  The engineer had turned toward him again, watching. “That’s why I wanted you down here, Admiral. She’s more awake now than I’ve ever seen her, and she won’t be driven any farther. She pulled us out of Sidespace. We can’t tunnel all the way to the original terminus.”

  “How close are we?”

  The engineer touched the arm’s grey skin. “We’re anchored to the mass of a brown dwarf a dozen light-years from the target.”

  “That’s as close as we can get?”

  “It looks that way.”

  Tholan rolled a curse around in his throat. With the original light-line collapsed, transporting the Second Fleet to the Perseus Limb required running a new line. But if this was as far as the line could reach, the numerical superiority of the Second Fleet was useless.

  There were only a handful of jump-ships in the Second Fleet, but they couldn’t ferry an entire armada across the final distance. It meant Tholan would face whatever was on the Grave Worlds with only a few vessels instead of an entire fleet.

  He swallowed the curse and turned to leave.

  “Admiral, do you realize what this means?” the engineer called after him.

  Tholan pushed through the web of wires without answering.

  “It means she’s not alone!” he shouted. “It means there’s another somewhere out there. Somewhere near.”

  Perhaps the engineer, bonded as he was with the scrap of flesh that powered the ship’s drive through Sidespace, found this an exhilarating thought. Tholan did not, and he left the core with set jaw and stony silence.