First Fleet #1-4: The Complete Saga

by Stephen Case

  Of course that didn’t matter to him. All that mattered was that, somehow, Cam and his daughters were here – now – and not, as he had imagined, hundreds of light-years away and safe.

  Finally, Paul spun toward Jens. “Is it true? Did you see them?”

  Jens nodded silently.

  The room was quiet. Paul stared them all down, as though daring them to again try to stop him leaving the ship. Instead of resuming his argument, though, he walked back to the low table around which they sat and took his place opposite Beka.

  “Tell me what it means,” he said.

  “What, Paul?”

  “Everything! Why did I see her face in the Brick? How can she hear them – hear the Brick – in her mind?”

  He slammed his fist on the table between them. “You’re the expert, damn it! You’re supposed to understand. Aggiz might have been able to explain it to me, but he’s dead.” His face was livid. “Maybe the old man would have been able to, but he’s gone too. Give me some answers, Beka!”

  Beka kept her voice calm. “I don’t have any, Paul.”

  “I might.”

  They turned toward Eleanor in surprise. She cleared her throat gently.

  “Tholan used to speak of a project,” she began, “that involved a fully-articulate human consciousness in the Brick. Not just a scan. Not just a memory. A sentient mind within the Brick.”

  Beka shook her head. “That wouldn’t be possible. It would take up too much space. There wouldn’t be room for memory scans.”

  Eleanor nodded. “And if any mind was inserted, it would be overwritten by any subsequent scans added to the Brick. Which is why it was abandoned. But if the Brick could not house a fully articulated human mind, the next best thing was to make a human mind more like the Brick – to attempt to adjust a human consciousness so it would interface directly with the Brick.”

  Paul stared at her. “What do you mean – ‘adjust’?”

  Eleanor sat beside Beka, her legs crossed and her hands folded in her lap. Her easy grace had returned. She looked as though she were discussing some minor political maneuvering on an inner-System world instead of a series of classified military experiments.

  “Necroeugenics,” she said. “Tweaking the cellular make-up of certain soldiers during the regeneration process. Working to tip the neural make-up toward something that would fall into resonance with the Bricks.”

  “‘They re-grew her,” Paul whispered. “At least once when she was in the service. She told me about it. You’re saying Cam was one of these experiments.”

  Eleanor shook her head. “I don’t know who the experimental subjects were. I don’t even know if the experiments were ever carried out. But if what she says is true, it appears as though they were and were partially successful in at least one case.”

  Donovan stirred from where he had been listening in the shadow of the Brick. “But what does that have to do with the creature?” he asked.

  “We already know the creatures the Colonizers planted on the Fleet wiped the Brick,” Beka pointed out.

  She was tired of this dialogue; she should be on the command deck, figuring out whether they could raise the ship. She needed to decide whether they were going to contact the Colonizers.

  But she went on. “That implies that they communicate in some related manner. When speaking through the Brick didn’t work, maybe it sought out another method. The point is, it’s trying to communicate—”

  “The point is,” Paul interrupted heatedly, “Cam and the girls are lost and I need to find them.”

  They were interrupted again by the faint klaxons they heard earlier. Beka glanced at Jens, who had her hand to her ear. Jens caught her eye and nodded: they had another signal from their mystery ship.

  Beka stood. It was time to make things happen.

  “Rine, you and Jens get to the command deck. Jens, I want to know whether we can get the ship in the air.” She turned to the doctor. “And I need you to figure out how far we are from the best place to send a message to the Colonizers.”

  Jens and Rine left the science bay together. Beka turned toward Eleanor and Donovan.

  “I want you two to stay down here,” she said. “If these creatures are trying to communicate, they may use the Brick.”

  Donovan looked doubtful, but Eleanor nodded.

  “And keep an eye on those two as well.” She motioned toward the pod in which Davis slept and also toward Paul, who had wandered over to where the Brick sat in darkness.

  Beka started out of the science bay, following Rine and Jens toward the command deck, but paused in the doorway and glanced toward Paul. Eleanor and Donovan had withdrawn to the far end of the bay, leaving him with his thoughts.

  The Brick reared up before him like a black wall, absolutely featureless. Beka watched him reach out to touch its exposed surface, finding it closer to his face than it appeared. The total emptiness of its surface fooled the eyes.

  She tried to imagine what he must be feeling. What if their positions were reversed? What would she have done if she believed Jens was safely back in System, only to suddenly find her here and lost just beyond reach?

  Beka sighed and walked toward him, uncertain what to say, yet feeling she must say something.

  “Paul,” she began.

  “It’s empty now,” he said softly, still facing the Brick. He spun toward her abruptly, his worn face more animated than Beka had seen it before. “I want you to put me into it.”

  She stared. “What?”

  “She said so herself.” He pointed an accusing finger across the bay at Eleanor. “The military had plans to do just that, but they couldn’t because the Brick didn’t have space.”

  Beka nodded cautiously. “To upload a fully sentient, fully articulated mind wouldn’t leave room in the Brick for anything else. And it wouldn’t be stable. There’s no way to protect something that large, inside the Brick. It would be overwritten as soon as more information was added.” She paused. “Or if the creatures blanked it again.”

  “But it’s empty now,” Paul said again, looking plaintively at Beka. “Would it work? Could you do it?”

  “The Brick normally stores memories,” Beka began, “a compressed slice of information encoding all a soldier’s life and personality. But they’re static; they don’t have active consciousness within the Brick. They’re just an image of the soldier’s mind. What you’re talking about …”

  She paused. “I would need to run some simulations. Some tests.”

  “Would it work, Beka?”

  Her mind had already engaged the technical aspects of the problem. She thought furiously, recalling everything she knew about parsing information and funneling it into the condensates of the Brick.

  In theory, in theory, it was possible, given enough space.

  In theory it would even be workable with the standard memory scanners they had on board. Those would simply need to be recalibrated for a deeper scan, peeling back the neural layers one by one in order to translate and rebuild those patterns within the Brick. The process however—

  “It would kill you, Paul,” she said flatly.

  Paul blinked.

  “Even if it didn’t work,” she explained quickly, finding herself falling into Aggiz’s speech patterns as her thoughts raced ahead of her words, “which it might not – the process of extracting and full memory scan (not just a snapshot, not just a slice) but getting the amount of neural traction necessary to rebuild you actively in the Brick – would destroy the original neural pathways.”

  Paul was silent.

  “You would be brain-dead, Paul,” she finished. “It’s a deep scan. There is no way to pull it back out of the Brick. There wouldn’t be a mind to come back to when this was all done.”

  “But it might work?”

  Beka nodded slowly. “It might.”

  “But what’s the point, Paul?” Beka hadn’t realized Donovan had joined them beside the Brick. He looked at Paul with what Beka imagined was a physi
cian’s concern. “What do you hope to accomplish dead?”

  “Communication,” Paul whispered. “I won’t be dead in there. And I may be able to communicate with Cam and the creature. I can find the girls. I can lead them home.”

  “You’re making some pretty spectacular leaps there.”

  Beka watched them both for a moment, feeling something she couldn’t quite describe. They were both strangers to her when she left the shipyard, but now the three of them had a bond, forged in the hell of passing through the Fleet to this place. She had promised herself she would get them – that she would get her crew – safely to these planets. Now that it had been accomplished, what was her responsibility?

  Paul ignored Donovan and turned again to Beka. She found she could not meet his eyes.

  “Do it, Beka,” he said. “Now.”

  “It’s suicide, Paul,” Donovan pressed.

  The surface of the Brick stretched out before them like a black sea. Beka searched for her reflection within it, but saw nothing.

  What would she do if Jens were still lost? To what lengths would she go to find her? The old Beka would have given excuses or at the very least asked for more time, more information, more opportunities to run simulations and tests. The old Beka would have stalled, perhaps, or asked her superiors, the senior entanglement experts back in System, how to proceed.

  The old Beka was gone.

  “Okay, Paul,” she said finally. “Donovan, get the scanner.”

  Forty-Nine

  Rine lagged behind Jens as they threaded a path back through the interstices of the ship. He watched the spill of the red hair between her shoulders, the steady pacing of her booted legs on the deck plates. He knew what he felt; it was a familiar ache in his chest.

  It was responsibility.

  He had felt it often before, tending the broken forms of the young soldiers in the first, tentative measures of resistance against the System picket forces surrounding New London. They were batted back like flies, and he had spent long, fruitless hours with other Hetmantate healers, working to mend the wounds of battle that System technology would have repaired in minutes. He had seen his fill of futile deaths long before the call came summoning him to the Grave Worlds.

  He was already an old man then, and he had fallen in love with the helplessness of a hundred patients before. It was this mingling of love and responsibility, the feeling that to let even a single one of them die – and they had, so many of them, died – was to fail them all.

  “You’re slowing me down.”

  She was paused halfway up an access ladder. He had fallen further behind, lost in his thoughts.

  “I do not think your sister’s instructions required us to remain together,” he answered, feeling the full weight of his decades. “If you go ahead to the command deck, I am certain I can find my way.”

  Jens waited, smiling slightly, and Rine had an overpowering feeling that she was dead already, that he was seeing only a particularly sharp memory of her now.

  For a moment he considered confessing.

  “What?” she asked as he approached, her brow furrowing.

  Rine forced his expression into what he hoped was a studied neutrality. He had to remain objective, and he had to let this objectivity show on his features. He would lie. If she asked – if anyone asked – he would lie.

  He remembered her form when it was pried from the wreckage of her metal suit and brought into the caverns. He had healed her, but he had also taken the samples he was ordered to.

  And then – when the other samples came, those brought up from the remains in the Creche – he had done as ordered as well: he combined them. He gave his superiors the hybrid material needed to seed the captured res-pods.

  What would she do if she understood, if she realized the creatures that had destroyed the ships above were – in some genetic sense he was loathe to fully consider – aspects of herself?

  “What is it?”

  His mouth was dry. She waited on the ladder, though she had not begun to climb.

  “I was considering the technology,” he said. Half-lies were always better if possible. “The systems that made this possible.”

  “System technology isn’t to blame here,” she answered defiantly, misinterpreting his words. “The res-pods were never built to do what the Colonizers did with them.”

  He noted with remorse that she did not include him in that accusation. He had gained her trust. Was it simply because he had nursed her back to health? In any case, it was undeserved.

  Fearing she might still be able to perceive the emotions warring beneath his features, he pushed forward with the argument, eager to distract his own attention from the possibility of confession.

  “And what were the res-pods designed to do, exactly?” he said. He was close enough to see the smoothness of her skin, and he wondered briefly what it would have appeared like, newly grown and reborn within a pod’s womb. “Individuals are more than networks of cells and information structure. They are not meant to be copied like pages from a book.”

  “I would be dead, Rine,” Jens said slowly. “Not this last time. Before. Before I ever came here. A proximity mine near one of the Reservation Worlds. Asphyxiated in my suit.” She turned toward him. “Res-pods keep soldiers alive.”

  The feeling returned. It was a sense that Jens was already dead, that she had always been dead, that Rine was speaking with a corpse.

  “They hide the price of war,” he muttered, terrified.

  She touched his shoulder and pulled herself against him for a moment, leaning into him as she had when her legs were healing and they had paced up and down the length of cell in the caverns. He was too shocked to respond. She kissed him once on the side of his face, as a girl would her grandfather.

  He would have told her then. He would have asked her forgiveness – for what he had done with her, for what he had done to her – but at that moment a scream ripped up and down the corridors of the ship, splintering his thoughts and making him grasp convulsively for her hand.

  It was agony, flooded through the bulkheads and ringing out into the waste spaces beyond.

  “Come on,” Jens said, moving back into action, grasping the ladder and flowing up it. “We need to find out what’s going on.”

  Rine followed slowly, wishing only to be done with it, to know for certain who was dead, who was dying, and whether at the end of the day he would join them.

  Fifty

  Paul’s voice crackled through the butt of the rifle slung across Cam’s back.

  She had been slowing for a while now – sprinting for as long as she was able, then finally giving up and lapsing into a ragged trot. There was a time, years ago, when Cam had been able to keep up a flat-out run for hours and a brisk jog for most of a day.

  She remembered the arching tracks of training bases in the artificial moons of System, the forced marches always bringing you back to where you started along the tiny curving circumference of the natural satellites, some so small they had been issued magnetic boots to keep their footsteps from propelling them off the surface.

  Cam felt right now she might have been on one of those tiny moons again, circling over and over, for all the progress she had made so far.

  The voice brought her up short. “Paul?” she answered.

  “Gods, Cam!” His voice shook. “Hold on. I’ve been listening everywhere, and I’m hearing a lot. It’s hard to focus. It’s dark in here.”

  “Where are you?”

  “It doesn’t matter right now. I’m close enough. I found the girls.”

  She doubled over with a sob of relief and exhaustion. If they were with him, if he had them, she would collapse on the floor and cry and perhaps never move again. There would be no need.

  “They’re with you, then?” Cam asked. “They found their way back to the ship?”

  “No. But I can see your location, and I can see theirs as well.” His voice sounded flat, as though the depth to which the transmitter was broadca
sting stripped it of its normal timbre. “I can lead you to them.”

  “Are the girls together?” she asked. “How far are they from me?”

  “It’s hard to tell, exactly,” Paul said. “But it doesn’t seem far. Keep walking down the tunnel you’re in. How do you feel?”

  Cam resumed her gait. “Tired. Sick. Confused.”

  “Rine and Jens said the tunnels have that effect on you. Don’t focus on trying to understand how they’re arranged in space.” Paul paused. “I can see the network now. It bends in directions you can’t see.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I’m not sure.” He paused again. “I think it’s tied into Sidespace, somehow, like the light-lines. There are half a dozen of these Grave Worlds, but they’re all the same at the core. I think they’re all connected through these tunnels.”

  Cam had learned the disorientating effects of the tunnels reduced if she kept her eyes fixed on the surface directly before her or on the movement of her own feet. Even with the realization, though, it had been impossible to maintain. Instead, she was constantly scanning ahead of her for any sign of the missing girls.

  “Paul, what’s going on up there?”

  “Hold on. There’s going to be a slight turn-off to your left coming up. Take it, and then take the first branching to the right.”

  Cam obeyed.

  “They’re trying to get help, I think.” He briefly described the situation on the ship and the distress message Beka and Rine were attempting to send, then paused again. “Honestly, I haven’t been paying much attention. I’ve been trying to track down the girls.”

  “They can read the Brick, Paul,” Cam said. Now that she knew where she was going – or rather, had instructions to follow – she broke again into a run. Paul’s voice followed her, coming from the rifle still strapped to her back.

  Apart from the flatness of his voice, she could almost imagine he was following just behind her, guiding her with his instructions. “I mentioned this to you earlier, but there wasn’t time to explain. The thing – the creature, whatever it is, the ETI – communicates the same way. It said something about needing to communicate. That’s why we were brought here. I think that’s why it wants the girls.”