First Fleet #1-4: The Complete Saga

by Stephen Case

  “That’s something we need to talk about, Cam.”

  He sounded like he was talking out of a box, Cam realized.

  “I’m using the Brick to find the girls,” he went on. “I can see them clearly with it, and I can see you a bit fuzzier. I can see the creature as well, the one I think brought you here, and I even have a sense of the things in the Fleet above. But I don’t see anyone else. You and Agnes and Perry – you’re the only ones who make any impression on the Brick.”

  His voice dropped. “Another left, just ahead. This one should curve downward sharply. Take a deep breath and keep your eyes off the walls.”

  “What do you mean, you’re using the Brick?” she asked. “How?”

  “Beka figured a way for me to interface with it. But the point is I don’t understand why the girls should be so bright in here but no one else.”

  Cam sighed heavily. The tunnel floor spiraled downward.

  “I don’t know for sure, Twalish. I should have told you a long time ago, but it didn’t matter. It was why I got out of the service.”

  “Eleanor explained this: necroeugenics. They were experimenting on you, Cam, when you regenerated. The tunnel branches again. Keep following the one going downward. That’s why you were so scared when the Clerke Maxwell showed up on our doorstep.”

  “Yes.” Cam stopped.

  “But why the girls?”

  “I don’t know, Paul. My genes? Yours? The environment in which they were raised? It doesn’t really matter now, does it?” She closed her eyes and spoke directly into the handle-mounted speaker. She needed to apologize. “I had been running for a long time. I thought Onaway was far enough out, a safe way to start over. And then when the girls came …”

  “I understand, Cam. I would have done the same thing.”

  She shook her head. “No, you wouldn’t have. That’s the point. You would have found some other way. You would have sacrificed yourself. I sacrificed you.”

  “It doesn’t matter, Cam.”

  “No, it doesn’t – because the thing still came for us. We’re still here. We didn’t escape.”

  “You’re close to them now, Cam. The girls. I’ve pulled as much power from the systems here as I can to get this signal to you, but I’m not sure how long you’ll be able to hear me.” As if in confirmation, a wash of static surged out of the speaker.

  Paul continued. “The tunnel will go straight for a while now, and then you’ll find a right-branching passage that will start going downward quick. You may have to climb for the final stretch. Then you’ll be at the Crèche, and it should be simple enough from there. The girls are waiting in its center.”

  Cam fought the urge to start off immediately. Instead she remained where she was, holding the weapon in front of her.

  “I can tell when you’re holding something back, Paul.”

  “Let me tell you, quickly, what I’ve learned,” Paul said, ignoring her comment. “Then you need to go get Agnes and Perry. They’re unharmed, but they’re scared. I thought I might be able to make contact with them directly, but I can’t.”

  “Okay.”

  “The creature – the ETI – the one that found you and the girls on Onaway: the reason they warp the human mind is because they warp space itself. I can see it from here. You’ve been sliding in and out of Sidespace passing down those tunnels.”

  He went on, “But all of the Grave Worlds – their entire three-dimensional surfaces – are only the perimeter. You’re now down into where they’re all connected. The center of this world is the center of all of them. And the human mind can’t really follow that, can’t process it or even perceive it. That’s why the Colonizer miners started going insane, I think, and why the Fleet’s initial assault into the tunnels fell apart.”

  Cam nodded, though Paul could not see. “That also explains how we were brought here. The creature carved a path through Sidespace like it was a living forge-ship.”

  “That’s on a bigger scale,” Paul agreed, “but yes, I think so. Making passages to and from Sidespace is natural for it. I can’t imagine how it sees the universe. It’s a higher-dimensional being.”

  Cam grunted. “You sound like a goddamned quantum topologist.”

  “Good enough.” Paul laughed dryly. “But it gets worse. You’re going to see the Crèche. It’s where the organic remains of previous generations of these creatures were, from what Rine explained. And the Colonizers robbed the graves. They seeded the Fleet res-pods with the organic materials they found. They didn’t know for sure what would happen, but they assumed the mind-warping effects would be propagated.”

  “Biological warfare.”

  “Right. With a biological agent they didn’t understand. It worked better – or worse – than they hoped. Whatever the res-pods spit out, they were smaller half-breed versions of the creature that brought you here. I can see them – like a hundred angry scars in the space above these worlds. If the one that brought you here bends space, these things rip it. They twist it and any human mind close enough gets ripped as well. They’re like knots in Sidespace.”

  “Poetic. How do you know all this?”

  “I told you. I can see it.”

  “Why are you telling me?”

  “So you’ll know, and so you’ll be able to explain to the others. I’m not sure how much longer I have here.”

  Cam sensed there was still something important he wasn’t telling her. By this time, though, she was anxious to be moving toward the twins again, the directions Paul had given burning like a map of fire in her mind.

  The line faded to static for several seconds. When Paul’s voice came back it sounded scared. “Are you still there?”

  “I’m here, Paul.”

  “Tell Agnes and Perry, when you find them, that I love them.”

  “I will.” She paused. “What about me, Paul?”

  “I don’t have to tell you, Cam. It was all a bright adventure with you. You gave me a world.”

  Her eyes burned. “And then took it away.”

  “I adore you, Cam. Now go get the twins.”

  She ran, waiting for Paul’s voice to come again and wondering whether she was out of range. She followed the directions he had given, trying to keep her eyes off the walls that now seemed to be twisting out of her sight as though seen through turbulent water.

  “If we get out of this, Paul,” she said, not knowing whether he could still hear her, “I’m going to marry you.”

  The response came faint through a snow of static. “Okay, Cam.”

  Then he was gone, and she ran on in silence. The stones bent closer, as though to consume her. She stumbled downward, at one point half-slipping, half-climbing down a steep scree of cold rock. Still the sides of the tunnels drifted nearer until it felt somehow they met before her and she was swimming through a fog of cool, blue stone.

  The Grave Worlds had swallowed her.

  Then she was beyond, and an abrupt sense of empty space brought her to a breathless halt.

  The thick stone fell away on either side to form spreading walls of a huge, spherical chamber so large it appeared she had descended all the way through the planet’s shattered crust to its hollow core, as though the planet itself was simply a broken shell sheltering this inner spherical world within.

  Cam thought about what Paul told her; if this were the case, she was somehow seeing the space simultaneously with the center of all the Grave Worlds.

  In the middle of the immense spherical chamber hung suspended a second, smaller sphere, its surface riven with cracks as though in re-creation of the world it was centered within. The whole surrounding chamber was suffused with the faint purple-blue glow that had illuminated the stones for her entire long journey downward.

  From the central sphere a soft yellow light filtered through its broken surface, as warm and unexpected as a campfire in a forested System biome.

  She couldn’t tell whether she was looking down at this interior central sphere or looking up at it like a
broken moon in a stone sky. There was no sense of up or down here, though her feet and internal equilibrium told her – at least at the point where she stood – down was toward the surface of the tunnel from which she had just emerged.

  The central sphere – the actual size and distance of which was impossible to judge – was tethered to the surrounding walls by what looked like gauzy filaments. The image came to Cam’s mind of a huge egg sack held within the center of a membranous web, and she shook the unpleasant image away violently, not wanting to consider what such a vision might indicate about the creature.

  It was only from those filaments descending to near where she stood that Cam was able to see they were actually ribbons of rock, carved or stretched into arching stone sinews spanning the space between the inner and outer globes.

  There was no doubt in Cam’s mind that the central sphere was what Paul called the Crèche and that was where she would find Agnes, Perry, and the creature.

  She crossed one of the ribbons of stone, feeling she walked an impossible pathway across the sky, to the stone hub hung in the middle of the cavern. The cracks that shattered its surface loomed as she approached. From within she could hear voices, and she quickened her pace.

  Passing through one of the largest of the cracks was like emerging into a smaller version of the chamber she had just entered. There, sitting against the curved stone sides of the interior, talking quietly as if they were burrowed in their room back at the habitation, were the twins.

  Cam shouted their names.

  The relief she felt was palpable, the sudden release of a tension that held her coiled for the past several hours. She dropped the plasma rifle and ran to them, taking them both in her arms.

  “What happened?” Cam pulled away and tried to study both their faces, tried to hold their faces between her hands simultaneously as she had when they were young. “Are you okay?”

  “We’re fine,” Perry said calmly, though she hugged back. “We followed her.” She pointed upward.

  The interior of the stone chamber was huge, though far smaller than the interior space it hung suspended within. The walls were covered with intricate patterning that rose in a spiral along the inside surface. Suspended above them and filling the bulk of the chamber’s dome was the shape that loomed up over the edge of the rock-burner on Onaway.

  Cam eyed it, her arms around the girls. In the diffuse light, which – like the blue glow of the tunnels she had passed through – seemed to emanate from the stones themselves, the creature was exposed in all its naked strangeness.

  She first thought of an immense spider, but the analogy was weak. It didn’t hold in Cam’s mind. Seen without the veil of smoke in which it had first appeared, the creature’s lines were difficult to follow.

  The legs – and from this angle, seen from below, everything but the head seemed to be legs, a twisting, knotted network of legs that branched and re-branched like roots –appeared to have the same property of the tunnels Cam passed through. It was difficult to see quite where they ended. Some of them bled or faded into the rock walls against which it was suspended.

  The head was clear enough though – angular and with eyes so wide it seemed the sky was staring down at her.

  “What is it?” Cam asked, tearing her gaze away. “What does it want?”

  “She doesn’t have a name,” Agnes said slowly, as though that answered the question. “She doesn’t need one. You wouldn’t either, if you were alone.”

  Neither of the girls seemed frightened, and they were obviously unharmed. Cam relaxed a bit, though she couldn’t fully shake the sense the creature above was a spider in the center of its world-web, watching them like prey.

  “But what is it?” Cam asked again. “Why did it bring us here?”

  “It’s a phoenix,” Perry said. “Like from mythology.”

  “Not a real phoenix,” Agnes put in. “Not, like, a bird. But that’s the closest word she can find in our mind.”

  “There is only ever one,” Perry went on. “They’re born here and they go out into the universe – to look for something or guard against something, I think. She can’t quite explain. But they always come back here when they get old, and then another one is born and takes its place.”

  “Only something went wrong,” Agnes said, leading Cam to where the slope of the rock walls met the level surface forming the floor of the chamber.

  There was rock debris here, and dust, as though something had shaken rubble from the cavern’s walls. The girls sat and pulled their mother down after them. The wall they leaned against was warm.

  “The chain was broken,” Agnes went on. “One never came home, and this one was born to look for her.”

  “But while she was gone, others came.” Perry pointed to a scarred row of stone segments above them.

  Cam realized what she had taken for patterns on the surface were actually the lips of chambers, perhaps as wide as her outstretched arms, covering the interior of the dome like honeycombs and extending above her head to where the bulk of the creature hid the roof of the chamber from view. Several places Perry indicated had been ripped open, exposing empty cavities beyond.

  “The Colonizers,” Cam said. “The miners.”

  “They took the bodies. Some of the bodies,” Agnes continued. “They used pods like the one that came to Station. They brought them back to life.”

  The creature above them shifted slightly, movement rippling through its thousands of legs like wind over a field.

  “Did it tell you all this?” Cam asked. Despite the creature’s immense presence, the weight of everything that had happened and the relief of finding the girls unharmed were catching up with her. The stones seemed soft against her back, and the two girls were nestled on each side as though they were reading together back at home. She yawned. “Why can’t it talk to me?”

  Perry shrugged. “She says it was too difficult. She tried, before we left Onaway. Talking to us is easier.”

  “So that’s the problem,” Agnes said, as if they were concluded. She crossed her arms and put her head down against Cam’s shoulder. “There’s all these dead ones brought back to life, but they’re all small and twisted, where there’s only supposed to be one.”

  “Your father told me some of this,” Cam said.

  The girls brightened at mention of their father.

  “Did you see him?” Perry asked.

  “Not exactly.” She was so tired. Cam leaned her head back against the sloping rock wall. “But he led me here. He was using the Brick to find you.”

  “We can feel him,” Agnes whispered. “But we can’t make him hear us.”

  Perry and Agnes burrowed against her. They were just children. They were cuddled together, during one of the long nights of Onaway, and they would all wake in the morning to the fading of a strange dream.

  “What does any of this have to do with us?” Cam heard herself asking.

  “That’s what we don’t know,” Perry’s voice seemed to come from far away. “She was looking for you because of the one that never came home. She says you know what happened. She says you can remember.”

  Fifty-One

  “It was unnecessary – indeed, futile – for you to kill him.” Rine spoke over his shoulder as they moved down a metal corridor lined with flickering strips of light.

  They were just below the surface of the planet, and the weirdly carved walls of the tunnels had given way to steel plating and passages clearly manmade. There were supposed to be dead alien cities down here, Beka had been told, but Rine was careful so they avoided those routes.

  Beka kept her silence.

  Since the procedure, they had heard nothing from Paul.

  She glanced over her own shoulder, beyond where Glaucon plodded silently behind them. The Clerke Maxwell waited like a curled beast in the distance, albeit a benevolent one. Beka could see the white curve of its hull where it was anchored at a docking spur much like the one it crashed into far below.

  They had
lifted it as close to the surface as they dared and anchored at a docking terminal from which Rine claimed they would be able reach a communications relay station just below the surface.

  It was strange how quickly that white hulk – scarred now from its entry into the crevasse – had begun to feel like home. The shipyard had always felt empty and somehow draining, but something, the time spent in their harried passage through the Fleet perhaps, made the Clerke Maxwell feel like a shelter.

  A shelter she was now, for the first time, leaving.

  Glaucon saw her looking back at the ship and smiled, his face as honest and impassive as always.

  “I said,” Rine repeated deliberately, “it was unnecessary to do what you did to him.”

  Beka could not read the tone in Rine’s voice. Her sister trusted him, which was enough for Beka, and he gave no indication that he meant to betray them. Indeed, in their situation, they all quickly came to realize there was little alternative but to pool the resources they had and find a way to survive. Still though, he remained alien to her, and she wasn’t sure what he was fishing for in his comments.

  “Yes,” she finally said. “I think it was necessary.”

  “He died.” Rine turned back toward her. It was obvious he had been waiting until they were off the ship to confront her. “He died in a great deal of apparent agony, if you will recall.”

  Beka pushed passed him. Rine made no move to stop her.

  Things inside Beka had been dying. She had been wounded, certainly, when she learned her sister was most likely dead, missing with the rest of the Fleet. But when they started killing Synthetics to find out what happened, certain parts of her – certain connections – started shutting down. She knew that now.

  It happened again when she shot Davis, then again when Tsai-Lui died, and yet again when they lost Aggiz. It wasn’t a conscious choice; it was a survival technique, like frostbite. You lost limbs so they wouldn’t hurt so much.