First Fleet #1-4: The Complete Saga

by Stephen Case

  The forms walked slowly toward the center of the circle, keeping their positions relative to each other like they were surrounding a wounded but still dangerous animal, as Cam knew they were.

  They swept heat-cleavers slowly, on maximum spread, boiling the ice into armies of angry ghosts that marched up into the night. Someone farther down the surface held up a gloved hand to indicate he had found something.

  Leave it alone, Cam screamed silently. Don’t do this.

  But no one was listening.

  She could not see what they were looking at, but she saw the nearest figures raise their weapons. Their shots were completely silent, the impact felt only up through the soles of her boots into her feet and knees. But she could feel the broiling pain and anger that bloomed up in response, the cold helplessness, and it nearly knocked her to her knees.

  She watched them pull the body from the ice – the immense head and the meters and meters of tangled legs seeming to stretch into a thousand directions even as she watched – and then move it into the waiting vessel.

  Cam shook herself and the memory shifted, falling into new shapes. Now she was waking up in agony in a metal coffin smelling of formaldehyde. Now, again in a glass tube suspended from the ceiling of an immense lab. Then once more beneath the smoothly curving surface of a res-pod.

  They re-grew me from my fucking legs, Twalish.

  The scenes drained away. She found herself on the floor of the Crèche, sweating and trembling. Agnes held her head and stroked her forehead while Perry looked on.

  “She’s trying to help you remember,” Agnes said softly.

  Cam rose to a sitting position and ran fingers through her short-cropped hair. “I don’t think I want to remember. What the hell was I looking at?”

  “What did you see?” Perry asked.

  “I’m not sure. I was on a comet, and they dug one of the creatures out of the ice. Then I saw myself being regenerated, over and over.”

  The figure above looked down on them like an impossible chandelier. Its eyes were immense and unfathomable.

  “You saw the one that came before her,” Agnes ventured, glancing upward. “The one it was sent to find. The one that never came home.”

  Cam stood and walked a few unsteady paces to the entrance to the Crèche. From the opening in the stones she stared out over the gulf spanned by the gauzy ribbons of rock.

  “You’re right, Agnes.” She turned to Perry. “I think I know what I saw, but I didn’t want to believe it.”

  “You know what you know,” Perry said.

  Cam nodded. “I do, now.” The memories bubbled up like pockets of air trapped in the depths, dislodged by the plunging chaos of the vision. “I only remembered being regenerated once. I didn’t lie to your father about that.”

  She stared down at her hands. “But there were other times, before that. They were blocked, somehow, I think …” She trailed off, flexing her hands absently. “I think I’m older than I realize.”

  “Why did they do it to you?” Agnes asked.

  “I was on the original team that found the creature,” Cam said. Her voice sounded tired to her own ears, as though the years she just discovered had been added to it all at once. “I must have said something then, shown some sort of affinity. They realized I could be used to communicate. Each time I regenerated, they were there, waiting to see if the changes they made were enough. And they kept me from remembering.”

  “But you escaped,” Perry said.

  “Or they got sloppy.” Cam shrugged. “Time passed. I left the service. I found your father and tried to start over.”

  “You said you could hear the Brick,” Agnes pointed out.

  “It must use the same frequency. The same resonance. Something. That’s why it blanked the Bricks, right? It was trying to use them to communicate.” Cam pointed toward the creature. “When that didn’t work, it found me.”

  “Found us,” Perry said.

  The creature above them was moving now, drawing in its legs like a million snakes returning to their nest. Its head rose slightly.

  “That’s the other thing,” Cam said wearily. “What happened to the one that never came home. I saw that too. I remember.”

  Perry and Agnes waited.

  “They butchered it,” she whispered. “Carved it up. They used res-pods to create more of its tissue when they ran out. They knew it could fold space.” She took a deep, shuddering breath. The legs above continued to coil. “They put a piece at the center of each forge-ship. That’s it. That’s how they work. That’s how we drive holes through space.”

  Agnes wrinkled her nose in disgust. Perry continued to stare.

  Silence wrapped around the three of them.

  “So what do we do now?” Cam finally asked.

  Perry and Agnes both looked upward. “She says it’s time to go,” Agnes whispered. “Now that you know. Now that she knows. She says it’s time to face the Fleet.”

  *

  This time, Cam did not feel plunged into darkness when the creature moved space around them. Instead it was as though the curving walls of the cavern melted into the spanning, writhing legs of the creature – those million legs a sparkling, living wall of light surrounding and enveloping them. In another moment they had faded or withdrawn to reveal an even stranger sight: soft blue light and a foggy expanse through which the outlines of machinery were visible.

  Cam’s hair lifted off her brow. One of the twins giggled.

  “We’re in space!” Agnes shouted.

  The creature still hung like a web above them, but now it was enmeshed in a much larger web of wires and cables running through the center of the chamber in which they found themselves. It crawled inward, its huge head pushing forward through the network of wires like an animal burrowing into underbrush.

  Cam could see its body clearly, but she still had no clearer idea of its anatomy. It seemed almost fluid, the way it moved, with only the huge, angled and somehow snakelike head providing a solid point of reference. Everything surrounding it looked, in one moment, a shifting mass of legs, and in another, a multi-segmented exoskeleton that bent around it like glass.

  “She’s been looking for this place,” Perry said. She drifted at Cam’s elbow. “She’s been searching a long time. She couldn’t find it, until she saw it in your mind.”

  Cam had trained in zero-g. She spun evenly, scanning the reaches of the room around her, while the girls tumbled end over end, delighted and dancing. They had never been outside of a planet’s embrace.

  “I don’t remember this place,” Cam said. “I don’t even know where we are.”

  “You are at the core of a forge-ship,” a man said, rising like a shade out of the fog below them.

  Perry and Agnes both screamed, less from surprise than the horror of the man’s ruined visage. Cam used one arm to level her plasma rifle and the other to expertly grab Perry mid-spin and bring them both to a halt with her opposite momentum.

  “What are you?” Cam demanded.

  The man spread his hands. “I am an engineer.”

  He was tethered to a long tangle of wire that emerged from the back of his neck and trailed away downward, almost lost in the mist, to loop back around and join up with the network extending above their heads. His skin was so white it looked translucent, but what had caused both girls to scream was his face. It was a wasted, pale ruin. Skin hung from it in long ribbons, and pieces flecked away like paper as he spoke.

  “Are you dying?” Agnes whispered.

  The man nodded.

  “Is it radiation?” Cam glanced upward. The creature was nearly hidden in the dense cluster of cables overhead, some nearly as thick as the trunks of the modified conifers of Onaway. She had no idea what the creature’s tolerances were, and there was no way to know it wouldn’t take them someplace safe for it but deadly for them.

  “It is loss of cohesion,” the man said, trailing the final word off into a moan. “We live and die in the shadow of the core. Its geometri
es twist and untwist around us, washing against us like surf against sand.”

  Agnes was still drifting upward, toward the forest of cables overhead.

  “Are there others on board?” Cam asked, holding her weapon trained on him. “Where are we?”

  The man blinked bulbous eyes and gave a deep shuddering cough. “Most of the crew left with the admiral,” he said, when he finally caught his breath. “We are at the edge of the Rills, near the Shallows. I cannot remember the coordinates.”

  “She’s found it, Mom!” Agnes called. “It’s here!”

  The engineer looked toward Agnes and caught a glimpse of the creature disappearing into the mass of wires above. His eyes widened and he wailed, a deep hollow cry that set Cam’s teeth on edge. “She is here!” The wires at the rear of his skull twitched, jerking him like a fish at the end of a wire. “I hear her! I know! I know!”

  His skin began to come away faster, shivering away from hands and arms like flakes of snow as he beat them against his head.

  Cam thumbed the rifle to minimum intensity and fired downward, propelling her and Perry toward the immense tangle of wires Agnes had now nearly reached. The cables parted before them as though alive, and Cam saw the incredibly long legs of the creature twisted among them as well, so thickly that it was impossible to tell where the wires ended and the creature began.

  In the center, the face of the creature was regarding a grey mass of flesh. Cam realized with a start that it was – although bloated, distended, and nearly dead – the same form as the creature’s larger limbs.

  “This is it,” Cam whispered. “This is one of your kind.”

  The creature turned its face toward her, like the revolution of an orphaned moon hanging above a dead world. Cam could read nothing in the alien expression, but she felt unmistakably a wash of sorrow.

  “That man,” Agnes pointed back the way they had come, “and all these wires. It’s all to try and communicate. To make these ships go.”

  “To forge the light-lines.” Cam shuddered. “They were charnel ships, all along. We built our light-lines on its body.”

  “We don’t need wires,” Perry said.

  From the lack of gravity, Cam knew they must be at the central axis of the forge-ship, though she did not consciously recall ever having been in one before. She felt the bulk of the ship spinning around her, as though the surfacing memories and accompanying vertigo were embodied in the unseen, rotating shell of steel she knew must be beyond this chamber.

  She was dizzy. The memories beginning to break in on her, the realization she had been regenerated multiple times, perhaps dozens of times, all the way back to the beginning – and that it was because of these creatures, because she had been on the team that captured the first – were still shaking the foundations of her thought.

  It meant one of the three pillars on which System predominance rested – the light-lines – was created specifically in response to that single encounter. Perhaps the res-pods as well. Maybe human regeneration was simply something developed alongside efforts to keep pieces of the creature alive.

  And had been used to create – to augment – her.

  Cam shuddered again.

  “We’re connected,” she whispered, looking at the creature waiting near the shapeless mass of flesh at the forge-ship’s core. “We’ve both been used.” She turned to the girls. “What do we do now?”

  “We can pilot this,” Agnes said. She was staring along the network of cables as though she could see beyond them.

  Perry grinned. “We were born to pilot this.”

  The wires and the limbs of the creature flexed around them. Cam felt the ship lurch to life. A coil of filament arched by Agnes, and she passed her hand along it as if stroking a pet.

  “We’re going to take her home,” Agnes said. “She needs to put the dead one to rest. But first—”

  “First the Fleet,” Perry interrupted.

  “No.” Cam could still feel the ship spinning around her. “This is enough. We didn’t ask for any of this. Tell her to take us home, or take us home yourselves, if you can. Take us back to Onaway.”

  The girls stared.

  “Whatever happened in the past – whatever role I played – it’s long behind us. I don’t even remember it, not without that thing’s help.” Cam chose her words carefully, trying to fight against the simplicity of duty she read in the twins’ eyes. “I’m sorry this all happened to it, that our technology is built on bodies. But we did our part bringing the creature here.”

  Cam couldn’t look back at the thing behind her, though she felt its eyes studying her with the same disappointment she saw in the girls’.

  “You two will be safe back home,” she said again, knowing it was futile. “You don’t have anything to do with this.”

  “What about dad?” Agnes asked. “He’s still back there, trapped.”

  “What about us?” Perry’s eyes were bright and angry. “You think we’re children, but we’re not. Those engineers died trying to make these things fly. We were born for it.”

  Her hand shot forward, along the direction of the thick thread of wires. Cam felt the surge, the almost-falling sensation, of a normal slip into a light-line. But she felt a deeper pressure as well that told her they were sheering through Sidespace, that they were forging a line.

  The girls were navigating.

  Cam realized that they had passed her. The girls were suspended at the center of the ship, their outstretched fingers barely touching each other’s, their opposite hands against the living cables snaking around them. The creature rode behind them, powering, propelling, or obeying their commands, Cam couldn’t tell.

  All she knew was that she herself was now only a passenger.

  Fifty-Five

  The strangeness faded away, and Beka Grale began feeling at home in the command chair on the command deck of the Clerke Maxwell. Stranger yet, she was curiously at ease even though staring apparently-intractable dilemmas in the face. She had piloted the ship – burnished and white around her, like a bleached bone – through the jagged ruins of the First Fleet.

  Then they had lain – buried, trapped, hemmed in – beneath the skin of the broken world. Now they were rising again, finding the sky above them as broken as the surface of the Grave World beneath.

  A shattered sky.

  Beka, back from the surface with Rine and Glaucon to find Davis awake and Paul truly departed, stood between her sister and Rine and stared at the display showing the expanse of sky above them. The Clerke Maxwell floated low and just above the lip of the chasm in which they had been sheltered.

  “They’re growing,” Beka said. “They’re tearing at space more strongly. If what Paul explained is true, they’re furrowing space around these planets like …”

  She paused.

  “Like what?” Rine prompted.

  Beka shook her head, still trying to work out the implications.

  “Like a few hundred forge-ships with no direction and no shielding,” Jens finished dryly.

  “It’s more than that. Space itself is starting to cave.” Beka pointed at the display. “Look at the stars.” The stars making up the studded background wavered and flickered as though seen through bubbled glass. “Gravimetric lensing. If space collapses and those things scatter into Sidespace, they could emerge anywhere. And if they pop out near an inhabited world …”

  Beka paused again.

  “The more minds are affected, the stronger the resonance is. This was a single fleet and an outpost.” She shuddered. “If one of those things found its way back to System, I can’t even imagine the consequences. A mental conflagration.”

  Jens eyes were on her. “We’re just trying to get out of this alive, little sister.”

  Beka shook her head stubbornly. “We were. Not anymore.”

  “No heroics.” Jens closed her eyes. “That was me, and this is where it got us. A pointless war and a biological weapon out of control. A lot of dead people.”

 
; You don’t know the half of it, Beka thought. If you knew what they did to you – with you – on those ships …

  Rine’s eyes were on her as well, his face begging her to keep his secret.

  “We have nothing,” Jens continued.

  “We have them.”

  Beka pointed. The huge Colonizer stone-ships, which had tumbled out of the Sinks almost immediately after Rine sent his message, swung into view low in the sky, between them and the Fleet above. They orbited the planet like renegade moons. From this distance the tangle of steel spires on their surfaces marking ports, communication relays, and weapons turrets jutted from the angled rock skin of the ships in all directions like the towers of small cities.

  “They have sent the entirety of the surviving Crossers from the Asiatic Hetmantate,” Rine said, shaking his head in wonder. “They are some of our largest.”

  “They’re asteroids,” Beka said.

  Rine nodded proudly. “They were our cities in System, our homes for generations before the Crossing. You thought perhaps we had fled System in immense ships, but you were wrong. We carried our homes with us.”

  “But we’re still trapped,” Jens pointed out.

  Jens was correct, but despite their position, Beka felt poised and somehow in control. One the one hand was this strange new force from the Colonizers, in some ways even more alien than the broken ships of the Fleet above. On the other were the approaching System ships – two in number, from what they could tell from their sensors – that had apparently just tried to destroy her vessel.

  She had little doubt about who was on board and the lengths to which he would go in order to keep the Clerke Maxwell out of enemy hands. She was at the moment stationed in a sort of bridgehead, between two forces that hated and feared each other, facing a threat that defied easy analysis or quantification.

  But Beka realized that she was not afraid. Her sister stood on her left, Jens looking rested now, tall and in control, with the red mane Beka had always envied spilling down around her shoulders. Her grey uniform was the worse for wear, but she still wore it with the easy grace of a professional soldier.

  On her right, still an enigma, stood Rine in the even dirtier brown and green fatigues of a Colonizer, with his leather medical bag slung over his shoulder. His probing questions on the surface had given Beka a new respect for him, one that reinforced her sister’s trust.