First Fleet #1-4: The Complete Saga

by Stephen Case

  In the end, it was Eleanor who answered for him.

  “He’ll do it,” she said.

  Davis scowled and cursed with a strained elegance that impressed even Donovan.

  “Why?” Beka asked, glancing between the two of them.

  “Because it is who he is,” she said. “He has taken an oath to protect humanity. All his exterior bitterness, all of the hate he radiates, is only the passion of a true zealot. He will protect his species. It is in his programming.” Eleanor’s lips curled at the last word.

  “Is she telling the truth, Davis?”

  “Grale,” he began with evident annoyance, and then stopped. He flexed his arm and glanced at Eleanor. “I hate being surrounded by idiots,” he began again. “And I hate the fact that you’ve let that viper live and no one seems to realize how stupid a decision it was. I told you before, you picked the wrong side. But if Tholan judges this new threat accurately, the Synthetic wench is right.”

  Beka felt the color rise to her cheeks. Davis held up his hands.

  “You’re going to argue with me about its humanity,” he began. “Save your breath. That’s exactly my point. It’s programmed to elicit that response, and that’s why it’s so dangerous.”

  He flexed his arm again. “But none of that means it is incorrect now. I have indeed taken an oath, and I will protect my species, even in the face of the idiocy of particular members of it.”

  He shrugged. “I thought I was coming here to kill Colonizer Synthetics. I assumed they had decimated our Fleet. But if that’s not the case, I can adapt.”

  “Good.” Beka kept her voice level by force of will. “So it can generate the needed amount of energy?”

  “Of course not,” Davis snapped. “Not enough to punch through a fleet’s worth of interference. I’ll need to link up to an external energy source.”

  “The Clerke Maxwell’s core?”

  Davis shook his head. “Wrong again. If I detonated it on board, it would leave this ship dead in the water. Too much energy. You couldn’t broadcast Tholan’s signal. I’ll need to be overboard. One of the Fleet ships should suffice.” He smiled bitterly. “Add that wrinkle to your plan.”

  “So we push back into the Fleet,” Beka said, ticking off steps. “We transfer you to one of the wrecks. You find a power supply, send the EM pulse, and then Tholan sends his signal, which we piggy-back to the Fleet.”

  “Not too complicated.” Davis’s tone was sardonic. “Though, from what I understand, you can’t get close to any of those ships without going mad. Might make the transfer difficult.”

  “We’ll do an EV-pass to one of the ships,” Eleanor said.

  Beka turned back to her. “We?”

  Eleanor nodded. “I’m going with him.”

  “But it will kill you,” Beka said. She felt color rise to her cheeks again, this time from a choking anger. “If he detonates that thing again and you’re with him, you’ll be dead.” I already saved you once, she added to herself. Don’t make it have been for nothing.

  “It will kill him too,” Eleanor said softly.

  Davis grimaced but nodded slowly. “Almost certainly, yes. With that amount of discharge.”

  He barked the familiar, harsh laugh Beka had heard so many times in the shipyard. “How do you like that, Grale? You save your lovely Synthetic so it can sacrifice itself alongside its murderer?”

  Beka spun away from them both. She was embarrassed by the hot rush of tears to her eyes. Did she love Eleanor? If Davis was right, there was never anything there to love. But she had been a friend, and she had lost so many already – Tsai-Lui, Aggiz, Paul.

  She thought she had saved Eleanor.

  Beka felt a hand on her shoulder and turned to find Eleanor beside her. She let herself be held for a moment and buried her face against Eleanor’s neck as though she was a child. Eleanor’s skin was soft, and Beka clearly felt the beating of her pulse in her neck, soft and furtive as a bird.

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “You don’t have to,” Eleanor whispered. “Whatever else Davis says, I have a choice.”

  Davis groaned audibly. “It’s playing you, Beka. It knows the buttons to push to get what it wants. It knew you were the member of the team to connect with, to gain confidence. Just like it did with Tholan.”

  “Shut up, Davis,” Donovan growled.

  Beka wiped her face, kissed Eleanor’s jaw, and moved away. “You’re wrong, Davis. What does she hope to gain from self-sacrifice?”

  “Seeing me die,” he answered, grinning like a fox.

  Beka shook her head and gathered herself. When she spoke again her voice was steady. “Get yourselves ready. We’re about to head back into the midst of the Fleet. Donovan, we’ll need a final pain treatment for Davis. The rest of us should be fine.” She shuddered. “The Colonizer stone-ships think they can clear a wide enough path to avoid the worst of the influence.”

  Donovan nodded. Davis and Eleanor moved to find thinsuits.

  “Once the treatment is ready,” she told Donovan in a lower voice, “get back up to the command deck. I want you there with us.”

  “Why?”

  She smiled slightly, almost shyly. Her eyes were still wet. “Your Gordian knot, remember? You were there when we punched through this thing the first time. I want you beside me, for luck.”

  When she left, Donovan began synthesizing the final pain treatment. It reminded him of the long days spent trying to fight their way through the Fleet. Despite the memories, he thought of Beka’s words, and his spirits were buoyed.

  Maybe they would make it through this thing after all.

  Fifty-Seven

  After Beka left the science bay, Eleanor answered Davis’s unvoiced question as she zipped herself into a thinsuit. “I’m not going to let you out of my sight, Davis. You have too much to answer for, and self-sacrifice is cheap.”

  Davis wrestled his own thinsuit over his head with considerably less grace. His only immediate answer was muffled cursing. He tried to remember the last time he had been extra-vehicular and finally gave up. It had been years.

  “I don’t have anything to answer for,” he said wearily, once the thinsuit was down around his shoulders. He wouldn’t use her name. She was not a person. She was a thing. “I don’t have to explain anything to you.”

  She grinned, wickedly. “But you will.”

  “Which once again illustrates how dangerous you are,” Davis said, glancing toward Donovan over in the corner of the science bay synthesizing the pain treatment.

  Davis raised his voice for Donovan’s benefit. It was like lecturing obstinate children. “It’s almost impossible for anyone – even someone who knows you aren’t alive – to not treat you like a person. Why do you think I spent so much time taking Synthetics apart from the inside out?”

  He finished tightening his boots and went to stand beside her at the edge of the airlock. “Grale was goddamned crying when she left. She thinks she loves you.”

  Donovan approached with a thin pen-needle and handed it to Eleanor. “That’s all we have left.” He glanced at both of them and wished them luck before leaving the bay and securing the door behind him.

  The bay had a long, thin airlock giving direct access to the ship’s exterior. Eleanor keyed it open with her slender gloved hand. Davis made sure both of his magnetic boots were firmly planted on the deck plates.

  “You can love things that aren’t alive,” Eleanor said. Her voice was crisp and close over their suit-to-suit channel. “She loves this ship too.”

  Davis grunted as the airlock door slid open and the ship exhaled around them.

  What greeted their eyes was pandemonium. Davis actually flinched and took a step backward, then flinched again when Eleanor laid a restraining hand on his shoulder.

  The Clerke Maxwell careened through the wreckage of the Fleet, which spiraled out before them in a dizzying array of twisted bulkheads and black, broken structural shells. Davis knew on some level the Fleet
could not be so closely clustered. Even when it flew in formation, the distances between ships were vast.

  But Beka and Cam had been right: the vessels – or, more accurately, the creatures the Colonizers had spawned on them – were carving up space around them, warping it, so that distant ships appeared impossibly large and other ships faded in and out of sight erratically.

  Space itself had gone mad. The wreckage of the Fleet bobbed, submerged, and reappeared in the night like ships in a storm-swept sea.

  “Do you feel it?” Eleanor asked. She had raised her voice, as though they were indeed looking out over a storm, though the vista before them was of course absolutely silent. “Do you feel the things in your mind?”

  Davis shook his head. “We must still be at a safe distance.”

  As if by signal, one of the Colonizer stone-ships swung into view, arching around the pathway of the Clerke Maxwell very much like a large moon in orbit around a miniscule world.

  Though perspective was skewed beyond hope, Davis could tell the stone-ship was immense. As he watched, a dead ship impacted its surface, obliterating the smaller vessel but having no apparent effect on the much larger stone-ship. Warheads lanced out from the asteroid’s irregular surface in a hundred directions, clearing a wide sector of Fleet ships and their accompanying distortion fields.

  “Where’s our target?” Davis asked.

  Eleanor touched the side of her helmet, and Davis could see she was speaking to someone on another channel, Beka or Tholan most likely. She nodded and pointed to a spot ahead of them where Davis couldn’t make out any specific ship in the shifting mass of chaos.

  “We’ll be within range in about two minutes,” she said. “The Clerke Maxwell will launch a mag-tether, and then we’ll jump.”

  Davis’s forearm itched. He glanced down at it, at where the embedded bioweapon had been implanted when he was little more than a child. He thought of the oaths he had taken then.

  “You want an explanation of why I kill Synthetics,” he said. He shifted his magnetic boots on the deck. “We take one oath when we’re given this weapon, and it doesn’t have anything to do with hunting Synthetics. It’s simple. It’s an oath to protect humanity against hostile intelligences.”

  “It’s an old argument,” Eleanor said, scanning the space before them, waiting for a signal to launch. “But you always assumed our hostility, assumed that because we had the capability to displace humanity we would act upon it.”

  “That’s exactly not the point.”

  He pointed outward.

  Another Fleet ship shivered into glittering fragments and seemed to pull space in upon itself as it collapsed. Davis thought for a moment he glimpsed the weaving blue scintillations of Sidespace beyond, as though space itself were a sheet of paper being rubbed too thin.

  “That’s exactly not the point,” he repeated. “Your very existence is a threat. It always has been. Your intentions are irrelevant. Just like those things out there. And that’s why I’m here, because I’ll help destroy them for the same reason I would destroy you if I could.”

  “Now,” she said.

  There was a hollow thud they felt through their boots as the Clerk Maxwell fired a projectile toward a quickly approaching ship. Eleanor grabbed Davis’s arm and pulled him through the airlock.

  For a moment Davis felt the familiar gut-wrenching freedom of zero gravity as they spiraled away from the hull of the Clerke Maxwell, but then the electromagnetic tether fired at the hull of their destination ship locked onto them and began drawing them away from their ship. As they approached the derelict, the Clerke Maxwell continued on its path, leaving them behind.

  “Do you feel it yet?” Eleanor asked.

  Davis tried to answer but realized he had lost the capacity for speech. He knew the words were there, but it was as though they were in a part of his mind now inaccessible. Between them and him reared up something new, something foreign emanating in waves from the ship they were rapidly approaching.

  Something was calling him. He could almost see it around the edges of the broken hull they were approaching. It was as if space itself had always been there, hungry, just at the corners of his eyes, waiting for him to come close.

  Then there was a sudden stabbing of pain, and the sensation was gone. The dead ship in front of them was simply a dead ship, rotating slowly, although the flickers of spatial distortion could still be seen in its wavering outline.

  He groaned.

  “The pain treatment,” Eleanor explained, letting the pen-needle she had punctured his suit with fall away from her hand. “That’s the only one we have.”

  “You can break a rib later if you need,” Davis grunted.

  Donovan had warned him about the sensation, but its intensity came as a surprise nonetheless. He felt as though each of his joints was on fire.

  Eleanor did not answer but fired her wrist-jet to rotate them so they were descending toward the ruined ship feet-downward.

  “It’s the Rowan Hamilton,” Davis noted, watching one of the broken bulkheads rotate into view.

  Then something happened. Space itself embraced them, twisting and shunting them to one side, away from the approaching ship. Eleanor’s grip tightened on his arm. Davis heard her sharp, hissing intake of breath.

  “The line’s slipped,” she said. “We’re adrift.”

  *

  Beka’s plan had only begun, and already it was falling apart. She watched the minute speck representing Eleanor and Davis moving between the two larger specks in the midst of the projected fleet. They followed a tiny thread linking two ships. As Beka watched it, the line snarled and winked out.

  “The mag-line has broken,” Jens said with evident disbelief.

  Beka shook her head. She was running numbers. On top of everything else – or perhaps to keep her mind off everything else – she was working on a way to calculate and display the distortive spatial effects of the Fleet.

  They had moved into a chamber Beka had never been in before. There were no holographic emitters in the crowded command deck to allow a wide enough view of the entire Fleet.

  This new chamber, which Jens called the strategy room, held a huge black table – by now a familiar fixture of System military design – that dominated the entire room and was itself one large emitter. The pale luminescence of green dots indicating the derelicts spread on all sides in the space above the table. The Clerke Maxwell moved through the center of the display, a tiny red icon circled by the three brilliant golden moons of the Colonizer stone-ships.

  “It’s the distortions,” Beka said sharply. “Space is bent.”

  Beka’s background algorithms completed their calculations, and a purple webbing – like soap bubbles surrounding the Fleet ships – appeared on the display. Each ship was encased in a pulsating purple aura. The forge-ship, at the top of the display, appeared at the center of a huge porphyry flower. The Clerke Maxwell and stone-ships were headed directly for a region where the purple spheres surrounding three Fleet ships overlapped.

  “Veer us away from that!” Beka yelled.

  Jens moved to correct course, and two of the stone-ships followed ponderously. The third was slower, still careening in its wide loops around the Clerke Maxwell. It grazed the danger region. For a second it looked as though it would clear the space unmolested, but as they watched one half of the asteroid began to distend and shatter. The stone-ship came apart slowly, trailing bright yellow fragments.

  The Colonizer commander’s face dissolved into static.

  “A city,” Rine said softly, his jaw working. “You have lost ships, but we have sacrificed an entire metropolis.”

  “Full stop!” Beka shouted. “Where are Eleanor and Davis?”

  It was nearly impossible for the eye to follow the confused display before them. The sensors of the Clerke Maxwell were high enough resolution that each time one of the golden orbs of the stone-ships launched a flight of warheads, the impacted Fleet ships did not simply wink off the display. In
stead they shivered into their own expanding cloud of green fragments, which littered the seething chaos of wreckage until the Clerke Maxwell’s path through the Fleet was surrounded in a verdant corona.

  “They can’t navigate through that,” Jens said, motioning at the shower of gold representing the fragments of the stone-ship.” This whole place is a minefield. Their thinsuits don’t have the fuel or maneuverability.”

  “The whole region is a morass,” Tholan’s image broke in. “You can’t get your ships any further through. Pull back to the planet’s surface.”

  “We can take as many as possible with us.” Rine spoke slowly and steadily, watching the spreading fragments on the display.

  “It’s not worth it,” Tholan said. “I’ll bring up reinforcements—”

  Cam was shouting now as well that there simply wasn’t time, that the rift needed to be closed soon or it would start spreading as the rest of the Fleet unraveled space.

  A room of this design should have held a group of officers in sharp, grey uniforms arranged around the display, Beka realized.

  But here there was only her ragged crew, and against the polished blackness of the room they looked even more ragtag and out of place. Only Tholan – his holographic avatar now a full-body image standing at one end of the table – and Jens seemed to fit with their surroundings.

  Donovan sat perched on the edge of the table, colored shafts of light cutting across his shoulder, while Rine stalked back and forth along the table’s length.

  Beka let the argument rage around her. She already knew – she had known almost as soon as they formed the plan – what this would eventually come to. The ships alone were not maneuverable enough. They needed to be guided through the waves of distortion now visible on the display before them.

  But her heart sank.

  Jens’s gaze found her own.

  Beka could not give the order she was waiting for.

  “We need to act now.” Jens’s words were soft but carried over the other raised voices. “Eleanor and Davis don’t have much time. Neither do we.” She paused. “The suits are ready.”