First Fleet #1-4: The Complete Saga (16 page)

“
O
ur bones are not hollow
, you know.”

Rine felt like a scarecrow, thin and angular beneath the folds of his dusty robes. He smelled of rust.

Jens’ face was pressed against his sharp shoulder as he helped her walk slowly across the chamber. As thin as he was, he supported most of her weight. Her legs felt as weak and stiff as though she had indeed been re-grown in a res-pod. But they did not feel fresh and new. They hurt so much that it was all Jens could do to not bury her face in Rine’s shoulder and scream.

Instead she focused on shuffling one foot before the other.

“Not hollow, you understand,” he continued. He was making conversation to distract her from the pain and keep her walking. “I hear that is a common misperception about us. That, having been raised in space, we have hollow bones. We don’t.”

Jens still had difficulty following his speech patterns. He came at topics from the side or began speaking as though they were in the middle of a discussion and expected her to follow.

“I was born in space, of course,” he went on, not waiting for a response. “We all were. But I was born in transit, and in transit there was plenty of acceleration. The gravity for most of the journey there was actually over Earth standard.”

He glanced down at her. “Keep moving. Just a little longer.”

She groaned. She felt she hadn’t worked so hard since basic training. If this was what happened to them after Colonizer soldiers were injured, she wondered how they were ever brave enough to keep fighting.

“My parents were from System, though,” Rine continued.

Glaucon had not accompanied him today. Rine explained his absence with a vague allusion to him having business to attend to, somewhere deeper in the mines. “Of course we didn’t call it System then. We didn’t consider ourselves part of System. We were the Outlier Hetmantates.”

“But you left,” Jens said.

The shoulder rose and fell against her cheek as the doctor shrugged. “My parents did. The generation before me. You have read the history books, I’m sure. At least, the ones that your people wrote. They probably gave you reasons for the exodus.”

They had made it to the far wall of the chamber, which meant that Jens would be forced to walk all the way back. Rine pulled away slightly, making her put even more of her own weight on her protesting legs.

“They did,” Jens grunted. “It was the Synthetics. You didn’t want to destroy yours.”

“That and a hundred other reasons,” Rine said mildly. “It may be ancient history for you, but it’s a single generation ago for me.”

She was halfway back to the cot, which still seemed a light year away.

“We had a planet.” His voice had taken on a different tone, quiet and almost reverent. “I remember the first time I saw it from our stone-ship. We had waited for decades. I had never seen a world like it, green and soft under its atmosphere.”

“What was it called?” She was almost there. Just a few more steps.

“New London,” he sighed. “It was going to be ours. A place to start over. Our own system. Distant. Isolated. Free. We hadn’t even reached orbital insertion when we saw your picket ships in formation.”

Jens knew this part of the story, or at least one side of it. The cot was right in front of her now. Her legs shook. “They were peace-keepers.”

“They were there to make sure we kept our place. Can you imagine what that was like, to find you waiting for us there after decades of traveling? There were three other planets in the system, and all of them were already inhabited and well on their way to full terraforming. You had already been there for two centuries. New London had two moons, and you had taken those as well. One of them was already half-carved for its raw minerals.”

“We left you your damn world,” Jens said. She started to sit down.

“Once more,” he said, his grip firm on her arm. “You need to strengthen those muscles.”

She swore softly, but rose and leaned against him again.

“A
reservation
, my survivor,” he said. If there was anger in his voice, he hid it well. “We found ourselves on a reservation. Hemmed in. We thought we were getting a frontier, and we found ourselves surrounded by the very sweep humanity we had sought to depart from. And what’s more—” he laughed, mainly through his nose. “What’s more is that you wouldn’t even give us the technology to go any farther, to push on to new worlds, to more distant horizons. We were trapped.”

Something about his story was itching at the walls of her mind, but Jens was still too sluggish to catch it. She felt it picking at her though as Rine continued.

“There were two moons, as I believe I have already said, two companion satellites to our new planet. One was simply a captured asteroid, but the other was large enough that we had detected it in the initial surveys from System,” he chuckled sadly.

Then he continued. “We used to argue about what we might name it when we arrived. This was the moon that had already been staked and mined. You were pulling it apart, piece by piece. It was tidally locked, you understand, with New London. It hung in place above the major continent, like an unmoving eye. But it was mocking us. You were dismantling this moon bit by bit, stealing it away out of our sky—and we were to simply watch?”

There was anger in his voice now, but it was an old, tired anger.

“I have spoken too much,” he finally said. “You don’t want an old man’s stories. I only wished to say that it was why we fought—it was against this hemming in, against this being consigned to planetary ghettos we had worked so hard to reach, without the technology to leave them.”

The itch finally broke through. Jens pulled away.

“You’re lying,” she said. “You have to be. If you were at New London, how could you be here now?”

“I was a very young man then.”

She shook her head stubbornly. “It doesn’t matter. That Reserve World is dozens of light years away. It would take another generation for you to reach it from here.”

“Perhaps it is nearer than you think.” Rine helped her back to the cot. “You need to rest now.”

When he was gone, Jens tried to pull from her memory as much as she could about the spatial distribution of the Colonizer worlds. Something about Rine’s story was not adding up, and it had to do with how Colonizers could be on the Grave Worlds to begin with.

The fact that the Colonizers were not among the planets that they had originally traveled to, that they were off the Reservations, was what had brought the Fleet here in the first place. There were not supposed to be Colonizers here.

And yet here they were, apparently with enough force that they had repulsed the Fleet’s attack. None of it made sense, least of all Rine’s story that he was part of a ship that originally arrived from System at an entirely different world.

How did he get here without light-line technology? How did any of the Colonizer soldiers, miners and scientists arrive at this dead cluster of worlds?

The question kept Jens awake long into the night.

D
onovan tried to remember dying
, though he realized logically he should not be able to. His memories had been scanned
before
he was killed, from what he could tell of the res-pod records, by severe head trauma. And though he could not remember, he was not able to keep himself from imagining it, from picking at bits of thought in his own mind and trying to put them together into some semblance of memory.

It was this chore of working at what he could not remember that kept his mind off what he did recall of his final moments aboard the
Mountstuart Elphinstone
.

But now he needed focus.

They still drifted among the poisonous wreckage of the First Fleet. Donovan had awakened perhaps an hour before he was due to take the helm of their nearly-abandoned ship.

He had slept poorly. There had been several alarms followed by injections and then waves of pain only to be called off by the dizzy dullness of the painkiller that he had synthesized and distributed to take for the crew, following the pain treatments.

They could not keep this up. They needed help.

They needed the Synthetics.

Donovan was a doctor, but he didn’t know the first thing about repairing synthetic life forms. He had believed them extinct along with everyone else until he woke to find several Synthetics surrounding him and Davis in the process of trying to destroy them. By doing so, Davis had robbed the ship of a crew and perhaps taken from them the only defense they had against the creatures on the Fleet.

Donovan stared down at the curving glass of the res-pod within which Davis lay suspended. He tried remembering his early days of training and the few actual live bodies he had treated. Living cells were more stubborn than dead cells. It was easier to regenerate necrotic tissue than it was to repair damaged tissue intent on doing its own slow healing.

“Cell growth . . . glacial.”

Donovan spoke to himself as he scanned the small display alongside the clear canopy. He glanced at where Aggiz was working hunched on the far side of the science bay, but the scientist ignored him. Aggiz was chasing after his own ghosts.

He adjusted a few levels, experimenting with nutrient mixes that he hoped would catalyze cell regeneration. The white of scar tissue spreading across Davis’s burned features was clearly visible through the glass. He needed cell regeneration to go faster. If the mixes went too high though, he risked propagating cellular malignancies.

Of particular interest was the bionic implant at the center of Davis’s shattered forearm. It looked like it had replaced or been grafted into the entire midsection of the ulna. Or was that the radius? Donovan couldn’t remember. Only Davis would know what the implant actually was and how to reverse its effects, but right now Davis wasn’t talking.

The ship rocked gently.

“Beka,” Donovan asked, pushing an intercom key on the wall near the pod, “do we have company?”

“No company,” came the terse response. Donovan saw her in his mind’s eye—her sharp features fired and polished by lack of sleep and recurring pain, bent over the holographic model of the Fleet that she studied like scripture. “I’m trying a new algorithm. Attempting a pathway.”

Donovan felt a flicker of annoyance, though he immediately quelled it. He was not in command. If she thought she had a new theory, let her try it. He certainly wasn’t doing anything more useful.

Beka fascinated him, he admitted to himself. She had features that were almost striking enough to border on beautiful. On a sterile ship like this, to a strained mind in a recently regenerated body such as his, her dark eyes and tangled hair took on a fevered intensity in his mind. He often found himself glancing down the twisting corridors, hoping to see her approach as he passed between his quarters and the command deck.

He shook his head again to clear it.

“Do you need something?” she asked when he did not respond.

He flexed his fingers, feeling the dull ache from the drug-induced arthritis. Soon he might risk removing Davis from the pod and taking him to one of the full surgical suites on board. It would be a more active and invasive form of regeneration. He needed to analyze the weapon, at the very least, but he was not sure he could remove it from Davis’s body without serious damage. It seemed, even in the wreckage that was his arm, to be wired deeply into a cluster of nerves.

“I need answers, Beka,” he muttered.

“Yeah. Me too.” She was silent, and he assumed she had clicked off the line. The motion of the ship felt like it had stabilized.

Donovan did not like indecision. Aboard the medical ships he had served on—and the
Elphinstone
was only the latest in a long string of assignments—he had been in charge of regeneration bays three or four times as large as this room with rows of hundreds of res-pods. There were always bodies in multiple stages of regeneration. Here, having only a single patient seemed excruciatingly exacting. Before, he had been a cultivator: watering, feeding and keeping the bodies growing, pruning the rare regeneration gone awry. But this was more like sculpting, trying to put a single living body back together, trying to get at the answers within its skull.

Donovan’s gaze moved to Aggiz again, still unmoving at the base of the Brick. It was what this crew had been doing all along before they woke him, wasn’t it? Trying to extract information. Before, it was buried in the Brick, waiting for the key—waiting for
him
, his body—to unlock it. And now he was on the other side of the glass, trying to do the same.

“It’s not working.” It was Beka again.

He rose from beside the pod, feeling his joints groan in protest. “What isn’t?”

“My path. My algorithm. It’s closing up.”

“They’re netting us?” He walked haltingly toward the bay door, trying to decide whether he should attempt more sleep or ascend to the command deck. He decided on neither. He would look in on his other patients- the Synthetics.

“They’re not—”

The ship dropped slightly beneath him as the gyros shifted and his stomach sank with it. “Hold on.”

She was getting better at this, he admitted to himself as he worked his way back through the empty corridors. Though they had not broken through, she was staying ahead of them, just out of their reach. No alarm came, no call for the ever-present pain injections, though he kept the channel open and her audio feed followed him as he made his way to where the Synthetics lay.

“We’re back,” she finally said when he reached the barracks where they had transferred the inactive Synthetics. “Donovan, are you there?”

“I’m here, Beka.”

“We’re back to square-fucking-one.”

The barrack was identical to the one that he and Paul shared one deck above. The lights here were kept dimmed, though, so it had the feel of one of the cavernous medical bays on a frigate.

But instead of pods, there were rows of beds like an ancient hospital. They held synthetic humanoid counterparts instead of flesh-and-bone bodies. These were Donovan’s patients, though he had no idea how to even begin to treat them. They had remained catatonic since the detonation of Davis’s weapon.

“It didn’t work, huh?” he asked.

He walked down the rows of apparently sleeping forms. Some had their eyes open or half open, but they did not follow his movement. Many appeared to be breathing—a preprogrammed and purely cosmetic effect that Davis’s weapon had not overridden.

Donovan was a doctor, but unless he had seen the effect of Davis’s weapon with his own eyes and the resultant state, he would have been hard-pressed to identify any of these forms as non-human. They had pulses and, in addition, they had perfectly articulated human features. They had every facsimile of life. Every non-invasive scan showed healthy human physiques all the way down.

“It didn’t work, Donovan,” Beka sounded close to tears. “I don’t understand.”

He wanted to be near her. He pushed the thought away. There wasn’t time.

“Did they see you coming?” he asked.

“They didn’t react like . . . I can’t put my finger on it. The whole thing feels organic.”

“They move as one?” He paused near the end of the last row, before the body of the Synthetic known as Eleanor. If the rest were submerged deep below consciousness, she was the one closest to the surface. He touched the side of her neck, feeling for the pulse he knew was only programmed similitude.

“It’s not that. It doesn’t feel like that. It’s something else.”

“Eleanor,” he whispered. Her eyelids flicked as though she was fighting to awaken, but she had responded like this before.

Beka heard him over the channel. “Are you with Eleanor? How is she?”

“Unchanged.”

The sigh was audible. “And Davis?”

“Too early to tell. I don’t want to crack the egg too soon.”

He heard her snort and imagined her blowing the short curls off her brow. “You wait much longer and there won’t be anyone left outside that res-pod. We’re out of step.”

“Out of step?”

He felt the ship lurch again. “The graveyard dance, Donovan. Grab your needle. We’ve got company.”

He did, but even in the pain his thoughts drifted back to Beka. What might things have been like had they met back in System? He found her presence comforting in a way he could not quite explain.

From the pack at his side, Donovan took a scalpel. He stood over the last Synthetic in the long row, a nameless soldier with a flawless face. He had no idea how to resuscitate them, and he wasn’t going to figure anything out by staring at their outsides.

He was sure, on some level, that Beka would be displeased.

It was a big ship though. She did not have to know.

He made a long, clean incision and bent to his task.