First Fleet #1-4: The Complete Saga (26 page)

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.”

“
I
t 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.

You pulled in, dropped down, fell back.

You let pieces of yourself die – and you survived.

She thought that maybe finding Jens – realizing her sister was indeed alive and her mission had in some small way been successful – might revive the dying parts of her. And knowing Eleanor would survive as well had to count for something.

But then Paul had looked at her and asked her – begged her, really – to break his mind down and feed it into the Brick.

“I tried to explain it to him,” Beka said, without breaking stride. She was surprised at how steady her own voice sounded. “He knew it might not work. He knew the risks.”

“You told him there was a chance he could find his daughters,” Rine said. Beka did not turn to see his expression, but his voice sounded incredulous. He went on, “I doubt that even now, even after three hundred years, there is anything a man would not do if there were even the slightest chance of saving his children.”

“Lots of people would not have done it,” Glaucon pointed out, striding behind Rine, apparently oblivious to the anger seething across the doctor’s features. “He was brave.”

“Idiot!” Rine hissed. Beka could tell without turning that he had whirled on the younger man – the Synthetic, Beka amended in her mind. “There was no chance of success.”

He addressed Beka again. “It was a delusion, and anyone not deluded by ridiculous devotion to her own assumed-infallible and god-like technology would have seen that. It was your responsibility to have explained this to him, to have made him aware of how negligible his chances actually were.”

He barely paused. “Not to have aided and abetted him.”

Beka finally stopped, but only because the corridors were branching and she didn’t know which way they needed to proceed. Rine halted at her shoulder.

“It was his choice,” Beka said, finally turning to the older man. Rine watched her under furrowed brows. “I did what I thought was right. He died doing what he thought was right.”

She paused, waiting for Rine to indicate the proper direction down the corridors. When it was clear he was waiting for more, she went on, “Why does this bother you so much? You barely knew him. Is it because you’re a doctor?”

Rine’s brows narrowed further. He muttered something under his breath.

It was clear that the corridor in which they stood was a major thoroughfare in the network of tunnels the Colonizers had dug beneath the surface. Beka herself had not been in any of the deeper artificial tunnels, but she had heard Jens describe them.

There were no perception-distorting lines here, no alien glyphs glowing beneath the surface of the walls. The only confusion was the common confusion of cramped spaces and artificial environs, of wires and low-fusion lighting. Yet, it seemed completely abandoned.

“Yes,” Rine finally said. “And it is likely because I need . . .”

For once, the doctor seemed at a loss for words. He sighed. “You must remember that you are, for me, from three centuries into the future. I am on your ship, and I am continually seeing things I do not understand. I see the way you talk to one another.”

He frowned, and brushed his hand against the stubble on his cheek as though trying to wipe away dirt. “Most of all, I see your artifact – your Brick. I see the way Jens and her soldiers look toward it as though it is their key to immortality. I see the way you seem to think you can thread a line easily between the patterns that make up a human mind and the reality of a human mind itself.”

Beka, for a moment, tried to gather some empathy. She tried to remind herself of the kind of social and chronological gap they were reaching across with Rine and his cooperation. She tried to imagine how the procedure – what they had done, what she had done to Paul – would have looked through his eyes.

“The technology is complex,” she finally said. “I’ll admit that. Even to someone like Paul, someone who knows it conceptually but doesn’t know the physics behind it, it must look like magic. And I’ll admit again . . .”

She paused and chewed her lower lip for a moment. “We were pushing against the theoretical limits of that technology. We were uploading an entire persona. It’s not surprising that we were unsuccessful. Maybe if I had more time, or Aggiz, we could have done it.”

“But that is exactly the point,” Rine said, and the sharpness of his voice in the echoing chamber startled her for a moment. “A man died in
agony
, my dear. He died screaming as you pulled apart his mind piece by piece and attempted to put it into a mechanical device.”

“And all the while you talk as if it was some sort of trial, as though it was an experiment that did not unfold the way you would have liked, but it might be successful in another trial or two or three or several.”

Rine took a breath, then continued. “You do not talk about whether or not it was horrific or ethically repugnant. Rather, you speak of whether or not it was successful. That is what terrifies me.”

He leveled an arm at Glaucon, who stood behind them silently. Beka noted Rine’s arm shook. “Three hundred years ago you attempted to exterminate Glaucon’s ilk because they were not human. Indeed they are not. They are tools. But now you’re here, three centuries later, and you seem less human to me than them.”

Something inside Beka coiled and knotted so quickly, she thought she would be sick, right there on the long lines of metal rivets along the length of the corridor. She had not looked at Paul’s face once he was strapped down and the scanner affixed to his forehead. Her eyes had been glued to the same monitors Aggiz had watched for days as she worked to funnel a complete mapping of Paul’s neural pathways into the Brick’s dancing particle condensates.

But she had not been able to close her ears to the screams as the scanner dug deep, as it peeled back layer after layer of neural tissue, erasing and destroying in the very process of recording. In her memory, the screams mixed with those of the Synthetics in the shipyard, and over all that, she heard a familiar voice berating her for her hesitation and pointing out how close they had come to success.

She recoiled from the memory and lashed out instead.

“What did you expect me to do?” she asked. “You’re the people who dug up these bodies, who destroyed an entire fleet. I don’t have to explain myself to you or anyone else, and I certainly don’t have to defend myself against a cave-dwelling fossil who feels he needs to lecture me on ethics.”

She heard her own words match the tone of the recalled voice, a defensive anger with an undertone of self-justification.

Who is it?
Beka asked herself.
Who do I sound like?

I sound like Davis
.

She leaned forward against the curve of the corridor and placed her forehead on cold metal. For several seconds she remained like that, hunched, gripping her stomach against the sickness threatening to rise.

Then she took a deep, shuddering breath, latched down hard, and killed it.

“You can give me your moral dilemmas,” she said, her eyes clenched shut. “You can give me your guilt and your questions. But
later
, damn it.”

She straightened and opened her eyes. Rine watched her with a curious hesitation. “Right now, there’s work to do. Tell me how we get to this communications relay.”

“This way,” Rine said softly, indicating the tunnel to the left. “There’s a ladder to the surface. Not far.”

They walked.

“Where is everyone?” Beka finally asked to break the silence that had descended between them. “Why isn’t this place crawling with Colonizers?”

“The infection,” Rine answered. “From the biological material they dug up from the Crèche, from deep within the mines.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” she said. The tunnel curved, and several meters farther Beka could see a wide silver ladder reaching upward. “It’s not a biological infection, or at least it wasn’t on the Fleet. It was
spatial
. They emitted a field or an influence.”

“And yet it spread,” Rine pointed out.

Beka nodded. “They couldn’t have gotten a body on each of the ships. Yet their distortive effect propagated throughout the entire fleet. It’s almost as if the human mind serves as a transmitter.”

Rine watched her.

Part of Beka’s mind knew she was backing away from what Rine had said, from the memories of Paul’s screams, into something safe: a problem to solve, a riddle to untangle.

“It makes sense in some respect,” she went on. “They were trying to use the Brick to communicate because they thought they could resonate with it somehow. But to set up the same sort of destructive resonance with a human mind . . .”

Beka halted mid-stride.

“The bodies,” she said, turning suddenly toward Rine. “The soldiers came down through the shafts during the initial assault. My
sister
came down. And you sent their suits back inoculated with the biological material you found in the Crèche.”

She stepped closer to him, forcing him back half a step, and lowered her voice. “But that wasn’t all, was it?”

He was glancing up and down the corridor as though contemplating running. Beka knew he had nowhere to go. She jabbed a finger at his chest.

“Answer me! What else did you do?”

“I did not lie to your sister,” he began, wringing his hands together. “Glaucon, tell her I did not lie. It was not immediately clear to me.”

“What wasn’t?”

“Why they needed tissue samples from the captured soldiers.” Rine winced. “I assumed they were using the material for testing, that our commanders were curious to know whether the System genome had been modified intentionally over the past three centuries. It is what I would have wanted to know.”

One of the light strips nearest them in the tunnel was flickering as though losing power. Rine twisted his hands, his long arms bent at the elbows. In the flickering shadow it made him look like an insect, a bizarre praying mantis.

“The soldiers came down,” Beka said again slowly. “What did you send up?”

“They were worried the regeneration devices you used on your ships would not recognize purely alien biological material. We combined it.” He paused, flinching again as though Beka were preparing to strike him. “We combined it with genetic material from the captured soldiers.”

“So the things up there . . .” Beka whispered.

“. . . are hybrids,” Rine finished miserably.

“Which explains why their disruptive signal can piggy-back throughout the entire Fleet. They’re part . . .”

She couldn’t finish the thought, remembering the hellish madness of their passage through the Fleet.

“Gods, Rine,” she hissed. “And you want to question
my
humanity?”

They had reached the ladder.

“None of this explains what happened on the surface here though,” she said. She was anxious to be out of these tunnels and away from Rine. She began to climb.

“Unless, once the creatures were incubated on the Fleet and had enough human minds working in resonance, the influence extended down here. There should still be bodies, at least. Something.”

The bodies were waiting above.

Beka keyed the shaft entrance at the top of the ladder. It hissed open, and beyond, she had the impression of a howling wind and a vast glass canopy, below which sprawled dozens of desiccated bodies. She had only a moment to take it in before Glaucon and Rine pulled her back and sealed the door.