First Fleet #1-4: The Complete Saga (27 page)

“The atmospheric seal has ruptured,” Rine yelled. “There should have been a warning light on the door seal!”

Glaucon held Beka’s shoulders as she caught her breath. Her throat burned as though on fire and her eyes ran with hot tears.

“The surface atmosphere is toxic,” Glaucon explained.

“We still need to get up there,” she finally said when she could speak again. “We’ll have to go all the way back to the ship for thin-suits.”

“Are those pressure suits?” Rine asked. “We should have some nearby, though there is no telling whether they will still be there.”

“Can Glaucon go?”

Rine glanced at him. “The atmospheric conditions would eventually affect him as well, though he would last a bit longer than us, if that is what you mean.” He paused. “It is possible he could resist the atmospheric corrosives long enough to send the message.”

Beka shook her head. “Don’t order him to. We can find thin-suits.”

They did, in a storage locker just beyond the ladder, though they were far bulkier than the suits Beka was used to.

“It’s not articulating,” Beka complained as she struggled into her suit with Glaucon’s help. Rine had already fitted his helmet on his own head. “It’s supposed to adjust itself to my skin.”

The doctor’s exaggerated sigh came through her own helmet clearly. “It is supposed to keep you protected. Consider it an antique.”

They left Glaucon waiting at the base of the ladder and re-ascended. At the top, Beka braced for the sudden gust of air as she opened the chamber door. She and Rine stepped through into the wide chamber and let the door seal behind them.

Her initial impression had been accurate. A shallow geodesic dome, fashioned of hundreds of triangular glass windows, arched over their heads. Beneath it stretched a long tangle of tables, computer terminals, and various unidentifiable pieces of equipment. There were perhaps a few dozen bodies scattered about, all of them dry and shriveled as though they had been lying exposed for a hundred years.

“What’s in the atmosphere up here?” Beka asked.

“I don’t know,” Rine said. “We never dealt with the atmosphere, remaining as we did below the surface or in sealed domes.” Rine examined a few of the nearest bodies. “They had no warning, no time to run. Someone broke the seal quickly and catastrophically.”

Beka pointed. Some kind of mining vehicle – something that looked like a cross between a crane and a single-pilot freight frigate – had buried itself in a tangle of stone and girders at the far edge of the dome. Its immense boom protruded through the glass dome like a jutting bone.

“Your theory may be correct,” Rine admitted. “It would explain the chaos, the erratic behavior, and why it afflicted those on the surface first and only later spread downward into the tunnels.” The doctor shook his head. “The communication console will be in the center. It should still have power.”

It did. Rine punched in a manual access code and brought the system online.

“The Sinks are close to the planets,” Rine explained, “and there are relay beacons at the rim of each. We are within instant communication of half a dozen Hetmantate worlds.”

“Fine,” Beka said. “Get the word out.”

She watched as he manually keyed a message explaining their situation and what they knew about the effects of the ETI on the surface and in the Fleet above.

“I told them to send Synthetics,” he said, when he was finished and turned back to her.

“Fine,” Beka repeated, fighting a growing feeling of helplessness. What good would reinforcements do if the entire Fleet had been overwhelmed and the Colonizer settlements were graveyards below? There was nowhere to go. The Sinks, as Rine explained, were only one-way. There was not even any guarantee the Colonizers would risk their own personnel on a potential suicide mission.

At the thought of the Fleet, she glanced upward. Beyond the broken lattice of the dome, the jagged landscape of the Grave World stretched like the surface of a river with the ice broken and re-frozen from a series of thaws and chills. She could see the lips of some of the larger chasms in its surface even from here. Above that, the other Grave Worlds hung in the sky like a series of impossible moons.

“Look,” she said, pointing. There was movement among the stars. The sky was thick with ships. “The Fleet. It’s closer.”

“We’re not safe here,” Rine said. “If their influence extends this far, we should get back below.”

Beka nodded, and they moved back toward the entrance.

“What about you?” she asked, when they reached the ladder. “How did you avoid ending up like these bodies?”

Rine’s shrug was barely visible through the bulk of his suit. “I spent most of my time in the deep caverns where the captives were held. And as soon as things began falling apart on the surface, we went even deeper.”

Below, they heard Glaucon yelling.

“What is it?” Rine shouted as soon as they were back through the door and he had pulled his helmet off. “What’s the matter?”

“You can’t hear it,” Glaucon said, grinning. “In the suits. Your radios are short-range. But it worked. He’s in the system. He can talk.”

“What are you talking about, imbecile?” Rine snapped. “Speak sense.”

Instead of answering, the Synthetic touched an intercom switch along the wall. A familiar voice flooded the corridor.

“Someone’s trying to kill you.”

Paul’s voice, despite resonating loudly through the speakers in the tunnel, sounded timorous and very far away.

I
t was not the people
, Tholan finally admitted to himself. It was not the fifteen thousand lost souls of the First Fleet eating away at his mind.

It was the fact that they were never coming back.

He stood on the forward observation deck of the
Kemal
, watching. He knew – he had been told – his preoccupation with actual sighting on physical objects in space was antiquated and, in most respects, impractical. Ships were too small and too far apart to see. Entire fleets could be hidden in the night. It was like looking for motes of dust on a black background.

But Tholan didn’t care.

He looked for them anyway.

Tholan had a hand in the design of this ship, one of the newest off the line. It explained the glassed-in observation deck at the forward nose. He had dictated that particular design feature.

“Is it safe?”

It was the young science ensign. She floated at the entrance to the observation deck, graceful and poised in the zero gravity of the ship’s central axis. It was the only portion of the ship where an observational position would provide a view of the stars not spinning as the ship rotated to simulate gravity.

“Perfectly,” Tholan said.

He watched her drift in slowly. She was young and quite lovely, but if she died on this mission she would be gone. A res-pod could re-create her body, perfect in detail down to the slope of her shoulders and corn-gold hair, but until they were sure the Brick was stable again – that whatever happened to the Fleet had not given the Colonizers control over it – they were all in danger.

He had ordered memory scans to begin again, but until he was certain, until he tracked down the Fleet and the Bricks that were lost, they were all hanging over an abyss.

System command kept the cataclysmic failure of the Bricks relatively quiet. Despite their best efforts, though, rumors spread. Recruitments centers had already noted a drop in incoming numbers before Tholan departed the shipyard. And those soldiers and sailors in the service were starting to get desperate.

His order to resume memory scans before leaving the Second Fleet at the light-line terminal was an effort to reinstate normality on that front, even if it was illusory.

The ensign might not make it back from this mission. None of the crew might make it back, especially if they came up against whatever weapon the Colonizers let loose against the First Fleet.

And their experiences would be gone. The fifteen thousand souls of the lost Fleet were a tragedy, certainly, but far more disastrous was the loss of System’s hold on functional immortality.

It was the Bricks that mattered.

She drifted up beside him and caught herself on his arm. “It’s just glass?” she said. “Not a visual display?”

“Correct,” he said. “No magnification.”

“Then what are those?” She pointed at the cluster of dots hanging in space beyond the wide windows.

“Positional markers,” he said. “Projected. Indicating the position of the ships of the Fleet in space. We could highlight the Grave Worlds in the same manner,” he went on, “because they’re also nearly invisible at this distance.”

They had jumped out farther, trying to come around to the other side of the planets and get a clear line of sight for transmission to the
Clerke Maxwell
.

“They’re dark,” she murmured. “The worlds of System would be lit up like diamonds at this distance.”

He nodded absently.

Something flashed at the edge of Tholan’s view, briefly outlining the black curve of the nearest Grave World. He recognized it immediately. In an instant he pushed past her, grabbed the handles on either side of the entry portal, and hurled himself down the central axis of the ship.

“What is it?” she called after him.

“Colonizers,” he barked. “Reinforcements. That was a light-line discharge.”

Several yards down the central axis he stopped and hauled himself upward into the first level of the ship, righting in the weak gravity and moving quickly down corridors and up ladders until he climbed to the command deck. The officer on duty looked up in surprise as he burst in.

“Get me the jump-set technician,” he bellowed. “Prepare for a jump.”

The officer blinked for half a moment before nodding and bending to his console.

“Have you detected any light-line activity?” Tholan asked.

Another officer sitting at the sensor display shook her head. Tholan frowned. It was possible the Colonizers had a light-line terminal on the opposite side of one of the planets, where any discharge would be largely shielded from the scanners that monitored the upper bands of the electromagnetic spectrum. Most detectors ignored their wash of visible light though, which was often lost in the vastness.

But Tholan knew what he had seen.

“I want a wide jump taking us to the opposite side of that planet,” he explained. “How long?”

The officer bit his lip and studied the display. “Sixty seconds to run the calculations. The jump-set is charged.”

Tholan drummed his fingers on the side of his console.

If the Colonizers did indeed have light-lines, this changed everything. It would explain, for one thing, how they were able to wipe out the Fleet – or at least partly explain it. Even if they had been able to bring a large part of their forces immediately into play in this system, the Fleet still should have held superiority.

“Ten seconds, sir.”

Surveillance of the Reservation Worlds was tight, but it was designed with the assumption that the Colonizers were restricted to their relativistic, chemical-drive vessels. If they could transport forces via light-lines, the nature of the conflict would have to be recalibrated across the board.

On the other hand, a light-line terminus here – this close to the Fleet – meant another possible avenue to bring the rest of the ships of the Second Fleet to bear.

“Five seconds.”

But how could the Colonizers drive a light-line this close to the Grave Worlds, when his own forge-ship had been unable to do that?

“Jump.”

Tholan’s teeth clenched. The star field on his display realigned, showing the curve of one of the Grave Worlds clearly but still beyond the ruins of the Fleet. From this new vantage point, the planet was seen to have three tiny moons, tumbling across its face like captured asteroids.

“Those satellites weren’t on our earlier scans,” an officer remarked.

“They’re not satellites,” Tholan muttered.

The officer’s expression was puzzled. He clearly had not been present at any of the operations above the Reservation Worlds. He had never seen a Colonizer stone-ship.

He didn’t know their size.

“Look,” Tholan said. He touched the display, magnified the view, and highlighted a superimposed scale. “The scale is correct: kilometers in distance. But look at their energy signatures. Analyze their flight path.”

“Stone-ships,” someone on the command deck breathed.

The stone-ships filled the magnified vista, wavering and grainy with the distance but clearly far larger than anything in the System armada. They were indeed moonlets, rocky asteroids that had been hollowed out by generations of Colonizers when they still lived in their scattered colonies at the outer rim of System.

“Check the surface spectrometry.” Tholan felt for a moment as though he were lecturing first-year cadets. The sheer scale of the Colonizer vessels often had that effect even on seasoned officers. “They have the composition of main belt objects. They’re from System. First-generation crossing ships.”

But what were they doing here now?

The cluster of ships tumbled in the view. Tholan knew from experience the vessels were slow and ponderously maneuverable. At this distance the warhead turrets studding their surfaces couldn’t be seen, but if it came to a tactical encounter the atomics they carried as armament were easily evaded. They were hardly a threat to the Second Fleet.

But the Second Fleet was twelve light-years away, and Tholan only had three ships with him now. In this situation, his vessels and the Colonizer stone-ships were almost evenly matched.

“Their trajectories are putting them in low orbit of the nearest of the Grave Worlds,” an officer reported. “They’re keeping their distance from the Fleet wreckage as well.”

Tholan nodded.

The Colonizers did indeed have a light-line network, with terminals near the Grave Worlds. It was the only way to explain the sudden appearance of these vessels. Moreover, it was a network apparently immune to whatever interference blocked Tholan’s forge-ship.

“Signal the
Laplace
,” he said, referring to one of the
Kemal
’s two companion vessels. “I want them to jump back to the Second Fleet with this information. Place all System ships – all Reservation World listening stations – on high alert. We need to know the extent of this network immediately.”

For a space of several heartbeats, the three ships of Tholan’s tiny expeditionary force hung in the darkness.

Space sheered away, and then there were two.

In that time Tholan reached another decision. The
Clerke Maxwell
was still on the other side of the Fleet, and no contact had yet been made. But the situation had changed. Now there were additional Colonizer ships, which could, in theory, pull it back through those light-lines.

For all Tholan knew, these stone-ships may have arrived specifically to capture the
Clerke Maxwell
. And if that happened, there would be no doubt that in addition to their apparent hold on the Bricks, the Colonizers would have a jump-set as well.

“Do we have line-of-sight on the
Clerke Maxwell
from this location?” Tholan asked.

The communications officer nodded.

“Lock onto the signal,” Tholan ordered. He thought of Eleanor. “Send the appropriate command overrides to initiate Puppet-Master Protocol.”

The Grave Worlds had been a trap from the beginning, a way for the Colonizers to capture the System technology they coveted. The Bricks were compromised, but there was no way in hell Tholan was going to let them take an active jump-set equipped ship as well.

It was about vessels and technology now, hanging in the night.

It was about bodies in motion.

“Executive command: immediate self-destruct.”

He cleared his throat.

“Send.”