First Fleet #1-4: The Complete Saga (28 page)

“
S
omeone’s trying
to kill you.”

The voice, coming as it did from all directions, startled Donovan so badly he dropped the sample vials he was holding. Eleanor watched him with cool, unblinking eyes that still seemed impossibly wide.

“Gods, Paul,” he breathed, kicking the broken pieces of glass under the res-pod in frustration. “You scared me.”

“Sorry, Donovan.”

“It worked,” Donovan said, when he got his breath back. “We thought – we thought you were dead.”

Paul’s voice did not sound like that of a ghost’s. It was too loud, for one thing, coming over all the speakers in the science bay at once. “I don’t feel dead. Strange, yeah, but not dead. But listen: someone is trying to kill you.”

Donovan glanced nervously at Eleanor, perched on the other side of the res-pod that held Davis’s body. From what he understood, she had plenty of reasons to hate and fear Davis. And Donovan had a few reasons to fear her as well.

“Not just you, Donovan,” Paul’s voice continued. “All of you. Someone’s sending a message to the ship’s systems to self-destruct.”

“You can hear that?” Donovan asked.

“I’m not sure.” Paul paused. “It’s difficult, in here. I’m tied into the ship’s systems – I mean, the Brick is – and I’m learning them. Talking to them. But someone’s outside as well, sending this message.”

“It’s Tholan,” Eleanor said. There was no uncertainty in her tone. “Those are his ships out there we detected. He won’t let this vessel fall into Colonizer hands.”

“Well, block it then, Paul,” Donovan said. He felt he should be more nervous than he was about the ship’s potential destruction, but all he felt was the strangeness of talking to Paul when he had flash-frozen his body in the morgue only hours ago. “Can you do that?”

“I have,” Paul answered evenly. “I did. Jens is on the bridge, trying to make contact with the System ships now.”

“Does she know about the destruct command?”

“Yes. I said that aloud to everyone, I think. I’m discussing communications possibilities with her now. Colonizer reinforcements have arrived.”

Donovan glanced toward the ceiling. “Are you having multiple conversations at once, Paul?”

Paul was quiet for a moment. “Maybe? I think so.”

“I don’t think you’re quite human anymore.” He glanced across the pod at Eleanor, but her flawless face remained impassive.

“What are you doing?” Paul asked.

Donovan could only imagine what sort of perception Paul now had, conscious in the Brick and manifested simultaneously in multiple ships throughout the galaxy.

“We’re trying to revive Davis,” Donovan explained.

“Why?” Paul asked. “I thought he tried to kill her.”

Donovan looked at Eleanor, waiting for her to respond. When she didn’t, he shrugged. “Beka’s orders. She wants as many available hands as possible.”

Not that he was having any luck though. The cellular catalysts so effective at regenerating necrotic tissue had a hard time working alongside Davis’s own living cells. It was taking far too long to bring the nutrient matrices to the proper equilibriums for accelerated cell growth.

“If I had months,” Donovan said, “I might be able to. But right now it’s just keeping him alive.”

“I can see the res-pod system,” Paul said, “from the inside. I can see how it works.”

Donovan closed his eyes wearily. “Of course you can, Paul.”

Paul was silent for so long Donovan assumed he had withdrawn his attention. He bent back to his own work over the res-pod and Davis’s ruined form. It was Eleanor who finally broke the silence.

“Do you see how to repair him, Paul?” she asked.

“Finding the right matrices is a matter of trial and error,” Donovan began. “It would take weeks to even—”

“I think so.” Paul’s response showed he had not gone far, though Donovan admitted he didn’t know where Paul could have gone. Paul was a presence now, a ghost haunting their machines. “I think I see how.”

“Do it.” Eleanor’s voice was even, but her eyes were dangerous.

Donovan considered arguing, but the res-pod immediately began to hum. The fluids surrounding Davis’s broken form drained away and were replaced. They surged, cycling back and forth, revealing and then obscuring Davis’s body as though he were the king of legend sleeping beneath a river of glass. The pod grew hot under Donovan’s hand.

“What will you do if he wakes up?” Donovan asked Eleanor.

“I don’t know,” she said. “He killed my entire crew. Punish him for that, I suppose.”

Donovan’s unease grew. He watched the fluids swirling in the pod between them and thought of his own experiments on the Synthetics while they were sleeping. Did Eleanor know about that as well? He told himself he had only done what he needed to do to find them a way through the Fleet.

“Donovan,” Paul asked suddenly. “Is it working?”

Donovan peered at the displays, which showed a dizzying array of amino acids and Synthetic catalysts being created, applied, and then immediately discarded or modified.

“It seems to be,” he said. The ragged flesh along Davis’s charred arm was already beginning to mend and knit itself over the weapon built onto the bone there. “Do you know what that is?” he asked Eleanor, pointing to it.

She nodded slowly. “When it became clear we would be made illegal and exterminated, when we first went into hiding, there were teams of hunters who used these weapons to track us down. They were called seneschals.”

“And he’s been hunting you this whole time?”

Eleanor shrugged. “When most of us were destroyed – or had departed with the Colonizers – the seneschals were retired. Some believed, rightly, that more of us remained in hiding. They formed themselves into family guilds, passing down their secrets and their weapon from generation to generation. They believed they were safeguarding humanity against a hidden threat.”

“Were they?”

Eleanor met his gaze. “We want to exist.”

“Donovan,” Paul interrupted. “I can’t see. What’s happening?”

Donovan glanced back at the pod. “You’re doing it, Paul. I’ve never seen a regeneration propagated so quickly, even on a dead body.”

“No,” Paul said. His voice sounded strained. “I can’t see anything. I can’t—Something’s happening.”

“It’s the memories,” Eleanor whispered to Donovan. “Somewhere they’ve begun scanning soldiers. The effect will be rapid. Paul will run out of space.”

“There are voices in here – frozen,” Paul said. “I’m in a room filling up with sand. I can’t move.”

Donovan was listening, but his eyes were on what was happening beneath the lid of the pod. The fluid had cleared and drained away a final time. Davis now lay beneath the glass surface, scarred and still pale and sickly, but breathing shallowly.

“You did it, Paul,” he said.

“I led Cam to the girls,” Paul was saying, as though he could no longer hear Donovan. “I couldn’t reach them, but I led her there. Bring them home, Donovan.”

“Okay, Paul,” Donovan promised. “I will.”

“Bring them home, Donovan.”

“I will, Paul.”

“Bring them home, Donovan.”

Eleanor put her fingers over her lips. “He’s collapsed into a static state,” she whispered. “Like a memory scan. There’s nothing left now but an image.”

Paul’s voice came once more, but faded, stretched and deepened as though by distance.

Donovan’s eyes went to the Brick in the corner of the chamber.

“Is he still in there?” he asked.

“A memory,” Eleanor said. “A broken scan. Too corrupted to pull back out.”

“Then he’s gone.”

She nodded.

Davis stirred beneath the glass.

Donovan walked to the wall and pressed the intercom for the command deck. “Has Beka returned from the surface?” Jens indicated a negative. “When she does, send her down. Paul’s gone, but Davis is waking up.”

C
am was not asleep
, but she was no longer in the cavern at the center of the twisted planet. Instead, she stood on a world of sharply curving horizons. Ice cracked beneath her boots and tiny jets of vapor rose up around her. There were others near her as well, all wearing thin-suits of a bulky and antiquated make. Above were the spurs and rims of System, which meant she was on a comet or asteroid well off the ecliptic plane.

She and the other figures stood in a ring around a central mound or low hill of serrated ice. Something lay buried at its base, something Cam sensed was wounded and frightened, although the other figures seemed unaware.

She wanted to tell them to stop, that they should leave, turn around and forget this comet was here, wipe its location from their charts, but no matter how loudly she spoke, no one could hear her through the weight of her mask and the heaviness of the vacuum beyond.

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.”

T
his 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 snake-like 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 geometries 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.