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

T
hey gave
her a full day before they summoned her. This time it was an admiral Beka had not yet met. She could tell he was of high-rank. The huge back wall of the office in which he waited contained more window space than Beka had seen so far during her whole week aboard the shipyard. It did not overlook the harsh star or the inner shipyard. Instead, it looked out on the whorled band of the galactic plain. The angry light from the dwarf star was invisible here. In its place, there were a million stars, undimmed by atmosphere or artificial illumination.

“Coffee?” he asked by way of greeting. He was sitting behind a large, ebony desk, and he looked very much the part of an admiral. His face could have been that of an iconic grandfather figure- wise and understanding though deeply lined and with a long, faint scar crossing his temple. His shoulders were square and stiff, even as he leaned backward in his chair and sipped from a ceramic mug. He had the simple, nondescript uniform on him that Beka had come to learn was worn by only the highest-ranking military officials.

“No, thank you.” Beka took the single chair opposite him without waiting to be offered it. She was tired, and she didn’t mind using her position outside the military chain of command to ignore certain subtleties of hierarchical etiquette.

“I’m Admiral Tholan. I’m very sorry about your sister.”

“You were monitoring my transmission?” She was unsurprised and too emotionally drained to register anger.

“Of course we monitor transmissions, but we knew before that. We knew—” He winced as though embarrassed. “We knew the day before we brought you here. That’s why you were summoned from System. But we thought it would be best to hear the news from someone you knew and trusted.”

Beka felt like she was processing information slowly, still filtering everything through the sudden fact of her sister’s now irrevocable absence. “You brought me here because of Jens?”

“Because of her death, yes.” The admiral took a moment to sip his coffee. His cup was—incongruously in this place—tiny and white. “I’m sorry that we had to keep you in the dark, but, again, we thought it best that the news come from someone close to you. And we wanted you here when you heard it.”

“Why?”

The admiral set the cup down and turned toward the huge windows.

“Did your sister tell you where she was stationed? Anything about her mission?”Beka followed his gaze. The stars anywhere outside System were an inaccessible Rorschach image of twisted, distended constellations for her. A stellar cartographer might be able to point out and identify some of the stars seen from home, but most soldiers—and certainly Beka—could not.

“Yes,” she answered.

The admiral nodded. “Then I apologize on her behalf for the lie. Her wing was moved to aerial assault three months before terminal deployment. They were under orders, of course, to keep their new assignment confidential.” The admiral turned back toward her. “She was assigned to the First Fleet.”

Beka’s curiosity warred with her fear. Rumors abounded regarding the fate of the missing Fleet. Everyone had a theory, each more outlandish than the next. But here was someone in a position high enough to have real information. And now the fate of the First Fleet—the Ghost Fleet, as some of the feeds were already calling it—was bound up with that of her sister.

“What do you know of the war with the Colonizers?”

“Only what the newsfeeds report, which is not a lot.” She chose her words carefully. “That after some initial and rapid gains, we’ve scaled back operations. That both sides are exploring diplomatic options.”

Tholan grunted. “All are more or less true, and of course are vague enough to be completely useless.” He held his cup again and stared into it. “If you drew a circle containing all of the specialists—communications, tactical, entanglement, both government and civilian—who might be able to help us figure out what happened to the Fleet, that would be a hell of a lot of people.”

Beka nodded blankly.

“If you drew another circle around all the people who had a vested interest—a personal interest—in helping us find the Fleet, that would be a pretty big circle too. Seven hundred ships. Fifteen thousand personnel. Representing a lot of family members to keep in the dark. A lot of people who are starting to ask difficult questions.”

The admiral’s office was chilling. Beka had been cold since leaving System. On her first day on the shipyard an aide she had not seen since had given her a surplus flight jacket. She pulled it tighter around her shoulders. “What happened to the Fleet?”

“It was our first major deep space deployment against the Colonizers, near the Perseus Limb. They had dug into a cluster of dead worlds that weren’t part of their treaty-allocated territory. Intelligence indicated it had become the Colonizers’ main tech hub.” He snorted. “Though
tech
for a Colonizer usually doesn’t mean much beyond rail-guns and hollowed-out asteroids.”

Jens had said nothing about any of this in her transmissions home. Neither had it been on any of the newsfeeds. Beka wondered what else Jens, and what else everyone out here, had been keeping quiet.

The admiral stood and walked to the transparent wall, beckoning her to follow. She rose. Close to the windows and still hunched in her jacket, Beka experienced a sudden sense of vertigo. The stars seemed to curve around them so the points of light were above and below as well as in front of them, as though the two of them were hanging in their midst. As though intuiting her earlier thoughts, Tholan pointed.

“There’s System.”

There were a few yellow specks. It was impossible to tell which he was indicating.

“I know it’s not comfortable here,” the admiral said slowly. “We’re all a long way from home. There are other planet-side military installments that are more pleasant. Comfortable, almost. We can move you to one of those if you prefer.” He paused. “Because you’re not going home until this is all over.”

Beka blinked and stepped away. “I’m a prisoner?”

Tholan waved the word away. “I want to make your situation clear, and you’ll understand you can believe what I tell you. I’m going to give you information, right now, that certain people would kill to have. I’m going to do it because I need you to make a decision. If you decide not to help us, that’s fine. I won’t compel compliance from you. But you’ll be kept safe and out of the way until we’ve found the Fleet and the conflict with the Colonizers is resolved.”

Beka paused to absorb this, taking a breath. “Can I sit down?”

He nodded. When she was seated again, he continued, still standing. “Those two circles I mentioned earlier. There are a lot of people in each. But where they intersect—people who could make a real contribution to helping us find the First Fleet and people who have a deep personal interest in doing so—it’s much smaller. A handful, really.”

“Including me.”

He nodded again.

“But you must have—” She motioned vaguely. Her mind swimming, she noticed her nails, never terribly well kept, had worsened in space. Her hands seemed tiny against the darkness beyond the admiral’s windows. “You must have hundreds of people you can order to tackle this problem. Probably people better than me and whoever else you’ve found.”

“You’re an intelligent woman. You couldn’t be an entanglement expert if you weren’t. But I’m not going to bore you with the ins and outs of the military command structure.” Tholan sat again and sipped from his cup. It had to be cold by now. “Suffice it to say that there are certain advantages to be had by utilizing people outside of that command structure. Certain questions of culpability and—” He paused as though searching for a word before finally sighing and settling on one he was clearly displeased with. “Certain questions of culpability and
ethics
are avoided. Officially.”

“Ethics?”

The cup was down again. He leaned forward. “We’ve got fifteen thousand ghosts in our machine, Ms. Grale. Memory uploads that know what happened to the First Fleet. Or pieces of what happened. We need to find out what happened to them. We need to talk to them. But we don’t have their bodies to dump back into.”

Beka closed her eyes. She was starting to see the height of the stakes here, subtle hints of some of the decisions she would be forced to make. Memories encoded in the quantum-tethered Bricks—the memory cores carried by each ship—were useless without the bodies to which they belonged. Encoded minds only fit into the neural networks they had been copied from. They could kill both the body and the mind trying to download into a different host.

The admiral was watching her. “Can you help us disentangle some of those memories?”

Jens body was lost, but her mind wasn’t. And Beka, Jens’ sister, was an entanglement expert.

“I assume we’ll be working with your Brick here.” She waited for Tholan’s nod. “I’m going to need new quarters. On this side of the shipyard. Away from that damned star.”

The admiral smiled and reached across the table. His hand was as weathered as his face, but she shook it, thinking of Jens.

It’s a chance
, she told herself.
More than most get. I’ll do what it takes.

She tried not to think about what that might mean.

“
T
here’s
a body in the attic.”

Paul looked up. Cam was speaking softly, keeping her voice out of earshot of the girls. The twins were sitting at the dining room table drawing slow circles with their crayons on large white paper. Brown and black-always brown and black. It was the landscape.

Paul couldn’t read her expression. “A body?”

“Station sent down the manifest this morning while you were out.” Cam handed it over. “That’s what it says.”

Paul read it over. A pod had arrived in the night, and the manifest simply read-

“But resupply isn’t for . . .”

“I know. Three weeks.” She arched an eyebrow. “And resupply doesn’t usually bring strange, unidentified bodies.”

“Of course not. But where did it come from?”

Cam shrugged and walked over to where the twins were coloring. She placed her bowl of oatmeal on the table and began to eat.

Paul was pale, like his daughters, with wide eyes and dark hair that fell in lank ribbons across his forehead. Cam, in contrast, had a deep brown complexion that was as smooth as the stones beyond the windows. She was sharp where Paul was distant, blunt where he was vague.

The wide viewports opposite the breakfast table looked out over a shallow, rocky canyon. Sunlight was staining the mountains beyond with the first stabs of light. For a moment, Paul thought he could see hints of texture, the first indications of nucleating particles and clouds, in the sky. It was only his imagination, he told himself. The new atmosphere of Onaway was still too thin.

One of the twins—Perry—looked up from her coloring.

“I had another dream last night,” she said mildly. “There were people outside.”

“You’re dreaming about the crew from the next habitation over,” Paul said. He had explained this several times already. “You saw them outside with me last week, working on some of the conduits to the rock-burners. You’re not used to seeing people besides your parents, and that was all you talked about the next day.”

The twins were five. They both nodded with wide eyes.

“I had a dream too,” Agnes said.

“Did you?” Cam joined them at the table.

Paul exchanged a familiar, concerned glance with her. They had talked a long time about raising the twins here. Plenty of colony worlds, even terraforming stations like theirs on Onaway, had children. It was encouraged with additional service stipends and reductions of terms. But there were also constant concerns about what it meant raising them in such isolation. The feeds and the real-time, offsite instruction helped, but their interactions with anyone outside the habitation were only through transmissions. They had never met other children in person.

“I did,” Agnes continued. “There were people outside too.”

Paul sighed. He knew that was all he would get from them. They didn’t seem scared, though they seldom seemed much of anything. It wasn’t like they were bored or uninterested; they just weren’t engaged. He blamed the bleak planet for this. It was lovely if you liked the play of light and shadows on rocks, but it probably wasn’t healthy for the minds of children.

He glanced back at the manifest. “I’ll have to go up there.”

Cam nodded. “What did you have planned for the afternoon?”

He finished his oatmeal and stood. “Nothing much. I was going to check the plantations along the north ridge, but that can wait until tomorrow. The rock-burners are running fine. I guess I’ll go upstairs then.”

“Can I come?” It was Agnes again.

Her mother shook her head her. “You can’t go up the elevator until you’re a bit older, honey.”

“But I want to see our house from space.”

“There’s nothing to see,” he told her. It was a lie- the view from up there was fantastic. “The cable obstructs most of what’s below, and the station windows are pretty small. I’ll take you when you’re older, babe.”

P
aul put
on his thinsuit standing along the outside airlock and then walked back through the habitation and into the north tunnel. The elevator to the orbiting station was tethered at the tunnel’s end just beyond the outer perimeter. The car was waiting at the base. He strapped himself in and activated the climb.

The ascension didn’t take very long. Again, he tried to make himself believe that he saw a vague hue, some slight haze move and dissipate as he rose. The landscape opened out below, brown and black all over like his daughters’ scribbles. The climb took about a half an hour. He might have drifted off at some point, lulled by the steady hum of the wheels reeling up the carbonic cable. By the time he reached the Station, the curve of the world below was clearly visible beyond the car’s windows. On the horizon, he could just pick out the identical Station of the next habitation, its cable an invisible thread against the black.

He didn’t necessarily have to put on his helmet on, but he did nevertheless, just in case the car’s osculation with Station’s airlock failed. It had never done that, but Paul liked to be sure. Space made him nervous. Machines made him nervous. Cam’s patient competence with both was the only thing that let him sleep at night.

He passed from the elevator to the tiny space station tethered in orbit two hundred miles above their home. Paul called it the attic. It really wasn’t much else. It was cheaper for the resupply ships that visited to deliver cargo at a string of orbiting stations than it was to land and take off again outside each habitation. Plus it was easier—and less risky—than trying to drop cargo at specific points planet-side. There was also the matter of outgoing cargo. Those on the surface occasionally shipped out as well, and it was far more efficient to lift it via elevator for pickup than to launch it into orbit every single time.

Station was their orbiting garage. The Attic. It was fairly empty now, or should have been, as they were expecting resupply within the month. There were still a few storage bins tethered against the white curving walls. When it was full, after resupply, there was barely room to turn around. That could cause some problems now, especially if the manifest Station had sent them was correct.

Paul used to bring Cam up here before the twins were born. Now she wouldn’t leave them all alone down there, which was understandable. She wasn’t comfortable bringing them up here, also understandable. Back then they used to look out over the desolate landscape beneath and the equally desolate expanse of stars beyond. Paul had done some watercolors of the planet’s surface, with the soft hues of vegetation and an atmosphere. He had labeled lakes and rivers that didn’t yet exist. The paintings still hung in Cam’s workshop.

And there was nothing quite like having sex in microgravity.

“Station, what’s the status?” he asked as he kicked off from the airlock, drifting slowly through the room.

The status was obvious. It was sitting in the middle of the room, but Paul figured he’d ask anyway. He had read in some manual—before Cam had hidden all the tech manuals he had for his own good—that one should talk to the AI systems regularly to make sure they weren’t developing verbal bugs.

“Situation is normal, Paul.”

“What’s the manifest, Station?”

“Remaining supplies: Three liters of distilled water. One kilogram of protein supplements. Assorted medical and nutritional self-preparing units. One medical pod. Do you want more information?”

“Yes.” He had drifted to the pod and was looking down at it now, if that was what it was. It was large enough to take up a corner of the attic, and it looked like it had automatically interfaced with Station’s power systems. “The last one.”

“One medical pod. Contents: one male human, age unknown, status deceased.”

“Where did it come from?”

“Unknown. The telemetry data is encrypted.”

The pod seemed just long enough for a tall man to lay horizontally, tapering near one end. There were some nozzles that looked like maneuvering thrusters along the base. The front surface was glass, but Paul wasn’t looking at that yet. He was studying the sides, looking for some sign or marking. There were a lot of numbers and letters, even a name, but they didn’t make sense to him at all. There was an insignia on one edge though, which he recognized immediately.

“This is military.”

“I cannot confirm that,” Station answered.

“But where exactly did it come from?” he asked again. “We didn’t get any notification of any ships in orbit. Who delivered it?”

“No ships docked. The pod arrived on its own and was brought aboard through the cargo airlock.”

“It’s self-piloting?” Paul couldn’t quite believe his hearing. He peered at the sides again, trying to make sense of the jumbled conduits and outlets stretching all the way to the pod’s rear. “Did it come on the light line? It doesn’t look big enough to be jump-set equipped.”

“I don’t know.”

He had been avoiding looking at the front of the pod. The whole thing felt too much like an open coffin.

“What’s inside again?” he asked, knowing the answer.

“One male human, age unknown, status deceased.”

It
was
a coffin, with a dead man inside.

“Why would a dead man come here?”

Station was silent for a moment. “I don’t know.”

Paul looked inside through the glass. There was indeed a body in there, clothed in what looked like the white garb of a medical officer. It was hard to tell. The interior of the pod was filled with some sort of blue-green fluid that made the details beneath too hazy to be sure of anything.

“Is it drawing power from Station?” Paul asked.

“Yes, but well within tolerance level, Paul. Solar array is still gathering with an eighty percent surplus.”

“What’s it using the power for? Keeping this body preserved?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can’t you get any information from its system?”

“All the data is encrypted.”

Paul sighed. His gaze drifted up along the length of the pod, and suddenly his stomach tightened.

The dead man had no face.

“
N
o face
?”

Paul and Cam sat in her workshop. The faint sounds of the twins’ class came from the next room.

“Not, like, blank or something.” Paul waved a hand and grimaced. “It’s just gone. The entire front of his head had been shattered in. It was . . .” he paused, “unsettling.”

“But a human body stored in a military medical pod?”

“That’s what it looks like.”

Paul’s hands were still shaking from the memory of it. He saw the ruined face every time he closed his eyes. Whatever sort of fluid the pod had been filled with, it preserved everything. It was like one of those paperweights that used to sit on his grandmother’s desk, a flower encased in glass. But the flower here was the man’s face framed with petals of blood and bits of bone.

He grimaced again. “Do you want to go up and see it?”

“No.” Cam frowned. “What would a medical frigate be doing this far from the front?”

One of the twins answered something to an unheard question. Paul couldn’t tell from the voice whether it was Perry or Agnes.

“I have no idea. I’m not even sure where the front is anymore; now that they’ve started blanking the newsfeeds.”

“It’s nowhere near here, wherever else it might be.” Cam was absently picking at the wires in a replacement moisturizer unit that lay disassembled on her workbench. “There’s not a Colonizer world within a hundred light years of here.”

Paul smiled wryly. “This is a colonizer world.”

“You know what I mean. Colonizer with a capital C.”

“So what do we do?” Watching her work helped. Her fingers, even without her full attention, moved confidently over the mechanisms before her. Paul knew that she could disassemble and reassemble most of the components of their habitation if need be. That knowledge helped him sleep at night as well.

“I don’t know, Twalish.” She was worried about something. She never called him by his last name except when she was worried.

“You don’t know? We need to report this.”

Her fingers stopped. “We can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“Why not?” She was looking at him now. “I’ll tell you why not. Because that pod is military, and if we report this back to Terraforming Service, they’ll call the military. Do you want a Man of War dropping off the light line into orbit? What do you think would happen to me if we had a fleet ensign coming down the elevator to poke around and ask questions?”

Paul spread his hands. “I don’t know, Cam. Your discharge was a long time ago.”

“I had to pull some strings to get out, Paul. It wasn’t a pleasant situation, and they don’t forget things like that. There’s a reason we’re on this godforsaken rock instead of someplace that actually has the rumor of an existing atmosphere.”

From the next room came the sound of the girls clapping.

“Okay.” Paul pinched the bridge of his nose. “All right. So what do we do?”

Cam’s fingers found their places again and something inside the unit twitched and sparked. “You’re sure it was military?”

“Jesus, Cam, the star and eagle insignia was right there on the side. Do you want to go up and check for yourself?”

She shook her head. “I’ve seen them before. From the inside.”

Paul swallowed the retort he had readied and waited. Cam hardly ever spoke of her time in the military.

“It’s a res-pod.” She put down her tools and turned to face him. “It has to be. “Rescue–Resuscitation-Resurrection.” Every medical frigate is full of them.”

“And you’ve been inside one?”

“We were in the first wave when we moved on to the Reservation Worlds. I was infantry. I’ve told you about that.”

He nodded.

“This was before it was even considered an all-out conflict. Before the Colonizers started making a mess of things. They called us a peacekeeping force.”

“Sure.”

“Those pods double as cockpits. They’re the egg you ride in at the center of your heavy-suit. Your suit gets hit, and the pod does an automatic evac. It doesn’t matter how much of you is left, or how little. Your pod fills itself with the nutrient matrix and keeps you in stasis until you can be returned to a frigate. Back then, they would come and collect you. Now, it looks like the pods are mobile. Which I guess makes sense if they’re from deep space deployments.”