Strength and Honor (6 page)

“Aye, sir,” said Cole Darby.

Steele had expected Darb to bail a long time ago. But the Darb had hung in, fit in. Not that the Darb wasn’t still an odd duck in this company. Steele didn’t know if Cole Darby had found whatever he was looking for, but he was still here and he was useful most of the time.

Steele watched Cole Darby read the Protocol. Darb’s eyes did not glass over. You could see the cylinders turning and the tumblers falling into position.

Steele returned to Ranza, gestured back with a jerk of his thick thumb. “There.”

“Oh,” said Ranza on an arcing note, everything becoming clear.
“That
brain.”

“Allocate your resources, Flight Leader,” Steele tapped her shoulder with the bottom of his fist. Ranza smiled a gap-toothed smile. “Got it, sir. Thank you, sir.”

Steele surveyed the hangar. His gaze fell on a pair of booted feet, sticking out from under the Swift next to Kerry Blue’s.

Steele advanced. Let his shadow fall across the boots. “You got a girlfriend under there, Salvador?” Clunk. Head on the belly. Cain Salvador scrabbled to vertical. “No, sir.”

Flight Sergeant Cain Salvador looked like a Marine. Cain was sleek and powerful as a seal. Could have been a real afthole but he respected authority and stood before Steele at stiff attention.

“As you were.” Cain Salvador rubbed his head and crawled back under his Swift, Alpha Three.

Tromping across the deck grates and making a lot of noise operating a maintenance bot to suck the debris and soot from Kerry Blue’s exploding crate was Dak Shepard, Alpha Two. Hard not to like Dak Shepard. All heart, guts, brawn, and dick. No brain. Dak was solid.

Flight Sergeant Twitch Fuentes was changing out the canopy of his Swift, Alpha Five. Steele did not ask Twitch Fuentes anything. Steele really didn’t want to know how much English Twitch didn’t know. Twitch was a good fighter, always ready.

Carly Delgado regularly flew Alpha Four. She had pried up a deck grate and was summoning Dak over to help her with the soggy mess underneath it with a wave of her stick-thin arm. All bone and whip muscle. Carly was a hard soldier. Her small pyramidal breasts looked hard too. Mean. Too lean. She was looking particularly skinny right now. Steele ordered her, “Bulk up, Delgado.”

“I feel better when I’m hungry,” Carly answered back. Steele told her, “I don’t care if you eat or not, I want to see more Delgado.” Dak whispered, “Carly! Take your shirt off!”

“Shut up, Dak.” This mess was all Augustus’ fault as far as Steele could see. The Roman man-machine was just plain easy to hate.

The war had gone hot and
Merrimack
was stuck in the Deep, snarled up in the Divorce Protocol, tripping over minutia and that was Augustus’ fault too. The boffins were afraid Augustus had left rogue nanites.

Merrimack
segregated all her systems. Took them down one by one, searched for signs of tampering and scoured for nanites. The crew ran test scenarios designed by the cryptotech and validated by the systems’ normal users and their maintenance personnel.

All programs were reencrypted and reseeded.

Chief Engineer Kit Kittering took down each of the fornicating ship’s six fornicating engines one at a time, exiling the fornicating antimatter into space, while she purged the fornicating system, rehoused the fornicating components, recoded the fornicating containment field, recaptured the antimatter (really fornicating on the way back in) and restarted the damned engine.

Codes needed changing on all spacecraft
Merrimack
carried, starting with the Swifts, their force fields, their engine containment shields. Same with the long-range shuttles and the space patrol torpedo boats.

All personnel reported to the hospital in rotation for full nano scans. That included the ship’s dogs.

Also to be scanned were the houseplants, the livestock, the hydroponic gardens. Innocuous systems—air, light, emergency light, the lifts—were all refitted with virgin programs. Decks were evacuated and sealed off one by one, opened to vacuum and sanitized.

Scrubbing for nanoparticles, you got to know how really big the
Mack
was.

She measured four hundred feet red light to green light, eighty-four feet of that across the beam. She was four hundred feet topsail tip to bottom sail tip; five hundred and seventy feet nose to engines, then add another ninety feet onto that for the engines.

“What’s that in nanometers?”

“Shut up, Dak.”

Steele began to wonder if those instruments couldn’t read his thoughts. Absolutely nothing else was private. Steele thanked God he’d never stashed away any images of Kerry Blue in his quarters. Nothing was left unscrutinized down to the nano level.

Harvard educated xenolinguist Patrick Hamilton apparently wasn’t smart enough to purge his stash before the searchers hit his quarters. Something turned up in his quarters not meant for wifely eyes. Whatever it was, it didn’t cause the security team any concern, but Doctor Pat’s wife was the Hamster, third in command of the space battleship
Merrimack.
Those were her quarters too. If Patrick Hamilton didn’t think a find like that wouldn’t get back to her there must have been a stupid contest running.

Made Steele feel like a fog trucking genius.

Captain Farragut took a walkabout of his giant ship. Not that he could see nanoparticles, but if anything were out of place on his
Merrimack
he could sense it.

The tap tap tap of a basketball drew him to the maintenance hangar. He recognized the cadence of the dribble. The ball’s bounces had a feminine sound. The footsteps following the ball were barely audible above the other ship sounds.

As Farragut entered the cavernous compartment, the lone player circled under the basket with a light tread. She jumped. Landed lightly and corralled the ball that bounced off the rim.

She was five foot one and light boned.

Hamster was just plain light.

She played one-on-herself in the maintenance hangar. John Farragut would have joined her, but it was probably not a good idea for him to play one-on-one of any game with Mrs. Hamilton.

Glenn Hamilton wore her auburn hair pulled back in a ponytail. She dribbled the basketball, jumped, and shot. And missed again. Caught the rebound.

“You know there is something ridiculous about you with a basketball.” Hamster glared toward the hatch. Saw John Farragut leaning in the entranceway. “Shut up,” she said. “Sir.”

Farragut strode in. He beckoned for the ball. She passed it to him, rather strongly.

He bounced the ball twice, took a shot. Missed.

Hamster collected the rebound, jumped and made the shot. “Gypsy wasn’t on deck when you called me to the command deck, was she?” said Farragut.

Hamster had to think back to the declaration of war. It seemed like a year ago since the balloon went up, even though it was scarcely enough time to count in days. More like hours.

She remembered the words she’d used to summon Farragut to the command deck in the middle of ship’s night without mentioning war.

Gypsy’s hair.

“Hell no, sir!” she answered.

Commander Gypsy Dent’s hair was an elaborate nest of serpentine dreadlocks detached from Gypsy’s head and exiled to her cabin until Gypsy got off duty, when she reattached it to her head hair by hair.

Gypsy was very proud of her hair, and she had given Captain Farragut an order: “Speak not of the hair.”

No one else would have made the connection, even if they had heard Farragut once describe Gypsy’s hair as “a war zone.” But Glenn Hamilton and John Farragut operated on the same harmonic. He figured it out instantly.

“Don’t tell Commander Dent I said that,” said Hamster. “She’ll sic her hair on me.”

She bounced the basketball.

It was the middle of Glenn Hamilton’s night. She ought to be in bed, with her husband. “All not happy in the rose garden?” Farragut guessed.
“Plant
the rose garden!” said Hamster. She took another shot. Bounced off the rim. “I am
not
going to sleep wflh
that.”

She flipped the bird at her absent sweetheart.

Farragut seized her impudent digit in his fist and walked Glenn by the finger over to a data terminal. He pressed her fingertip to an authorization pad. Her hand was dainty and tiny in his big paw. Her fingernail formed a neat little oval peeking out the bottom of his fist. He let go of her finger. The authorization pad showed green. He’d given her access to the captain’s quarters. “You can rack out at my place,” Farragut told her. “Be out of there by eight bells.” Glenn collected the basketball. She tossed it from hand to hand, agitated, considering the offer. Farragut intercepted the ball, kept it. He nodded sideways out the hatch. “Get some rest.” Glenn let her chin drop to her collarbone, suddenly very sleepy. “Thank you, sir.” She left the deck, her little red ponytail swinging side to side.

Farragut forgot about the encounter until mid watch, ship’s night, which everyone called the Hamster watch. The delicate smell of someone else, someone female, lingered on his pillow.

Had the damnedest dreams.

“Word is Lady Hamilton spent the day in the captain’s rack,” Carly arrived in the forecastle with the latest gossip. Gossip had already got there ahead of her, and Darb said back, “Yeah, she did but the cap’n didn’t. He was on duty.”

“Crap,” said Kerry Blue, disappointed. “Hamster should dump Doctor Pat and make the captain happy.”

“Never happen,
chica linda”
said Carly. “They’re officers. Officers take that skat serious.”

“It’s not like officers’ zippers don’t go down like everyone else’s,” said Cain Salvador.

“Yeah,” said Dak Shepard and added with a snigger, “They just make a real loud sound when they get caught.” Kerry Blue’s stomach fluttered. That was exactly nothing she wanted to hear.

“Hamster ain’t right for the captain,” said Ranza Espinoza.

“You think?” said Kerry Blue.

Ranza lifted a sneering lip. “Nah. She’s not for him. She’s just
here.
Farragut needs a hen, and that chick don’t lay eggs.”

“Somebody told me Farragut had a wife,” said Cain Salvador.

“Yeah,” said Dak. “Named Maryann.”

“So Farragut
is
married?” said Cain, surprised.

“Was,” said Dak.

“A while ago,” said Kerry Blue.

“She offed herself,” said Carly.

“Really?” said Cain. “Damn, I never found him that tough to be around.”

“That’s the point,” said Cariy. “He wasn’t around.”

“She did it because he wasn’t
around?”
Suicide was alien to Kerry Blue and she made a face, looking around for anyone else who thought that was weird. “Seems a little drastic,” said Cole Darby to her frown. “Couldn’t she just have an affair with the stable boy?”

“I wouldn’t,” said Kerry Blue.

“Wouldn’t what?”

“Kill myself,” said Kerry.

“We know that,
chica,”
said Carly.

“Kerry would do the stable boy,” said Dak.

Kerry didn’t ever want to know what she would do.

Merrimack
looked down from the observation deck at the devastated world of Telecore. It was getting time to leave.

Captain Farragut loathed giving ground to the enemy. As a soldier, he wanted to kill them.

It galled him to know that exterminating an entire Hive was as easy as flipping a switch. He had destroyed the two original Hives with two resonant pulses. They died in an instant.

It was pathetically easy.

And impossible at the moment.

Repeating that feat required identifying the specific harmonic that held this new Hive together. There were infinite harmonics. John Farragut had been given the first two. Xenos were working on recreating the methodology but if isolating a harmonic were not so damnably difficult then some intelligent entity would have stopped the original Hives long before now.

The Hive was so alien to organic life, so improbable, so contrary to ordinary laws of nature that worlds died before they could realize the nature of the beast.

John Farragut was sure to holy hell that no one would be giving him harmonics this time. The neutron hose option was tempting. But tactical victory could lead to strategic disaster.

John Farragut would not be the one to teach this Hive what a neutron hose was. But neither could he trust the gorgons of Telecore to stay on Telecore once
Merrimack
left orbit.

The xenos could not tell him what part of a Hive’s “knowledge” was learned and what was instinct.

Attraction to a resonant source was probably instinctive. Hive ability to hone in on a source and a reception point of resonance appeared to be an inborn skill as well.

Even now the gorgons of Telecore leaned up, yearning like sunflowers at
Merrimack’s
every orbital pass.

If this Hive behaved like its predecessor, then as soon as these gorgons became spaceborne they would immediately head to the closest resonant source. Assuming
Merrimack
was no longer here, that would make the swarm’s target the U.S. Space Fortress Dwight David Eisenhower. A space fort was a stationary target.

Farragut quit the observation deck and swung into the lab. “Doctor Weng! Doctor Sidowski! Show me what you’ve got!”

“I think we have come up with a workable solution—” said Weng.

“More of a stopgap than a solution—” said Ski.

“—to handle the resident swarm in the absence of human oversight,” said Weng. The xenos presented to Captain Farragut a collection of small drones.

Farragut picked one up. It was lightweight, roughly spherical, larger than a softball, smaller than a basketball. He turned it over and over. “They look like Roman rovers.”

Weng nodded. “We nicked the design.” Ski: “They’re programmed to resonate on different harmonics. This is the first set—”

“We’re calling it Toto.”

“Toto is engineered to run around on the surface of Telecore, resonating.”

“Gorgons chase resonant sources.”

“The gorgons will chase them,” said Weng. “Toto is faster than the gorgons,” said Ski. “According to current data,” said Weng. “We’re basically giving the gorgons a little exercise,”