“Keep ’em off! Keep ’em off! I
hate
those things.”
“Ain’t in love with ’em myself,” said Dak. “Load!”
The shell dropped into the chamber.
“Close and lock.”
“I’m locked,” said Carly, stepping away.
A nervous rookie—Cowboy’s replacement—watched the black clouds on the monitor. “They can get
in?
” Had heard that they could. Wanted someone to laugh at him for believing that one.
Dak grunted, cranking the firing mechanism. “You bet your favorite body part they can. Ready! Gimme a range! Gimme a range!”
Regi adjusted the mechanical dial for the shifting swarm. Fed out a measured length of chemical fuse. “Consider this a tone,” she said. “FRAG ’EM!”
“Clear gun! Come and get it, greta!” Dak pulled the lever as everyone jumped clear. The barrel bucked, sent the fragmentation shell on its way with roar.
Reg rose cautiously. “Listen.”
The six Marines in gun bay twenty-four listened to a tonal change in the force field’s hum.
“Gretas.” Dak pronounced grimly.
“Wh-who?” the rookie demanded from the knowing looks of the rest of the gun crew, who listened to the sound and nodded at the name.
“They’re on us,” said Carly.
Fresh off the last reinforcement boat, the rookie had never trained for this. He was a flier, not a gunner. But when the Battery was forced to manual loads and the Wing was grounded by Hive interference, everyone became a gunner. This was warfare according to John Farragut.
“How can they get through the force field?” the rookie’s voice shot up to a girlish range.
“Dak! Gimme a shell here, you baboon,” Carly demanded.
Dak complied, cranking the lever that hefted the giant shell to the breech while he answered the rookie, “It’s called—” grunt “ ‘insinuation.’ ” The shell dropped in place. He patted the barrel with a gloved hand. “You got it, bitch.”
“Shouldn’t we oughta clean this barrel?” Kerry Blue spat on the fat, black barrel. The glob sizzled away clean.
“On a roll here, babe,” Reg said quickly. “Come on, come on, we only got time for one more, I think.”
The rookie helped Dak ratchet the barrel back. “What’s insinuation?”
“Gretas
wiggle
,” Dak grunted. “Lock and load! Reg, take it! Range!”
“Range is
can’t miss
.” Reg cranked the mechanism as close as it would go. “They’re
here!
Fire!” She dived out of the way.
“Everybody
clear!
GRETAAAAAA!”
The gun leaped. The force field sizzled with shrapnel and gorgon parts.
The force field hum was erratic now. Gorgons caked the battleship’s energy shell.
Came the expected call: Secure the guns. Wing report to the Swifts—except Alpha Flight.
“
What!
”
“Whoa, Regi! Watch the pitch!” Dak shook a finger in the ear that received Reg’s shriek. “Help me, here. The barrel’s stuck.”
Reg leaned on the lever with Dak, trying to haul the extended barrel back inboard. She grunted, a high-pitched girly grunt, “Why everybody but Alpha Flight? Why not us? What’s wrong with us?”
“Why you asking me? Push! Put your weight in it. Aw, nuts. Can I get somebody fat on here?”
Carly, not fat, jumped on the canted lever; then Twitch, then Kerry.
The lever gave way suddenly with a tumbled pile of Marines.
With all the ship’s barrels locked inboard, the ship’s force field smoothed over and intensified against the gorgons’ assault.
There were fewer of them now—the gorgons—and it was safe to launch small ships to gun down the remains.
The Marines of Alpha Flight sat useless as the rest of Red Squadron and the whole of Blue Squadron stampeded for the port and starboard flight decks to take the battle outside.
To add insult to injury, Colonel Augustus was receiving clearance to launch his Roman Striker into the fray.
Hazard Sewell took in all the doleful eyes around him, his grounded, insulted flight looking to their leader for help. “Come on,” Hazard said, and his flight followed him to the command platform.
Flight Leader Hazard Sewell halted just outside the open hatch, at attention. He waited some moments, ignored. Inside, the control room operated like a living machine, Naval officers and specialists attentive to their stations, conferring in quick, cool efficiency.
Hazard cleared his throat in the hatchway.
At last, Lieutenant Colonel Steele turned.
“Sir,” Flight Leader Hazard Sewell spoke for the rest of his flight. “With respect, sir. Why not us?”
Kerry Blue’s eyes silently added exploding shells to that question. Glared at Thomas Ryder Steele. Her lips trembled. She thought the moose was protecting her. Pissed her off. She was a United States Fleet Marine, for God’s sake.
Steele spoke lightly, too indulgently, eyes on Kerry. “Alpha Flight, report to your Swifts.”
And they did, running, only to find their fighters in pieces all over the starboard maintenance deck.
The boffins had dragged out any part of the Swifts that might give a clue about Alpha Flight’s journey through the
kzachin
to nowhere. Even Kerry Blue’s Swift was disassembled. She recognized her pieces, all coded 0045—hexidecimal for sixty-nine. More boffin humor. “Why
my
crate!” Kerry cried. “
I
didn’t go into the frogging wormhole!”
“Yours is the control specimen,” Reg told her glumly. “They take a normal one to compare the weird ones against. Cinderella, we ain’t going to the ball.”
The monitor screens gave the control room a view of what was happening outside. Displayed the unlikely picture of Fleet Marine Swifts firing upon
Merrimack
. They scorched the gorgons off the force field shell with flaming gas before the wriggling monsters could insinuate their way through the ship’s distortion field.
More eerie still was the sight of a Roman Striker among the Marines, blazoned in Flavian red and black, picking off burrs with surgical precision.
“Captain, you have to see this.”
Everyone who could see it gawked. The Striker spat pulse pellets, ten rounds per second, one gorgon per round. He did not miss. He did not touch the force field.
“Sir, he’s not even grazing our shell.”
Neither did Augustus hit the Swifts that strayed into his firing path. Missed them by literal hair’s breadths.
The tac specialist could not close his mouth. “This is impossible.”
Farragut gazed in amazement. “I’m glad he’s on our side.”
“For now,” said Calli.
“For now,” said Farragut.
The little fighters quickly scoured
Merrimack
’s hide free of burrs. Then the sortie turned into a game, with Swifts vying with each other to bag the strays, but Farragut sent the recall. “We have an SOS to answer.”
The stray gorgons were too few to form up into a viable ball to survive an interstellar voyage. Gorgons needed to swarm in order to achieve FTL. Solo, they were thousands of years from anywhere. These lost monsters would eat each other or disintegrate before they ever made planetfall.
The LEN’s resonant message had been a brief one, instructing
Merrimack
where to pick up a courier rocket, which would carry the full message of dire import. The LEN at least had the sense not to resonate from within the Myriad, but this decoy was a bald one.
“The Hive will figure this one out,” Jose Maria Cordillera said. “A swarm will follow the rocket trail. Or it will go to the nearest yellow star. And that is Arra.”
Nine hundred light-years must have seemed like a safe distance from the true source of the message. But it was only six times the diameter of the Myriad. The Hive would figure it out.
On top of that, there was every indication that the Hive would recognize the sender from the harmonic. There were infinite discreet harmonics. The Hive would know from this particular harmonic who was out here.
Farragut marveled. “For a bunch of learned people, the LEN can be hanged stupid. This had better be important. If Donner’s taken hostages, I’m going to let him keep them.”
As soon as
Merrimack
gathered all her own aboard, Farragut gave the order to pick up their coal cars—the oxygen bricks—and proceed on an intercept course with the courier rocket, flank.
Calli advised, “Captain, the telltale is still active. We have Hive sign.”
“Run. Random vector.”
“Running sir. Eight hundred c. Still singing.”
“Bad words. Foul language.” Farragut slapped the arm of his chair, rising. “We got a clinger.”
One of the aliens must have insinuated through the force field and now rode along between the force field and the hull.
“Get it out.”
But the systems tech reported, “Negative burrs on the hull. Repeat, we have no burrs.”
The com tech reported, “Well, it’s somewhere close enough to bother the telltales. And it’s got to be pinging up a bloody storm.” The tech put the telltales on audio, a chittering scream of crickets and cicadas. You couldn’t hear the gorgon itself, but you could almost put words to it, shrieking to swarms far and wide: I got the
Merrimack
! It’s here! It’s here!
“Turn that off.” Farragut turned to Calli. “When you’ve looked everywhere and can’t find it—”
“It’s
in
you,” Calli finished for him.
Farragut spoke to anyone within earshot: “Somebody find that squealing maggot and squish it.”
“Aye, aye, sir!” Calli opened the loud com to broadcast: “All hands, all hands, we have an intruder on board. Look for a gorgon. Systems, clear the vents. Battery, blow the guns clear.”
“What’s happening?” the rookie asked as Alpha Flight returned to gun bay twenty-four.
“Bug up our nose,” said Dak, ratcheting down another shell, big as his chest, and Dak was a big man. “Force field is thinnest over the guns. You gonna open that thing, Reg, or do I gotta talk dirty to it first?”
Reg pulled at the breech lever, muttering. “Piece of frogging fripping low bid crap is stuck.”
Dak joined her on the lever, grunting.
The rookie hung back, scowling. “Why do you guys talk so prissy? Why can’t any of you just speak Anglo Saxon?”
“Hazard don’t like it,” said Kerry Blue, trying to push at the lever with her foot.
“So what’s that got to do with it?”
“Two stripes on his sleeve says we frogging do as he says. You gonna help here?”
“What are we doing?” The rookie was accustomed to auto loads. He had never seen anything like
Merrimack
’s manual loading system.
“Wasting energy—Cheese and rice, Reg, what’d you do to this thing?” Dak dropped off the lever, sweating.
“Ick, Dak, stop dripping on me.” Reg wiped her arm. She stopped on a sudden thought. “Force field goes away at the barrel. Barrel’s an air lock. You
can’t open the breech
if the barrel is
uncapped
.”
“We capped it,” said Dak dully, sweating like a shower wall.
“
Did
we?” said Carly.
Dak looked at Kerry. Kerry looked at Reg. No one could remember doing it.
“I bet you didn’t.” Reg turned the crank. Came a muffled thunk of a tampon snugging home. “You didn’t, you baboon!” Reg slapped the barrel. “Try the breech now!”
Dak turned to the rookie as if this had all been an instructional show. “Like that, you see? The barrel sticks out through the force field, so the easiest way for anything to get into the ship is through the barrel.”
“Provided no one fires the gun,” the rookie filled in.
“Which is just what we’re gonna do,” said Dak, pulling open the breech. “
Fuck!
”
Dak’s jump knocked Reg backward onto the deck. She crab-skittered away as lashing tentacles, wide and black as bullwhips, blossomed from the breech.
Terminal sucker mouths latched onto Dakota Shepard’s cheek, tore at his uniform.
More legs sprouted from the breech as a fat alien struggled to squeeze its blobby body through the barrel.
Dak screamed in pain. And Kerry Blue was there with a sword, hacking off ravenous stalks. The severed pieces fell, thrashing, stumps spurting caustic brown dry/wet sludge from the cut ends, mouth end still grasping. Kerry danced over the biting pieces, shrieked at the stinging acid seeping through her uniform. She kept slashing till Dak staggered free, and Reg hit the sprinkler. The compartment rained neutralizing solution, slicking the deck.
The full gorgon emerged like a balloon, its bulbous, space-black body filling out and rounding, freeing more tentacles.
Quick. They were more than quick. But you didn’t have to chase them. Gorgons came to you.
Reg stood still, shut her eyes, and whipped her sword in a lemniscate in front of her and let the burr reach for her. She felt the resistance of impact, the squirt of caustic blood, the flapping of severed ends at her ankles. She slashed harder.
Face shields, all polished and ready, hung within reach if only Reg could afford the two seconds to put one on.
Reg cried, “Don’t you be flapping all them sucky mouthy legs in my face, you frag bag. Suck my steel, space squid!”
Dak seized a face shield, skated on the slick wet deck to the stumpy side of the wounded alien to stab at its bloated body. “Die, greta, die!” For they were all gretas to Dak Shepard.
Brown acid spurted. Dak twisted his blade in the wound. Gretas self-sealed a simple puncture wound. The thoroughly ruptured alien emitted a grosteque noise, like a balloon sputtering air.
And it died. Dissolving into a brown puddle of neutralized sludge. The heat shut your eyes. The stink stopped your breath.
Carly yapped, “Catch that! Catch that!” chasing a severed tentacle thrashing across the deck.
The xenos had yet to get a gorgon part into stasis to study it intact.
Twitch hurried to fetch a container to collect Carly’s prize.
“Oh, you know it’s just gonna die,” said Kerry, not moving to help, even as the tentacle dissolved in Carly’s hands. “See?”
Carly screeched at the melted crap in her hands. “Oh,
futon
!”
There was money in it, a viable gorgon biopsy. Even though no one was even sure gorgons qualified as a
bio.
