The Myriad: Tour of the Merrimack #1 (27 page)

“Engines redlined! Engines shutting down!”

“Override!”

“Override. Aye, sir.”

“One meter to surface. And clear! We are clear to vacuum!”

“Shut down beam cannons! Shut down! Shut down! Take ’em off-line!”

Sounds wound down, the singed smell already clearing with a sudden influx of vacuum-cooled air.

Farragut had thought the vent would stay open only briefly, but the swarm did not collapse in on the burned tunnel, perhaps by virtue of its deadly heat, or perhaps the beams had cauterized the dead into a hard pipe.

The sense of relief was short-lived. The ship could breathe. Now what? You could hear the gorgons wheedling through the force field.

“How many did we kill?” Farragut demanded.

“Thousands.” But before anyone could cheer, the tech reported, “We are still badly outnumbered.”

Augustus specified, “From one thousand to one, we stand now a much improved five hundred to one—counting our dead, and I don’t believe those are up to the task. We’ll end up looking like the
Sulla
.”

“Stow that, Augustus. Can we still steer?”

“Yes, Captain,” Calli answered. “But we still can’t achieve FTL. By the time we get anywhere, we
will
be the
Sulla
.”

“Can we push another engine out?”

“If you can push a pig through a pitot tube.”

What Augustus’ answer lacked in respect, it made up for in clarity.

“I see.”

A replay of gun bay twenty on a nuclear scale.

“If we try that, the swarm will be dead, but so will we,” said Calli. “Has it come to suicide?”

“No, it has not. Nobody die till I say so. And
not
today. That is an order!”

Augustus saw the MP at the hatch roll his eyes, could read the skewed eyebrows:
Right, sir. Whatever you say, sir.
But also saw the men grow heartened in spite of themselves.

Farragut prowled his control room like a bear wanting a back-scratch and not a tree in sight. “I just want to scrape them off. And there’s nothing out here. What’s out here?”

“Nearest solar system is four light-years off,” said Tactical. “We don’t have that long. No comets of any size on the scan.”

The force field groaned. Five hundred to one.

“I don’t want to be eaten alive, John,” said Calli quietly, statement of fact.

“How about our engine?” Farragut directed the question to Tactical, not to Systems.

“We can’t get one out,” Tactical reported, confused. He thought they’d already made that clear. “We’ll die, too. And that’s against my orders today, sir.”

“I mean Engine Three.”

“It blew up,” said Tactical, feeling peculiar in stating the obvious.

But Augustus saw where this was going. “The antimatter.”

Farragut nodded. “The antimatter from Engine Three can’t have achieved one hundred percent annihilation. The containment chamber would have blown
something
clear.”

Calli snapped fingers toward Tactical. “Res scan. Antimatter. Look for it in the area where we jettisoned Engine Three.” Then turned to the captain. “You’re right. There must be something left. But it will be only particles and they’re flying every which way, fast.”

“Particles will do,” said Farragut. “Particles are all we want. We get too much antimatter, we’ll blow ourselves up.”

Tactical located the antimatter ejected from the explosion of Engine Three. A tenuous, expanding bubble of it.

And
Merrimack
, cocooned within its ravenous living asteroid, executed a lumbering turn into the path of the nearest, largest cluster of it.

Reg Monroe gripped and regripped her sword hilt like a batter waiting for the pitch. Watched the dead layer visible through the tear in the hull over the galley, a brown mass smashed against the force field.

The dead began to move.

Carly breathed, “There they are.”

Mandibles appeared first, moving, sucking up the remains of their own kind. The force field shimmered and whined as the living monsters began to ooze through the distortion barrier.

Mesmerizing, grotesque, gorgons contorted themselves, flattened, elongated, slithered. And then the first pointed black claw pierced clear to atmosphere. A long serrated leg pushed free, stretched, then another, the thing laboring to pull its body out of the force field, as from thick mud. It expanded as it emerged, forming a shape, organizing a mouth, till it dangled by a single claw, spiderlike, seven meters above the deck, weightless in the limbo zone between the force field and ship’s gravity well. Legs waved, searching for purchase, trying to acquire
up
and
down
; the body reshaping, shell hardening.

Cole Darby hissed, “Can’t we shoot it?”

“Don’t you dare,” said Reg. “Hive mind’s got the computerized sights fubared. And even if you gots a dead eye, you see where’s he’s at? He’s outside the gravity. That’s worse than shooting into water. Refracts your shot. And you miss and you hit the force field? One of us be eating your shot. Got it?”

Cole Darby bowed his head. “Got it.”

The ship’s loud com clicked. The boffins must’ve got the calibration recoded. The XO announced shipwide to ready swords, prepare for boarders, and stand by for impact,
Merrimack
was about to ram antimatter.

Reg glared back at the loud com. “We are ramming
what?
We are ramming
what?
What did that woman just say?”

“Eyes up, Marine.”

“I
gots
my eyeballs on your boarders, Mister Hazard Sewell.” Reg regripped her sword. “I see them crawly things hanging up there like the eensty weensty big ass spider. You just tell me: we are ramming
what?
”

Merrimack
lost speed in the turn that put her in the path of the antimatter.

“Just as long as we make contact,” said Farragut.

“We’ll make contact, sir,” the navigator assured him.

“How much antimatter are we facing, all told?”

The sensor technicians conferred over the readings. “Between a centigram and a decagram.”

“What kind of explosion can we expect from that?”

“You want to know if we can survive it, sir? I don’t know.”

The ship’s engines fed antimatter into the annihilation chamber in precise amounts, measured down to the atom. This mixture would not be precise.

“We’re in for somewhere between a twenty- to a two-hundred-megaton blast.”

The captain exchanged glances with his XO. Said, “Choose your poison. Fire or chewing.”

“I’ll take fire,” said Calli.

“Fire, it is.”

“Fifteen seconds to intercept with the antimatter,” Tactical reported. “Thirteen. Twelve.”

An abrupt change in the ship’s ambient sounds silenced his countdown. The moan of fluctuating energy fields now overlayed with a physical metallic scratch and scrape of hard claws on hull. “They’re through the outer perimeter.”

And a report from below: “They have gorgons in the galley. Requesting permission to use flamethrowers.”

“Negative,” said Farragut. “We are low on oxygen. I want to be able to breathe when this is over.”

Augustus lifted his brows, said nothing. Optimistic order, that.

“Five seconds to impact. Four.”

The specialists tensed. You had to resist the instinct to brace yourself against something. Grabbing hold of something only makes you look silly if you live through it, or sends you to your Maker cringing if you don’t.

A glance to the commanders showed Calli Carmel, tall, trim, picturesque, masked in cool dignity, standing in easy posture. Her hands, clasped behind her back were white fists.

John Farragut, alert, bright-eyed, ready to spring into his next action upon impact. Expecting to live.

The Roman colonel, Augustus, behind him, laconic, expecting to die. Going to do it with his eyes open.

“Two, One. Contact.”

And nothing. Nothing more than the continued sickening moan of insinuation, and the escalating scritching on the hull.

A curse from the helm.

John Farragut turned, looking like the boy in the Kentucky field when his M-100 didn’t go off. “What happened? Did we miss?”

“Force field, sir,” Tactical groaned. “Theirs.”

A coherent swarm—and this one was entirely too coherent—maintained a weak forward screen against particles in its path.

“We’re not going fast enough,” Tactical issued the postmortem. “The antimatter particles didn’t pierce the swarm’s force field.”

The clashing of sword-on-pincer carried from below. Calli reported quietly, “They’re in.”

Five hundred to one.

14

S
OMEONE SPOKE AN EPITAPH: “That’s it.”

Farragut thundered, “No, that is
not
it! Where is that antimatter? Did it bounce?”

“No, sir. We
have
it.” Tactical struggled to explain quickly, “A swarm’s force field follows the contours of the swarm shape. So there are pits and pockets in it. We caught the antimatter in those pockets. It’s coming with us. It’s just not contacting any matter.”

“Good. There has to be some matter out there,” said Farragut. “We push the antimatter into the matter—” He gave a loud clap to explain the finish. “We don’t have to be going fast. We just have to touch it.”

“Particles, Captain,” Tactical reported somberly. “There are
particles
of matter out there. We are light-years from anything substantial. Annihilating two particles at a time isn’t going to produce force enough to pierce the swarm field and kill a significant number of gorgons—assuming we can even line up our approach to collide one matter particle into one antimatter particle. It’s going to be like throwing one grain of sand into a beach and targeting one specific grain of sand—while moving at near light speed.”

“Makes hitting a hundred-and-three-mile-per-hour Kyle Norton fastball look easy,” Farragut offered.

“You got it, Captain.”

“Need a bigger bat,” Calli muttered.

“I need a brick,” said John Farragut.

“The oxygen!” Couldn’t be sure who all in the control room shouted that.

Merrimack
had dropped her oxygen reserves before battle. Bricks of matter as big as coal cars.

“Res scan,” Calli barked.

“Oxygen bricks located,” Tactical reported. Fed the coordinates to the navigator.

“Calli, can you steer us—and our antimatter—on a collision course with our oxygen bricks?”

“I’ll make it happen, John.” Looked to the helm who nodded, “Happening, sirs.”

“Just how low are we on oxygen?” Farragut thought to ask.

“We’ll pull it out of our water if we have to,” said the XO. “If I get eaten alive, I’m not going to feel much like breathing.”

“My thoughts.” Farragut nodded. “Somebody give me an estimated time of impact?”

Calli deferred to the helm, who answered, “Ten minutes, sir. Maybe nine if I can squeeze some acceleration without cooking us.”

“Calli, your boat. I’m going below.” Farragut exited the control room, sword drawn.

“He loves this part,” said Augustus, and followed him.

The gorgons had chewed a flanking route around Team Alpha where they were holding the galley breach. Kerry Blue sliced gorgon limbs off as fast as they emerged from the ductwork into the corridor outside the galley, while her team held off the main onslaught within. She grunted a song to herself:

Five hundred bundles of legs on the wall
Five hundred bundles of legs.
You take one down
And hack it around
Four hundred ninety-nine bundles of legs on the
wall.

Her sword dragged heavily as if pulling from a gravity sink. Her arms became elastic bands that had lost their snap. She should never have started counting bundles of legs on the wall. Zero was so very far away.

She was hacking number four hundred and eighty-nine when a crashing and peripheral motion told her a gorgon had dropped from the overhead behind her. And she could not afford to turn.

She sliced mandibles out of her face, the muscles in her back tensing into a knot of primal terror, awaiting the pain, any moment expecting the jaws to pierce her spine. She whirled—

To a splat of gorgon innards hitting her face shield.

The offal slid off to reveal John Farragut cutting down the flanker.

“Ho! Shitska! The high-priced talent is on deck!” Kerry blurted.

The Roman, Augustus, darted past both of them in two long strides to cut down number four hundred eighty-eight coming out of the wall.

Captain Farragut nodded to Kerry. “As you were. Hold out, Flight Sergeant. We’re almost out of this.”

Sweat streamed through her scalp, soaked her sides. Her muscles quivered. Eyes burned. “Really, sir?”

“Yes. Really.”

It was so easy to believe him that she didn’t. But a nod from the Roman told her it was really so. She could trust Augustus to put a rosy outlook on nothing.

He didn’t tell her that getting out of this might involve sudden death. But they were almost out of this one way or the other.

Came a sound like an ocean roar in a hurricane, like a thunder roll on a mountain, as loud a noise as
Merrimack
’s dampers allowed to sound.

The end-of-the-world roar shook the ship. Kerry crouched to the shuddering deck.

John Farragut winked and was on his way down the corridor, quick as Santa Claus.

“God provides for drunks, fools, and John Farragut. Or did I just repeat myself?” Augustus followed him.

Kerry scarcely heard him for the din. She pulled herself up from the quaking deck, holding onto the bulk. “This is good?” Her words were swallowed up by the roar. She shouted, “Is this good?”

But the officers were gone. And so were the gorgons, which had been clawing out of the duct. Number four hundred eighty-seven never came.

Kerry staggered to the galley hatch. She clutched at the frame and hung onto it with sudden vertigo upon the sight of the gorgons, pressing against the force field over the galley, suddenly tearing away in a blur of living, writhing sludge. They scraped across the energy barrier, shredding, with a noise between a scream and an avalanche. A pelting river of them raked across the energy field.

And abruptly cleared to a light as bright as
Merrimack
permitted to shine through its screen. It shut the eyes.

When the stabbing brightness gave way to cool darkness against her lids, Kerry opened her eyes to beautiful midnight. Green clouds of afterimage floated on her retinae, as she blinked at the peaceful stars showing through the rent in the hull.

She inhaled deeply, able to breathe again with the death shroud’s lifting. As if the swarm had been pressing on her chest.

The air stank.

The roaring subsided, and Reg’s screech pierced her eardrums, calling God by very familiar names.

Twitch and Carly were doing an elaborate gloat ritual, part flamenco, part chicken dance. “Now you see ’em, now they’re frogging
spaced!
” Cowboy used to be very good at that dance.

Hazard Sewell muttered to his God.

Kerry pointed up with her sword to the very peculiar sight of some remaining gorgons caught in the act of insinuation. The few, the squashed, hung within the force field like insects preserved in invisible amber.

And preserved they were. Still alive, the monsters pressed inward, relentlessly, toward food.

“So which one’s gonna drop first? I got a dime on that one.” Kerry wagged her sword. “Squiggy there.”

“I got the runt,” said Cole Darby. “The one with the fire in his eye.”

“That’s not an eye,” said Carly. “I think that’s an asshole. I got Gimpy there.” She picked out a gorgon, which was oozing through the field, leaving one of its legs behind.

“I think mine’s dead,” said Darb. “I want a new one.”

“Cost you.”

They fell to arguing about it, till the Navy gunners showed up to relieve them. “Orders from Lieutenant Colonel Steele. Team Alpha report to the hangar deck. Get some space under your butts, Marines.”

Flight Leader Hazard Sewell put up his sword, barking. “Come on, dogs, let’s go walk ourselves!”

Renewed, awake, alive, Kerry jumped at the chance to fly again. She gave her sword over to a navvy. “Here, spaceman.” She yelled back to him as she ran: “Just let me know which one of those buggers drops out of the overhead first! There’s money on it!”

Jose Maria Cordillera appeared at the captain’s table, impeccably groomed. His long hair was clean, glossy, neatly parted and held back with a silver clasp. Only the slightest bulge of an elbow wrap under one brushed sleeve hinted that he had been in a fight for his life or suffered any strain from it. That and when he seated himself slowly, as if he might break, his back aristocratically straight, “I am too old for this.”

John Farragut poured a stiff one for his friend. Alcohol flowed freely throughout the ship with the captain’s blessing in the wake of desperate battle, to reward the living and mourn the dead.

“Mo tells me you got a reading on a dissolving gorgon,” Farragut prompted.

“I did,” Jose Maria confirmed. “Our valiant young Marines endeavored to corral one into my scanning chamber, where it promptly expired for the recorders.” He did not sound happy. “I do not know what to make of it. I should like Augustus to review it.” His dark eyes found the empty place at the table.

“He’s dead asleep,” Farragut answered the absence.

Augustus, who had been chemically jacked awake for forty-eight hours, had fallen asleep, hard, directly after the second battle was won.

Jose Maria lamented, “I am not even sure our patterner can help. I just want a second opinion.”

“You have a theory?”

“I have a weak hypothesis based upon an unrecognizable agglomeration of molecules. Their form? It is like trying to reverse engineer a human being from a pool of sixty-five percent oxygen, eighteen percent carbon, ten percent hydrogen, three percent nitrogen, two percent calcium, one percent phosphorus, and two percent sixty-odd other elements. Even in my snapshot of its living form, what is missing is apparent cohesion. What holds this being together? The normal molecular bonds—they are not here. I cannot make sense of its digestive process. A Hive cell eats left- and right-handed proteins alike, though I could not isolate a single protein in its own makeup. It converts organics to energy, but can this process be more akin to combustion than digestion? I should like to hear Augustus laugh at me for that one.”

“They convert organics to what kind of energy?”

“I fear Augustus shall laugh. I fear more that he will not.”

Farragut pressed, “What kind of energy, Jose Maria?”

“Resonance.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“In an insane way, it makes perfect sense. What else could give them fluidity and cohesion in vacuum at temperatures at near absolute zero? It must be resonance.” Jose Maria took a long, fortifying drink, set down his glass. “And I shall venture further out on this most precarious limb and postulate that resonance
is
Hive.”

Farragut gave his head a quick shake as if he had water in his ears. “Resonance is a by-product of Hive existence?”

Jose Maria shook his head slowly, eyes on the amber dregs in his glass. “Resonance
is
Hive existence. The Hive and all its swarms and all its cells—what we call gorgons—are a titanic resonant being, and we the parasites within it.”

“Oh. So we kill the enemy, we cut our own line of communication.”

Cordillera had to smile. The captain had no awe for the vastness of such a being, no compunction at the prospect of being a parasite within it. Only keep his lines of communication intact, and that was all right with Captain Farragut. “If I am right, there is that risk.”

“How weak is this hypothesis of yours?” asked Farragut, not liking the sound of this.

“Feeble enough. Here.” Jose Maria Cordillera refilled their glasses to propose a toast. “To Augustus laughing.”

Augustus woke in a depleted torpedo storage bay, his mouth cotton and dust, his eyelids stuck together. Faint scent of wood spice in his nostrils. He spoke to the scented air. “I heard Spanish music.” And he rolled his head, cracked an eye to see who was with him.

Jose Maria Cordillera, sitting on one of the few remaining torpedoes, lifted a finger from the guitar to claim responsibility.

“How long have you been here?”

“A while.” Jose Maria produced a computer bubble. “Can you sort this?”

Augustus held the bubble up, squinted at it. Tossed it to the deck, where it rolled through the grating to the metal. “No.” He covered his eyes.

“Shall I leave?”

“No. Play. Order coffee.”

Augustus did not stir again until the hatch thumped open and shut and the smell of coffee filled the torpedo bay. He smirked at the bearer. “You’ve been busted down to orderly?”

Captain Farragut set down the coffee service. “I want in on this discussion.”

“No, you are running away from your recorder,” Augustus saw through him. “You don’t want to record any more of those letters.”

“There’s that,” Farragut admitted.

He had lost a lot of crew. Made for a lot of anguishing letters home to Mom, Dad, spouse, sweetheart, and—God forbid—child.

Jose Maria set aside the guitar to pour the coffee.

“Don’t give Farragut the guitar, whatever you do. He’ll play that country western caterwauling.”

“It’s bluegrass caterwauling,” Farragut corrected, stung.

Augustus rolled over the edge of his pod and, whether at the prospect of bluegrass music or from the pounding within his head, retched. He had little to bring up.

“Is that from wiring up into patterner mode or from . . .” considered what to call his encounter with the Hive mind. “The interference.”

“How would I know?” Augustus sat up, reached for the coffee. A tic moved his gaunt cheek.

“They scared you,” Farragut guessed.

Augustus replied tersely in scatological Latin.

“They got to him,” Farragut told Jose Maria.

“I . . . am so pissed I can’t see straight,” Augustus breathed in strong emotion he had not felt in this lifetime.

“Did you touch the Overmind?” Jose Maria asked.

“If you can call it that.”

“Does it—do they—think of itself as singular or plural?”

“The questions assumes a fact not in evidence.”

“Which fact is . . . ?”

“That it thinks. It doesn’t
think
. It’s all gut instinct. In fact, that’s it: it’s a gut. Your alimentary canal can function without a brain, and so does it. When I was connected to the Hive, I had no knowledge of the whole, any more than one lung would know the existence of another. I got only impulse, not thought.”