The Myriad: Tour of the Merrimack #1 (3 page)

And then he was talking. Almost without himself. “What I will do for Cowboy’s memory is neglect to record in my report that he was in direct violation of procedure, which violation caused his death. I will not put in the record that he did not die in defense of his world but in the act of being a cowboy. And I am only giving him that much slack because he didn’t take any of you with him!”

Felt the heat in his face. With his fair skin and white-blond buzz-cut hair he may as well have a signal beacon for a head. Knew he was flaming red.

He roared on, louder, “And if any of you do the same, not only will I refuse to say anything at your memorials, I will jettison your carcass out the air lock where your vacuum-bloated remains will drift for all time. DO YOU UNDERSTAND!”

Alpha squad flinched back as a whole in dumb disbelief.

“The rules exist to keep your sorry asses still connected to your thick skulls and your still-beating hearts. You want me to say a few words? Here: Cowboy got what he asked for. Now, someone go sanitize his personal effects before I ship them back to his wife. I have a letter to write!”

As he whirled toward the hatch, someone blurted, “Cowboy had a wife?”

“A pregnant wife,” Steele snarled back. God, how do you write a letter like that? Damn him. Damn him. A pregnant widow. He roared in parting, “Take all his girl-friends’ stuff and space it!”

Kerry Blue, looking ill, mumbled, “I’ll do it.”

It would be mostly her stuff.

Normally, a star cluster offered nothing of interest to a military vessel. The cluster was a beautiful curiosity only, until this one had started shooting.

IC9870986 was a class I globular cluster, meaning, on a scale of I to XII, it was very large, extremely rich, and very much compressed at its center—though “compressed” in cosmic terms meant that the core suns still averaged a quarter light-year apart.

The cluster measured 150 light-years in diameter, encompassing three million stars. At light speed it would take
Merrimack
472 years to orbit the cluster once; at the distortion threshold, six days. The whole of it measured 750,351 solar masses.

“That can’t be right,” Steele objected, hearing the statistics read off. Couldn’t bite back the words fast enough. Caught sideways glances from the Navy techs, who were embarrassed for him. Steele had just stepped in something and didn’t know what. Only knew he had revealed some ignorance.

A scanner monitor muttered into his console, “Marines can work division. Wow.”

It was the division that was not working. Steele did not see how three million stars equated to seven hundred fifty thousand solar masses.

Farragut murmured aside to his abashed Marine commander, “Underweight stars. Typical in a glob.”

“I slept through globs,” Steele growled.

“So did everyone,” Farragut assured him. That would be just like Farragut not to leave you out there by yourself. “Globs are of no strategic importance.”

Globular clusters were among the oldest features in the Milky Way. In comparison to Sol, the typical globular star was poorer in elements any heavier than helium by a factor of ten. And no heavy elements meant no planets, no dirt to stand on, no military bases. Nothing for a gorgon to eat, and
Merrimack
was hunting gorgons.

But somebody was here. Or had been here.

Captain Farragut wondered, passing through the cluster, if he had not been lured in here. But the Hive did not understand humans well enough to know that humans would find this beautiful. Beauty was irrelevant to Hive existence. The Hive did not know beauty. It knew edibility.

In surrounding space, only one in four stars formed singly. Stars in a globular cluster were all singles, unless one considered the whole system of three million as one colossal multiple star system. Though one could not say these stars orbited one another. They milled.

But lying as it did only two degrees off the galactic equator, this cluster had picked up three rider stars not born with the rest of them. Three heavy stars.

“Two M types and an F8,” the monitor reported. “Main sequence.”

“Planets?” Farragut asked.

“Affirmative. All three of ’em. Planets in their hospitable zones.”

“Let’s go look. Take us to the F8 system.” Captain Farragut pointed to the white star, heaviest of the three rider systems. His voice was uncharacteristically tight.

A habitable planet was the last thing
Merrimack
wanted to find on the path where she was bound. The silence of surrounding space underscored the captain’s misgivings. If the minefield had come from one of those three star systems, then where were the communication signals of its makers? Against what enemy had the mines been set? The cluster lay in direct line with the Hive’s last known trail.

The navigator plotted a course toward the white star system. Captain Farragut did not request any special haste to get there. Afraid
Merrimack
was flying toward a mass grave.

Space may be silent, but noises carried clearly through the thin bulkheads of
Merrimack
’s confined world. Crashing. Shrieked curses. Tearing. Kerry Blue was trashing Cowboy’s sleep pod.

“Kerry! What are you doing!”

Kerry tugged, grunting. Fabric of Cowboy’s shirt gave way after two mighty tugs. Ripped. “Colonel said sanitize his effects,” she puffed, getting another grip.

“Sanitize, not annihilate!” her squad mate Reg Monroe cried. “They have to send something home!”

“When I’m done, they can send his shit home in an envelope!” Yarn from a sweater unraveled in curly lengths with each yank. Might’ve been Cowboy’s guts. Kerry whipped the shredded ends at anything left standing of Cowboy’s belongings. Screamed, “He was married! Son of a bitch! Son of a bitch! Son of a BITCH!”

Things flew and shattered. Marines ducked for cover as Kerry Blue raged.

Till an iron grip surrounded her, pinned her arms to her sides, and pulled her off her feet. She knew who had her—didn’t need eyes behind her head, or even in front to see those braided cuffs to figure this one out—though she couldn’t believe it. She went rigid against the hard, hard torso at her back. Like being chained to a boulder. Felt Colonel Steele’s voice vibrate against her. “Marine, what the hell are you doing!”

“He was married! Sir!”

“Yeah?” Steele’s tone said:
So?

He set her down on her feet so hard it rattled her teeth, and let her go.

An oddly hurt lump rose to her throat. Her eyes welled, nose thickened. First betrayed by her lover, and now the damned colonel hated her, too.

She turned to face him. “No one told me!”

Rather softly, perhaps mocking, Steele said, “I thought you knew.”

“What do you think I am?” she cried, shocked.

Steele’s answer snapped right back, flat: “Easy.”

She blinked matted lashes, hurt. “No shit, sir.” Of course she was easy. She sniffled indignantly, straightened her back, and fought the wobble out of her voice. “I am not an adulteress.”

Steele’s white-blond brows lifted at the quaint, antique word. Steele looked for a moment as if he might laugh. Didn’t. “You’re just an old-fashioned girl, aren’t you, Blue?”

“What is that supposed to mean, sir?”

An ice-blue flick to the side—quick scan over the wreckage. “You done here?” he asked.

“Yeah. He ain’t worth any more of my time.”

Steele snarled to the others, signaling that this show was over. “All right. Someone
else
go through Cowboy’s effects! And everyone stay sober at the wake. I remind you we are still under a Hive watch!”

2

“C
ONTACT! Contact! Contact!”

The Officer of the Deck’s voice broke the captain’s sleep in the middle watch, four days into the cluster.

“What have you got?” Farragut bounded into the control room, still wearing the T-shirt and sweatpants he slept in. Lieutenant Colonel Steele arrived close behind in T-shirt and khakis, but Steele had managed deck boots as well.

Farragut glanced at the monitors. Knew from the lack of alarms and the quiet telltales that the contact was not Hive. He rubbed his eyes to make the images focus. “Where are we?”

“Ninety light-years from the F8 star,” the OOD answered, surrendering her station. Lieutenant Glenn Hamilton—Hamster, they called her. The Hamster, a mellow-voiced, auburn-haired young woman, stood five foot one barefoot. She was all professional, way too cute. Married. Subordinate line officer. Captain Farragut kept her on the middle watch where he never had to look at her. Almost never.

“The second planet in the F8 system is pouring out electromagnetic transmissions,” Hamster reported. “Radio, television, satellite bounces. Video shows a humanoid population.”

Monitor screens lit up with different images broadcast from the planet. They showed a somewhat Earthlike world in terms of terrain and climate, with green vegetation. Lean, lithe, humanoid beings with red-bronze skin and dark equine manes moved under a star-spangled sky. There were tall, willowy elfin-faced females draped in flowing, floor-length clothing. And distinctly shorter, harder, dog-muscled males, less covered, their manes showing through slash-backed shirts and tunics.

Captain Farragut did not remember ever seeing anything like them in the archives. “Is this a new contact?”

“Yes, sir,” said Lieutenant Hamilton. She lifted brown eyes to her captain. “Congratulations, John.”

Grins spread all around the control room. “Sir?” The com tech turned from his station. “If we’re just hitting radio waves now, ninety light-years out, that ought to indicate they just invented radio ninety years ago. But we’re hitting radio, microwave, and television signals all at once.”

“Colony,” said Farragut. “Has to be.”

“With sublight technology, sir?” the tech asked, dubious.

That stopped Farragut short. Could not have heard aright. He gave a quick once over to all the monitors. “All this chatter is sublight?”

“Electromagnetic, all of it. No bouncing bubbles. No res—lucky for them. Nothing in any of the images to suggest they had FTL at the time these signals started. Look. There’s what I mean.”

He punched up on the monitor an image of an archaic spaceship belching fire in its landing, a small cluster of beings greeting the ship’s arrival.

“I guess,” Farragut said faintly, a concession. “No one traveled very far in one of those.”

“Then those people had to be seeded,” Steele pronounced harshly, arms crossed defensively over his broad chest.

“Oh, God, I hate people gardens!” Hamster blurted.

An officer tried to keep an open mind out here, but one could not love a species who grew other intelligent species as food crops. Gave their kind the ironically tender name of “shepherd.”

“All right,” Farragut acknowledged. Made to give the con back to his lieutenant. “Maintain speed. Record everything. Pipe all this to the xenos. See if they can sift the languages apart. TR, send a recon squadron ahead. Full speed, full stealth.
Full stealth
. I don’t even want those Swifts so much as talking to each other.”

“Mission objective?” Steele requested.

“I need to know if those beings are still on the planet.”
Merrimack
’s current information was ninety years old. A lot could change in ninety years. “And if they’re alive, what is their present level of technology. Watch for shepherds. Watch for Hive.”

“Watch for mines,” Hamster added.

“Damn the mines,” said Farragut.

A League of Earth Nations exploration vessel would have stopped to make a detailed collection of the signals encountered—catalog them, study them—before moving on an unknown life-form. And
Merrimack
, a U.S. Navy space battleship, would ordinarily have flown wide and left the unknown civilization alone. But the planet was located on the Hive highway; it was
Merrimack
’s business now. If the world was dead, Farragut had to know. It would mean
Merrimack
was on the right path. If alive, then Farragut had to know why,
how
, when the Hive had passed so close by.

So the battleship pressed on, flying fast forward through ninety years of video/radio history of the planet, reeling the transmissions in for the computer to unwind, sort, and decompress for playback.

The xeno crew on board studied as fast as they could before the LEN could take over the project, as the LEN invariably did. Yet, not to keep the League of Earth Nations unaware,
Merrimack
’s crew dutifully assembled a courier missile to report the discovery. A quick call for mail, and the courier missile was on its way to the Fort Eisenhower Repeater.

Courier missiles, like torpedoes, could push through the distortion threshold and arrive at Fort Ike, with its Repeater and its Shotgun, many times faster than a manned vessel could.

Out here in unexplored space, on silent run,
Merrimack
was on her own, as isolated as a sailing vessel of old. She had no access to her res pulse that could have notified Earth at once. Resonance was instantaneous. It also was, apparently, the Hive’s dinner bell.

Hive seemed able to pick up any resonant pulse, no matter the harmonic. Resonant receivers of human design could not pick up a res pulse not coded to its exact harmonic. The Hive not only detected all resonant pulses, but it could home on them, and eat their source.

From the moment Earth discovered resonance and sent its first pulse—“Watson, come here. I need you!”—Hive swarms had turned toward Earth, and kept coming in multitudes.

The Hive’s invading swarms had to get past Palatine first. So the blockade was there, in Roman space. Roman and U.S. ships patrolled the same zone, holding off the ravenous spaceborne swarms.

John Farragut never fought a defensive war. His
Merrimack
, in a flanking maneuver, was now headed around the invasion front in search of the Hive’s home world, to take the battle back to its source.

As the battleship moved toward the F8 star, the recorded years folded in. And the crew waited for the sickening inevitability of pictures of the local insectoid life rising in plague swarms—the hideous, consistent, first sign of Hive approach.

The insectoid form, one of the most successful and universal of life-forms in the known galaxy, was apparently resonant-sensitive. Insectoids had an uncanny ability to perceive Hive presence. Insectoid panic was often the first warning humans had of Hive proximity.

But the signals from the F8 system persisted peacefully for an agonizingly long time. Farragut caught a xeno in tears, a sweet, pillowy, “mom-ish” woman with a bottle-red cloud of hair. Farragut asked her what she had found that made her cry.

“Nothing.” The xeno daubed tears from the bags under her eyes. “I’m falling in love with this culture. And they’re dead. They have to be. I don’t want to watch them die. Can’t we speed up, Captain? Just—just get it over with.”

The natives’ clothing changed, their cities spread, with no sign of FTL technology other than their sudden presence. It made no sense. There was no pattern.

“I have a patterner on board,” Farragut said. “Let’s take him for a test drive.” He hailed the ship’s MO, Mohsen “Mo” Shah, on the intercom from the control room. “Is my IO fit for duty?”

“He is being
on
duty,” said Dr. Shah. “Did he not report?”

Farragut turned to his XO, Calli Carmel. “Did he report to you?”

Calli’s beautiful brown eyes went quizzically blank for an instant, then shared a bemused stare with her captain, as if one of the ship’s engines were now giving itself orders. “No.”

Farragut answered absurdity with absurdity, “I wonder what he assigned himself to.”

Dr. Shah’s voice sounded again from the intercom. “Captain? May I be having a word with you?” Confidentially, Mo Shah’s tone added.

So Farragut strode aft to the medic’s compartment. Detecting the concern in the MO’s voice over the control room intercom, Colonel Steele came along as well.

Images of aliens lit up all of the medical officer’s screens—pictures of innards, things recognizable as lungs, hearts, guts. Dr. Shah followed the captain’s alarmed stare, hurried to interpret the images. “Oh. These are not being signs of slaughter. These are being medical communications. Physicians conferring with each other, I am believing.”

“Human?”

“Humanoid.” Mo clicked off the monitors. Mo was a placid man, a Riverite, with great brown puppy eyes and a calming voice. Mo Shah’s forehead extended halfway up his scalp. He folded his hands and faced his captain. “I am wanting to tell you about your Roman.”

Augustus had become John Farragut’s Roman ever since he had come aboard. No one else wanted him.

“He did not pass the drug scan,” Dr. Shah reported.

Farragut pursed his lips. Spoke at last: “What’s he doing?”

“The whole pharmacy,” Mo answered. “And the R&D lab.”

Captain Farragut took a guess, “Does this drug use have to do with his alterations?”

“I asked him that. He asked in return if I were deferring to Roman medical authority. I said no. So he told me to be making my own diagnosis.”

“He has a chip on his shoulder,” said Farragut.

Mo shrugged. “If you are wanting to call Gibraltar a chip, it is being a chip. I am thinking he wanted me to bust him.”

“Apparently you didn’t.”

“I considered it. I checked what we are knowing of Roman medicine—which is not being much. Palatine are being very tight-lipped about their patterners. They are not sharing that technology. So I checked Roman law, and there
is
being a specific exemption for patterners regarding use of controlled substances.”

“What kind of exemption?”

“Drug use is being entirely at a patterner’s own discretion. He may be carrying. He may be using. He may not be selling, and Augustus is not doing so. So I cleared him. But it is being your boat, Captain.”

Farragut could still throw Augustus in the brig. “Did he bring drugs aboard?”

The MO nodded. “Quantities consistent with personal use.”

“Is he coherent?”

“Much too coherent, I am thinking.”

Farragut nodded with a slight snort. At their first meeting, Augustus had communicated his thoughts and feelings with great clarity and brevity.

Mo continued, “Augustus’ medical jacket is only going back eight years. In fact, his
whole
jacket is only going back eight years, which could be when he was augmented. He has filaments in his muscle tissue. I am not knowing how the Roman doctors strung it.”

“What kind of filaments?”

“Some are being reinforcements, I am thinking. Others are being electrical connections for his plugging into patterner mode.”

“Patterner
mode?
” Farragut had assumed a patterner was a patterner; like John Farragut was a captain. It was not a mode that turned off and on.

Mo explained, “He must be making connections to his augmentations, plugging cables between parts of himself, to be enabling his functions as a patterner.”

Farragut gave his head a quick shake as if to shake the weird idea out. He was not sure he understood. Asked slowly, “So when Augustus is not ‘enabled,’ he’s like the rest of us?”

“No. In ways I am not at all sure of, he is not being like us. His gunsights—these,” Mo Shah lifted a hand to Colonel Steele’s gunsights, black bars implanted on either side of the colonel’s eyes. “Augustus is having these, too.”

Farragut made a motion like a shrug. “So Augustus’ sights are camouflaged better.”

“Augustus’ gunsights are being
inside
his eyes,” said Mo. “And he is being stronger.”

“How strong?” Colonel Steele crossed his arms. Even in defensive posture, for the size of his arms and breadth of his chest, TR Steele never looked anything but formidable.

“Stronger than any of us,” Mo Shah answered.

“How many of us?” Farragut asked, curious now.

“I am having no idea.”

“Just tell me, Mo,” Steele abandoned subtlety, since he was never good at it. “If I need to take the son of a bitch out, how many Marine guards do I need?”

“I would be suggesting a gun. He is still being human.”

“And he’s still on our side until further notice,” Farragut reminded Steele. “Unless he’s psychotic or suicidal. He isn’t.
Is
he, Mo?”

Dr. Shah gave a noncommittal shrug. “Bad temper is not necessarily being psychosis. But you cannot be altering a biological organism and not be having side effects. Period. Only God is knowing what got nicked in Augustus’ brain when they did whatever they did to make him a patterner.”

“Meaning what, exactly?”

“Meaning—” Mo considered a moment. “Be watching your ass, Captain Farragut.”

“Captain Farragut and Colonel Steele! Control room.” The XO’s voice projected an urgent sort of calm over the intercom. “The recon patrol is coming in.”

Farragut and Steele glanced to the chronometers to see what they already knew: The recon flight was early.

Steele breathed a vulgarity, met the captain’s eyes, about to apologize for his word choice, but Farragut said benignly, “Let’s go see how deep it is.”

Merrimack
’s starboard hangar deck was a wide space, fully three decks high—the entire height of the starboard wing. Elevators brought the Swifts inboard from the flight deck. The Swifts’ distortion fields kept them from coating over with condensing ice.

The Swifts were scarcely inboard and clamped down when canopies popped and the recon team jumped down to the hangar deck, tucked helmets under their arms, at attention. Erks had standing orders to ignore Captain Farragut unless specifically called to attention, so they crawled over the returned fighter craft, industrious as ants. Hoses hissed. Recorders were pulled, air reloaded, flight times logged, systems checked.