The Myriad: Tour of the Merrimack #1 (6 page)

“Calli asked for clarification,” Farragut excused his XO’s balk.

“Callista Carmel was schooled on Palatine. Mr. Carmel knows that under a Roman captain, she would be in the brig right now. But she also knows she can get away with that yellow snow under John Farragut.”

“You think Calli’s question was a thinly veiled challenge to my authority?”

“Thinly veiled? It was damn near naked.”

“Had more clothes on than your challenges, Augustus.”

“And yet I am not in the brig. Why?”

“Because you want so badly to be there. Well, I’m sorry but it’s going to take something very un-Roman and dishonorable like direct violation of orders for you to get there.”

Augustus fell silent as a stone. Stared. Had not expected that kind of insight from this man. Was surprised to be surprised.

Very well. The captain was a shrewd idiot.

Farragut’s smile returned. “So why are you so jolly eager to get into my brig, Augustus?”

“Frankly?”

“I’m pretty sure you can’t do anything else. Yes, frankly.”

“I believe Earth and Palatine to be natural enemies. Which is to say the U.S. and Palatine are natural enemies, given that the United States is the only military power worth mentioning on Earth. I am sworn to give my life to Rome. And Rome has seen fit to put its neck under the U.S. heel for the duration of the Hive threat. So here I am. I serve. I don’t like it. I don’t pretend to. I don’t question a direct order in your own command center.”

“And that grudge is not getting heavy, Augustus?”

“Can
you
shut off a hundred and fifty years of hostility as quickly as turning out a light?” Augustus countered.

“Oh, much faster than that,” John said brightly.

Palatine was founded in the late twenty-third century by a private consortium on a planet two hundred light-years away from Earth in the constellation of the Southern Crown under a U.S. flag.

Once Palatine’s infrastructure was in place, its land partially terraformed, the planet self-sufficient, and the government subsidy exhausted, the model colony declared its independence. Palatine, which also called itself Rome, summoned all true Romans from Earth.

And they answered. By the millions. Doctors, lawyers, judges, legislators, philosophers, historians, Catholic clergy, all manner of highly educated people for whom most Earth dwellers assumed the knowledge of Latin was merely a professional necessity or historical interest. Millions left Earth, forswore citizenship in their various nations and pledged allegiance to Eternal Rome.

The Roman Empire had never fallen. It had lived on in secret societies for more than two millennia. The very idea had been a laughable conspiracy theory for those two millennia. Until the Romans of Palatine erected their eagles over the capital of their dictatorial republic and the Senate installed a Caesar for life.

The United States, which had to date never tried to keep a colony by force, declared war on Palatine. The two worlds had remained at war, on and off, for the last one hundred fifty years.

Even during hostilities, Rome/Palatine spread its territory, founding other planetary colonies in its own name. Palatine was not signatory to the League of Earth Nations Convention and did not restrict its colonization only to those planets without sapient natives. Alien civilizations were absorbed into the empire, some even willingly, attracted by Roman order, might, and technology.

Palatine excelled in mechanization and automation, thanks largely to a genius of his age, one Constantine Siculus, whose innovations were so devastating to the balance of power, that the U.S. Central Intelligence considered kidnapping him. Rome killed him first, after he set himself up as King Constantine of one of Palatine’s own colonies. Rome cloned him, of course, but Constantine’s clones hadn’t his inventive genius. The cloners neglected to consider the impact personal experience had on the formation of the human brain; and the clones were simply not the same person.

Still Palatine grew from renegade colony into a rival, then a menace. Roman Legions, both human and robotic, swept across the galactic south of Near space and headed across the Orion Starbridge toward the galaxy’s Sagittarian arm, a territory called the Deep. When Rome claimed the whole of the Sagittarian constellation as a Roman province, to the farthest end of the galaxy, no one could dispute them, even though no human had ever been to the far side of the Milky Way, much less to its far Rim. Just traversing the two thousand parsecs to the Deep took the fastest ship three months.

Then, in AD 2389, the U.S. stunned all the nations of Earth and all the known worlds with the unveiling of a colossal displacement conduit, the Fort Roosevelt/Fort Eisenhower Shotgun. Displacement was known technology; the Shotgun was just bigger. Instead of displacing people and goods from orbiting ships to planet surfaces, the Shotgun displaced whole carriers—U.S. battle carriers—instantaneously from Fort Roosevelt in Near space to Fort Eisenhower in the Deep, deeper than the Romans had ever gone.

And planted American flags in Sagittarius.

Human territory still only comprised a fraction of the galaxy. The unknown was far greater.

In early 2436, Romans ran into something horrible. They did not know it at first. At first they knew only that they had lost a ship, the
Sulla
, in the Deep.

Searcher after searcher disappeared. Even when Rome found the monsters behind the path of destruction, the Empire kept silent. Deep end colonies were eaten alive. Hive impulses caused a million Roman killer bots to self-destruct, and Rome maintained its swaggering mask of invincibility.

It was not until Captain John Farragut and the space battleship
Merrimack
met a Hive swarm and lived to tell about it that Rome sued for peace and asked for help.

The U.S.S.
Merrimack
was the only ship ever to survive a Hive swarm once engaged.

The U.S. agreed to assist, but only on the condition that Rome put its military command under U.S. control. It was a measure of the disaster that Caesar Magnus agreed.

So, in 2443, Rome and the U.S. became locked in an unhappy, unholy alliance, united only in their quest to exterminate the monsters at the edge of the map.

And John Farragut and Augustus became the least likely pair of officers ever to serve aboard the same space battleship.

“During the hostilities I was ordered to suicide before letting myself fall into Earth hands,” said Augustus. “Now here I am ordered to serve a U.S. commander. Not just a U.S. commander, but John Alexander Farragut.” The words said
John Alexander Farragut
, but the tone clearly said
John the flaming idiot Farragut
.

John Farragut had dealt Rome one of its few defeats in a battle for ownership of a planet.

“You’re ready to fall on your sword?” Farragut asked lightly. “Take cyanide?”

“That’s a big joke to you, isn’t it?” Augustus pulled the cap off a back tooth, produced a tiny vial. “There’s your joke.” He replaced the vial and the cap.

Farragut’s brows twisted, one perplexedly higher than the other. “Ever hear the line, ‘No son of a bitch ever won a war by dying for his country?’ ”

Augustus replied in irony, “Of course. That’s why there are monuments to the dead at Thermopylae, Masada, the Alamo, and Corindahlor.”

“You don’t suppose the Romans at Corindahlor Bridge would rather have lived?”

Augustus bridled in personal ownership. “Don’t
ever
presume you know what was in the minds of the Romans at Corindahlor.”

Corindahlor was before Farragut’s time. “And you do?”

“No. Honestly, I don’t.” Augustus sat back, murmured to himself, “What could they have been thinking?”

“You would rather commit suicide than take orders from me? I’d have thought orders to live and serve rather than die and serve would be a relief.”

“Shows your own self-serving priorities. I was assigned to you because John Farragut is where the Hive is. In wide-open space, it’s John Farragut who gets into the furballs. How do you do that?”

Farragut laughed. “I have no idea!”

“I believe that,” Augustus said dryly. The man was clueless. “They gave me to you the sooner to eliminate the Hive. Doesn’t make us lovers.”

“Doesn’t it even make us friends? Civil acquaintances?”

“Earth is next in line if the Hive eats its way past Palatine, so I don’t overestimate Earth’s compassion. And you would be well advised not to overestimate Rome’s gratitude.”

3

M
ARINES SNAPPED TO ATTENTION at Colonel Steele’s barking entrance into the fighter craft maintenance bay, which doubled as the Marines’ parade deck. “Hallahan!”

“Sir!”

“Jaxon!”

“Sir!”

“Li!”

“Yo! Sir!”

“Blue!”

Kerry Blue straightened, tried to look keen, shocked to be called. “Sir!”

Steele’s pale blue eyes narrowed at her. “You all here, Blue?”

“Yes, sir!” Kerry shouted, spirits rising. She was done crying over that lying, cheating, gorgeous bastard Cowboy. A tear stole down Kerry’s face. She dashed it away. Well, almost done.

The colonel ignored it. Turned away, barking more names.

Nothing like a mission—a big one—to drag you out of yourself. Colonel Steele was taking Kerry Blue down with the captain to meet the aliens. Kerry refrained from gushing thanks.

The names ended. Kerry was peripherally aware of Reg standing at attention next to her, shoulders slightly slumping, not called. Steele was giving orders for the chosen ones to collect weapons from the armory and to kit up in dress whites and dog collars. Steele exited as briskly as he’d come.

He had not ordered exo equipment—Arra had a nitrox atmosphere, hot, heavy, but breathable at sea level—not even sunglasses. It would not be hideously bright down there, even in the starry cluster; it would be nighttime where the Archon’s palace stood when the ship’s party went down. They were calling the leader of the three-world nation an “Archon.”

This was not just a prime mission, a first contact, but Kerry was getting out of the can and breathing real air. And she was
not
one of those poor sods who were sent on recon to the other two inhabited systems. She could not believe her luck.

At Kerry’s side, Reg hissed, “Hell, Blue! Who’d you go to bed with to pull this duty?”

Kerry could more easily name soldiers she hadn’t slept with, but fraternization with officers never got anyone anywhere but back to Earth with a dishonorable discharge. “Hell if I know. Steele musta drank something that killed the brain cell that knew who I was—and
don’t you remind him
.”

“Do you think if I trash Cowboy’s pod I can go on a first contact sortie? What’d you lay on Steele anyway?”

“Nothing!”
She couldn’t even imagine
that.
“That man has never liked me. He thinks I’m a fu.”

Carly ganged in from Kerry’s other side: “Yeah, that’s why you’re going planetside. I think he’s hot for you,
chica linda
.”

“He’s got a hard-on for me, that’s for sure,” Kerry muttered.

“Wish I were on his shit list,” Reg sulked.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Kerry conceded anything they wanted to throw at her. “Just tell me how to get beer stains out of dress whites.”

A snicker sounded behind them—that big baboon, Dak Shepard. “Right. Blue’s gonna try ’n’ tell us those are beer stains. Uh-huh.”

“Shut up, Dak.”

Wrinkled dress whites flashed down the ladder rails between decks, a crushed cap clenched between teeth. Captain Farragut blinked at the fleeting apparition, trying to identify the glimpse. Guessed: “Kerry Blue?”

“I didn’t give her the name, Captain,” said Steele, as if it were the name itself that provoked the captain’s skepticism.

“Cowboy’s Kerry Blue?”

“She does not belong to Cowboy,” Steele said.

Farragut knew who Kerry Blue was. “Your reports on her don’t exactly glow, TR. Why is she coming ashore? She’s not honor guard material.”

“She doesn’t get nitrogen narcosis.”
Rapture of the deep
, divers called it. Nitrogen at pressure could disorient the susceptible. “When the fur flies, there’s no she-dog I’d rather have at my back. I know she’ll be there. She don’t cross t’s, and she don’t pass inspection. But no combat-ready unit ever passed inspection.”

“You expecting combat?”

“Ready for it.”

Farragut nodded. “Make her pass inspection.”

“Yes, sir.” Steele took the captain’s dismissal.

Didn’t know what he was thinking when he chose Kerry Blue.

Kerry Blue. The tough/pretty girl Marine with the stupid name who had the starring role in all his wet dreams. Likable girl, good looking in a rough and ready sort of way. Better looking since she ran out of eye makeup. Girl-next-door pretty. The next car door. TR Steele had grown up in a trailer park. There was always a Kerry in the back seat of the next car.

Trailer
park.
An idyllic name for a slum where the landless lived in their mobile shelters stacked three high in the unpretty part of town with hard men, slutty women, and mongrel dogs. And when someone else needed the land, you hitched your gypsy home behind your current mode of transportation, be it pony, ox, automobile, or grid transit car, and moved to another park.

Kerry Blue was trailer trash, indestructible, rangy, loose-jointed. Breasts enough that you knew there was a woman under the uniform, small enough for you to know they weren’t bought. Wide shoulders, little waist, superb ass. A lot of motion in her walk. Kerry Blue wore her brown hair pulled back rather than buzz it off. It probably brushed the tops of her shoulders when she let it down.

TR Steele spent too much time thinking about what Flight Sergeant Kerry Blue would look like with her hair down.

She was a great little dog soldier, but unfortunately there was no way in any conscience he could ever recommend her for a commission. So he could just forget about ever seeing Kerry Blue with her hair down.

“You’re not a lubber, are you?”

Augustus looked up from his headache. His glower through pain-squinted eyelids answered no.

“We have therapy for space sickness,” Farragut offered. And with his saying so, the deck gave a burp, setting them on an eight-degree list. John Farragut put a foot to the bulkhead to stay himself until the deck settled.

A battleship did not rest quiet on the vacuum sea. It heaved and bulged and adjusted within its distortion field.
Merrimack
was not a passenger liner. Fine-tuning was not worth the expense and maintenance of achieving it on a military vessel. The distortions—which allowed for shipboard gravity, for FTL travel, and for hard turns without fatal load shifts and crushing inertial drag—were tuned within working tolerances only. A semblance of Earthlike gravity was needed for the crew to maintain bone mass on long voyages; but it didn’t have to be pretty.

You could not even say
Merrimack
rocked. Sway, she might, but having done so, she felt no compulsion to fall back and cant the other way. She swayed and she kept going, drew up short against a damper and left one with an unsettled wanting to tip back upright. Space legs needed acquiring. New hands spent much time in the head.

Augustus roused himself up on one elbow. “I am
not
space sick. I have a lot on my
mind.
”

Farragut glanced about the torpedo storage bay, the bunk netting strung kitty-corner. “I’ll get you better quarters.”

“Don’t put yourself out.”

“I wasn’t going to put myself out. I was going to put the quartermaster out.”

Augustus let the issue pass with an indolent wave of his hand.

“I have an audience with the Archon of the Myriad,” said Farragut. “Coming down with us? You feel well enough?”

Augustus slowly uncoiled, rose. “The two questions are unrelated. The answers are yes to the first; the second is irrelevant.”

At the appointed time, John Farragut, captain of the
Merrimack
; Jose Maria Cordillera, civilian biologist and Nobel Laureate; Lieutenant Colonel TR Steele, commander of the Marine companies; Colonel Augustus, the Intelligence Officer; several of the xenos; and the Marine guard assembled in the ship’s displacement bay, each person posted on a transmitter disk, each with a dog collar snapped round his neck. Without the transmitters, receivers, and collars, the margin of error in displacement was far, far too risky for human transport.

The receivers—landing disks—preceded them down. The LDs arrived like an artillery barrage, banging into thick air and clattering and spinning down to rest on the palace’s gem-encrusted floor. One disk missed low; embedded itself like a bomb with a resounding crack and spray of semiprecious stones. Augustus wondered if anyone had told the Arrans what to expect.

Captain Farragut yawned, popped his ears, as the displacement chamber gradually pressurized to five Earth atmospheres, to prevent the abrupt transition to Arran sea level from hammering the party’s sinuses in.

Augustus, standing with the Marines, muttered aside to Lieutenant Colonel Steele: “It’s a pity your uniforms are so utilitarian. The Archon himself is dressed fairly sedately, but his guard has all the ceremonial gold-trimmed gewgaws that dictators like. Can’t your Marines loop some curtain cords round their armpits and wear big furry hats and hang gold mops on their epaulets? At least put on your medals, Steele. Don’t you have enough ribbons to fill up your chest yet?”

Steele flushed. Kept his icy blue eyes fixed straight ahead. Hissed, “You are so full of it.”

“You make it too easy.”

The
Merrimack
vanished around them.

At the hour of the Archon’s command, just after sun-down, the beings from outer space thunderclapped into existence on the black disks in the Archon’s audience hall.

Heat enfolded Captain Farragut, air so thick you wore it. His first breath was fragrant, lush, heavy with sea air and living scents.

The landing disks, besides ensuring an intact displacement, bristled with sensors, so John Farragut already knew what would meet his eyes. He was not prepared for the vivid immediacy of it, the astonishing beauty. He could only afford a moment to take it in, the touch of breezes, hot and humid, on his skin; the sound of sea waves rushing softly from somewhere.

Lofty skylights let the starlight in. Wide arches opened to a terrace overlooking an expansive reflecting pool upon which the stars scintillated huge as moons in a deep blue heaven. The moons themselves shone like pale numinous wafers occulting the radiant stars.

Farragut marshaled his attention to the humanoids in the lyrically grand chamber.

Male guards, decked in uncomfortable, showy regalia, regarded him warily with dark, almond eyes.

Tall, deer-eyed, sylphlike women, with flowing manes and elfin faces, clustered along one wall, exchanging glances and private signals, their willowy forms draped to the floor in pastel gauze.

The Archon. The only one who did not gasp or shrink back as the visitors flashed and crackled into existence. Even on an alien face, the Archon’s look of satisfaction was unmistakable. His black eyes gleamed. A contained air of power. In charge and accustomed to it.

The Archon was short. Stately as a handsome animal. He wore a shirt of loose, crisp white linenlike weave, with wide boxy sleeves, and a v-slash down the back to accommodate his neat short mane. His loose black trousers would look quite in place in an Aikido practice.

Behind him towered a monumental inscription—what looked to be an inscription—carved in rose granite over a massive throne, but no translation came to mind as Captain Farragut tried to read it, and he feared his language module had failed him. This first encounter could be very sticky without an accurate translator.

The Archon took a quick survey of the aliens, seemed to be deciding which to address. He dismissed the rank of Marines out of hand. Regarded the scientists briefly, discarded them, too. Did not even glance at Augustus. Quickly narrowed his choices down to Jose Maria Cordillera and Captain Farragut.

The various colors may have confused him. The xeno, Dr. Ling was golden amber; Flight Sergeant Blue was brown; Flight Sergeant Jaxon blacker than the Arran night standing at attention next to Colonel TR Steele, who was as white as humans came.

We look like a litter of Labrador Retrievers
, thought Captain Farragut amid the monochromatic Arrans. Farragut wanted to prompt the Archon, but had been advised to let the Archon speak first. And he got the impression that the Archon did not want to be helped. Black eyes flicked between Farragut and Cordillera, searching for signs of leadership.

Dr. Jose Maria Cordillera’s coloring was closest to the Arran red-brown; his bearing that of a diplomat. A striking man in any setting. Slender, cat-muscled. Jose Maria Cordillera made a dignified, aristocratic presence. His long dark hair, cinched with a silver clasp, flowed down his back like a Myriadian’s mane. The Archon wanted it to be Dr. Cordillera.

But he turned to the captain and recited in conclusion, “John Farragut, captain of the U.S.S.
Merrimack
.”

With a blinding smile, Farragut greeted him in turn: “Archon Donner.”

The Archon returned a very human smile, then corrected his visitor, “Archon. Or Donner. Together is insistent or redundant.”

“Captain Farragut,” Farragut also corrected. “The rest is too long.”

The Archon breathed a light gasp, delighted. “You understood me! You speak my language!” Reciting names was one thing. This alien had just spoken an entire Myriadian sentence.

“Not well,” Farragut warned.

The Archon took two goblets from a waiting server and offered one to Captain Farragut.

Customs varied as widely as the stars, but one stood nearly universal among humanoids as a symbol of unity, trust, and friendship—the sharing of food and drink. It sealed most friendships and just about all unions that could be called marriages.

Hesitation would not wear. There was no doubting the offering’s safety, and safety was not the concern. Protocol was. Farragut asked, “Does one just drink, or are there words to be said?” He did not want to slug back the drink if there was a proper ritual to be observed.

The Archon instructed, “If you choose to accept, you drink first.”

Augustus, his voice a low murmur across the room, like the waves’ rush, footnoted in English, (“The implication being: if you choose not to drink, you are enemies.”)

Farragut lifted his glass in a toast, Earth fashion. “To your health.” And drank.