The Twice and Future Caesar (18 page)

“Aye, sir. Karit will drop down from FTL in ten, nine. Target's advance remains steady. Karit will achieve intercept in six. Five.”

Farragut braced for the dreaded last second jink when Romulus would escape the trap.

His teeth were clenched. Farragut caught himself leaning in, tense, willing the karit onward to intercept.

“Three. Two.”

The explosion lit up the Tactical display. The misty condensate scattered.

Got him!

Several techs stood straight up at their stations with a yell.
“Yeah!”

The live feed from the observation buoy showed the hit. The condensate lit up for miles.

The target's stealth failed as it died, tumbling away from the gate.

Tactical constructed a visual image from sensor readings of the broken object in the darkness.

A stunned disbelief descended on the command platform.

You could make out the leopard spots on the Xerxes' shattered hull.

We shot the wrong Xerxes
.

“It's
Bagheera
!” Dingo said.

Farragut turned away.
I just killed my brother
.

He clung to a wild hope that John Junior hadn't been on board the pirate ship.

“Sir! Look to the gate!”

Another motion disturbed the scattered condensate. A shape. Like the last one but distorted.

Another Xerxes had dropped down from FTL. It wore its energy field wide and thick toward its bow like a catcher's mitt.

“Reload! Launch another karit!” Farragut ordered.

Useless order.
Merrimack
was still light-years away from the target.

“Second karit already underway,” Calli advised.

Farragut was happily surprised. Shouldn't have been surprised at all. This was the
Merrimack
. Redundance was good. It was very very good.

“Time to intercept,” Calli demanded.

Tactical answered, “Negative intercept. Unless the target slows down, we have a five second deficit. Target will be at the gate in ten seconds. Nine. Eight. Time of the karit to the gate is now thirteen seconds. Twelve. Eleven. Intercept deficit holding steady.”

Farragut stared at the tactical display as if he could drive the karit missile faster and will Romulus to slow down. But Romulus knew he was being chased now. He would make no mistakes.

Later someone can tell me why I think this matters.

Later. There might not be a later.

Rear Admiral John Farragut waited through the final seconds in perfect dread for nothing to happen. Trying to memorize this moment, the people around him, as if they were all going away.

“Romulus at the gate in five. Four.”

The countdown fell on cotton ears.

“Three. Two.”

John Farragut meant to keep his eyes wide this time.

“Xerxes at the gate.”

Eyes shut. Held his breath.

It was dawn on the eastern seaboard of the United States of America. Kathy was waking up.

Farragut tried to imprint their images on his memory forever—his wife, his daughter—even though he knew he would be home soon and they would be there.

There would be time.

It only felt as if he was waiting for his world to end.

He
breathed.

7 June 2443
U.S. Space Battleship
Merrimack
Globular Cluster IC9870986 a/k/a the Myriad
Sagittarian Space

H
E
BREATHED
.

One cry with several voices sounded. The clearest from Tactical, “He
bounced!
”

“Ho!” from Targeting.

Captain Farragut's eyes flew open.

On the tactical display the Arran messenger ship was not recognizable. Farragut wasn't even sure it was the Arran messenger. It was flat, utterly flat, as if it had collided with something, hard, and now its crumpled mass was caroming straight away from the Rim Gate, its tail pushed into its nose.

Farragut had been braced for the end of his world, as much as anyone can brace himself for such a thing. Now he felt ridiculous for being afraid.

Everything and everyone was still here, just as they were an instant ago. His too beautiful XO Calli Carmel was still on deck. Big-eared young specialist Jeffrey was still at Tactical. His Terra Rican sword master Jose Maria de Cordillera still observed from the rear of the command deck with the Marine guards. And Captain John Farragut's Roman patterner really had just kissed him on the neck on his own command platform in front of God and his command crew.

Farragut's ears felt red and his face burned bright as the Jupiter Monument. He just wanted to vanish into a black hole. No time for it. He forged ahead. He pointed toward Augustus and told one Marine stationed at the hatch, “Brig that man.”

The Marine guard snapped to and glared at Augustus, who went quietly.

Farragut could bring the Roman up on charges later. For now he ordered, “All stations. Figure out what happened and tell me what I just saw. And where is my Star Sparrow?”

Tactical: “Star Sparrow is headed toward the Rim Gate on momentum only. Dead missile. Live warhead.”

“Detonate that infernal thing,” Farragut ordered. “I don't want someone feeding that back at us.”

Not that there was anyone out here who could redirect the burned out Star Sparrow.

But something had already happened that was altogether wrong. The Arran messenger hadn't made it through the gate.

It wasn't just that the Arran ship had plowed into an invisible barrier. The Arran messenger didn't have the velocity to crush itself like that. The trajectory of the wreckage suggested a collision with an undetectable object coming out of the gate at extreme speed.

Undetectable? It was as detectable as a bomb. But what was it? Was it still out there?

The Arran had crashed into
something
. The resultant vector carried the flattened Arran straight away from the gate.

Farragut demanded of anyone, “Was the unseen thing a solid traveler or an energy hammer?”

Targeting: “Other than its effect on the Arran, the observer buoy's instruments don't tell us anything at all.”

“Did the thing have a mass?”

Tactical: “Can't tell how much of that force was mass and how much was acceleration.”

“What was the position of the Arran messenger at the moment of impact?”

“Precisely at the gate.”

“Precisely?” Commander Carmel challenged the term.

Tactical stood by his observation. “
Precisely
. I don't think the Arran messenger got a molecule inside the gate. The force—or object or whatever it was—prevented the Arran from entering the
kzachin
.”

“Something else out here didn't want the Arran to go back in time,” Farragut guessed. He looked to Jose Maria de Cordillera, who gave a very slight sideways nod, allowing the possibility.

“Who else is out here, young Captain?”

“The LEN,” Tactical said.

Someone snorted low into his station. Muttered, “My Aunt Ferdinand.”

“That hit didn't come from anything Arran. It's nothing LEN, and it's not Hive,” Farragut said. “Commander Carmel!”

“Sir.”

“Siege stations.”

“Aye, sir.”

Calli called the ship defenses to full lockdown.

Farragut moved to the rear of the command platform where his stately civilian sword master stood with the Marine guards. “Jose Maria. Any thoughts on what that thing could be?”

Jose Maria de Cordillera looked baffled. “I would consult with Augustus.”

Farragut didn't much want to talk to that son of a she dog. Didn't have a choice. “Calli, your boat. I'm fixin' to talk with our resident Roman.”

Lieutenant Colonel TR Steele stepped forward, fist clenched, offering to assist with the Latin-Americanese translation.

Farragut waved Steele down and stalked out the hatch.

Colonel Augustus,
Merrimack
's Intelligence Officer, sat with one foot up on the bench in the brig, one elbow resting on his bent knee, his eyes shut. A pinch showed in his tall flat brow. He didn't rise, didn't open his eyes at the announcement of the captain's entrance.

“You comfortable?” Farragut asked.

“Not ever.”

Augustus looked wrung out. There was considerable pain involved with being a patterner.

“Something happened,” Augustus guessed without looking up.

“Tell me what just happened,” Farragut said.

Augustus held up a hand, to show his cables unplugged and dangling. “I don't have the input to know that, now do I?”

“Then how do you know something significant happened?”

“Because you're
here
—twitching.”

“I do not
twitch.
I am looking for the reason why you undercut my authority on my own command deck.”

“Is that what I did? I didn't expect to be here now—however one might define the word ‘now.' Events might have gone the other way. Then you wouldn't be stomping in my cell.”

Farragut was fairly bouncing off the bulks, his boot heels landing heavily.

“You were the one who said things happen once,” John Farragut said.

“I changed my mind. Things happened both ways. Or multiple ways. This is not the only reality. It's the one that I'm in right now, and no, it's really not comfortable at all. Will you stop pacing? You can't imagine that something changed when the Arran went through the
kzachin
. You wouldn't be able to recognize a difference.” He slumped back with a sigh. “What do you think you saw that shouldn't have happened?”

Farragut said, “The Arran messenger did
not
go through the
kzachin
.”

That opened Augustus' eyes. “Unexpected. How did you make intercept?”

“I didn't. Something hammered the Arran away right at the gate. Rabbit punch. Knocked him flat back. I mean flat and I mean back.”

“
Pedica
me.”

“What?”

“Not possible.”

Farragut didn't think that was literally what Augustus had said. But Augustus was right. It hadn't been possible. Farragut replayed the moment in his mind. One second he was listening to the countdown dwindle to nothing, then a shouted “Ho!” from Tactical, a scrambling at all stations, and on the monitor was the image of the flattened Arran wreckage careering away from the gate.

“It was impossible,” Farragut said.

“I just told you that. Don't repeat my words back to me. I don't have the patience for it.”

“There was a force that didn't register on the space buoy's sensors. We know something was there only because of what it did. It stopped the Arran.”

“Intentional?” Augustus asked with his eyes shut.

“You tell me. Looked intentional as a load of buckshot finding its way into a cheating lover from where I was standing. I need you to plug in to Tactical and figure out what really happened.”

“No.”

“Colonel Augustus?”

Augustus covered his face with his hand. “My head hurts. I don't feel like it. Brig me.” He peered out with one eye through the cage of his fingers as if to check his surroundings. Found Farragut was still here, with him, in the brig. Augustus closed his eye, settled back. “Unless it results in the annihilation of the Hive, don't bother me. I feel like death.”

He meant that literally. The patterner was dying. Patterners had severely shortened lifespans. Augustus had passed his due date last year.

“It's an order.”

“You have no leverage with me, Captain.”

“Yeah?” Farragut said. “There was a moment back there when I thought you mighta given a pile of turnips what happened to me.”

Augustus sat up. Anger flared in his hollow eyes. “That was when I didn't think we'd be alive to have this conversation.”

After a moment, Augustus exhaled a weary breath. He asked, reluctantly, “What was the vector of the unseen force?”

“Straight out of the
kzachin
.”

“Something popped out of the
kzachin
at the very instant the Arran messenger was about to enter?”

“That's what I've been telling you. So you tell me, how did the unseen force coming from the other end of this wormhole know there was a messenger ship fixin' to come through the gate right at that moment?”

“Your unseen force hit the messenger at the precise time and exact place to prevent the messenger from going back in time. That speaks of premeditation. Screams it, actually.”

The Rim Gate was known to connect to another gate—another
kzachin
—a quarter way across the galaxy and 10 billion years in the past.

“Patterner,” said Farragut.

“Origin didn't have patterners ten billion years ago,” Augustus said.

“Well, maybe there's a patterner from our future coming back to take the shot at the messenger we couldn't make. You!” Farragut said on a sudden thought. “It's you. In the future, you're fixin' to come back here and stop the Arran messenger from going through the
kzachin
.”

“No, I am not. I don't have a future. But as idiotic as your suggestion is, part of it may have merit. You're a patterner, John. Not your intellect. That's an empty squirrel cage. Your base instinct is matching pieces in the background.”

“My instinct is saying the unseen force is not my friend.”

“You don't think it could be here to save us from the Hive?”

“No. And you don't believe that either.”

“I don't. I just thought you might think so.”

“I'd sooner think it's here to saddle up the Hive and ride it right over us.”

“Controlling the Hive is a dubious ambition, but you're right on one count. One can never go too far wrong imputing malevolent intent to a hidden power.”

Augustus closed his eyes and went silent.

Hours ago Farragut had caught Augustus looking down the business end of a sword.

Farragut scolded, “This is an inconvenient time to be contemplating suicide.”

“I didn't consider your convenience. May I have my sword back?”

“All the gorgons in the galaxy heading this way, and you're fixin' to desert. I'm at the Alamo here. I order you not to kill yourself.”

“Then you risk me joining the other side in the middle of the next gorgon battle,
id est
, not convenient either.”

“Why would you do that? Why would you join the gorgons?”

“It wouldn't be my idea. I'm past the point where I'm certain I can resist Hive influence. It would happen because of equipment failure. I'm at the end of my life. I'm past due. And you're hard on your machines.”

“Sorry.”

“Don't
ever
. I am here to save the Roman Empire from gorgons. Nothing I do has anything to do with you. Be ready to strike me down if I join the other side.”

“Figure out what happened here,” Farragut ordered.

“I'm in the brig.”

Farragut stalked out. He jerked his thumb back over his shoulder as he told the human Marine guard at the hatch, “Unbrig that man.”

7 Iunius 2443
Xerxes
Globular Cluster IC9870986 a/k/a the Myriad
Sagittarian Space