by R. M. Meluch
The unreal beauty of the star-bright Arran night could make a man forget why he was here.
Up ahead, under the colonnade, servants swept walkingsticks off the cool-shadowed ceiling with an air of evening ritual, shooing the creatures back into the garden.
At the Archon’s approach, the menials gathered up their tools and discreetly vanished between glistening white marble columns.
“Your President,” said Donner, hands clasped behind his back as they strolled. “A figurehead?”
“No.”
Donner coughed, a deep cough like Kerry Blue’s. “You pledged yourself to serve a female?”
“I pledged myself to the Constitution of the United States,” said Farragut.
Donner puzzled over this. Asked, “This President sends you orders?”
“I left with a mission objective, but orders? No. Not at this distance. Circumstances prohibit use of our instant communications system. So I’m on my own out here.”
“Do you mean to say your instant communication system does not work this far away?”
“No. It does work. We don’t dare use it here. There is something else out here that uses resonant pulse, and it can track a signal back to its transmitter. We must not resonate. We’re on silent run.”
Donner gazed up at the blazing host of stars in the indigo sky. Gave a human scowl. The more answers he got, the more questions he had. “And these LEN. What are they?”
“Representatives of the League of Earth Nations. They’re scientists and ambassadors. They mean no harm. In fact, they are here to protect you.”
“They don’t like you.”
“They don’t like my interfering in your world.”
Donner considered this. Liked the recognition that it was his world. Cast a satisfied gaze about his grounds.
Colonies of ambiguous plant/animal things lined the walkway. The xenos called them euglenoids; the Marines called them “land coral.” Fans and antlers and ledges and domes and honeycombs of them in all the colors of a tropical sea lay about in reefs in the garden. Feathery fronds unfolded from tough shells under the gentle light.
Donner’s world.
Then the rest of the implication caught up with him. “You ‘interfered’ with my world.” The only thing Donner knew that Farragut had done was to save Donner’s life. “They would have let me die?”
“You will have to ask them that,” Farragut dodged.
“They can give you orders? They have that power?”
“If I stay here, yes. Unless your worlds come under attack from space, they can do that. In a military situation, I am the archon. In peacetime, they have jurisdiction over any Earth presence in a sovereign system.”
“You must explain your command structure. I do not understand who is in charge. How can it change moment to moment?”
Probably ought not to try to explain about Presidential elections. Farragut said, “The ultimate authority we all answer to is the law. The law doesn’t change. The individual in power does.”
“These LEN. Are they a faction?”
Captain Farragut could see the route the Archon’s mind had taken, filtering information to fit his own situation. The Merrimack had taken Donner’s side against a rebellious faction. Donner would consider doing the same for John Farragut.
“No. We don’t have a world government. The League of Earth Nations is a . . . league.” Farragut could not shave the meaning of the alien words close enough to explain himself.
“There is no one supreme power?”
“No. But you must be familiar with this. Your home planet Origin must have more than one nation.”
“It used to,” said Donner. “It could not remain so.”
“Ours did.”
“How inefficient.”
“Very,” Augustus footnoted from behind them.
Donner cocked his head. Had forgotten Augustus was back there. Asked Farragut, “You let him talk like that? Is he not your subordinate?”
“At the moment he is supposed to be. Augustus’ people are imperial. They have a single government on his world. But my country controls his world right now.”
Donner stopped, turned to face both of them. “You and you are not from one world?” He used you-equal and you-subordinate for Farragut and Augustus.
“Palatine is a breakaway colony,” said Augustus.
“And we are enemies,” Farragut pointed between himself and Augustus.
Augustus made a T’Arra motion of agreement.
Now Donner was completely confused. “But this one is your adviser. He takes orders from you.”
“Palatine came under U.S. protection,” Farragut explained.
“U.S. That is your nation. Palatine came under you how?”
“They begged,” said Farragut.
“We asked,” said Augustus.
“A common enemy,” said Farragut.
“An enemy not like you and you are enemies,” Donner surmised, pointing from Farragut to Augustus.
“No,” Farragut agreed. “Ours was a cold war.”
“That did not translate. I do not understand ‘cold war.’ ”
“Cold war means we are not shooting at each other,” said Farragut.
“At the moment,” said Augustus.
“At the moment,” said Farragut.
“In a rational universe, we are shooting at each other,” said Augustus.
Donner waited for Farragut to counter that. When he did not, Donner asked him, “The universe is not rational?”
Farragut shook his head. “Not since our common enemy showed up.”
Donner’s dark eyes flicked back and forth, weighing the sides. “What kind of enemy is this that drew you together?”
Farragut hesitated. How to explain the Hive? “Monsters,” he said at last. “They eat. That is all you really need to know about them.”
“Which protein structure do they eat?” Donner asked. “Left-handed or right-handed?”
Donner’s own proteins had a different structure than Arran native life. He would be aware of the difference, and the incompatibility of the two. Wanted to know if he were on the menu.
“Both. All. The Hive is a universal omnivore.”
“You think these monsters are here?”
“No. We know they are not.” Farragut had come here on the gorgons’ trail. Lost them somewhere. Couldn’t figure out how.
“And now you will both take orders from those—” Donner made a face of distate, “—those LEN?”
“No. We’re leaving.”
Without the cameras on him, Donner could admit his inferior position; he confessed his own dilemma: “How do I order a being with all those big guns to stay?” Donner very much wanted John Farragut’s Merrimack on his team.
Farragut smiled. “I need to take my big guns away to hunt monsters.”
“Do the LEN have guns?”
“No.”
Augustus added, “You may abuse the LEN as much as you wish. They’ll enjoy it.”
Farragut darted Augustus a glare. (“Belay that.”)
(“Aye, sir.”)
It was the first time Farragut could remember Augustus calling him sir. And in English yet; not for show in front of the Archon. Just between Augustus and Farragut. Sir.
Donner sulked, “The LEN have a ridiculous-looking ship.”
“They do,” Farragut had to agree. The spheroid LEN golf ball lacked the belligerent charm of Merrimack.
“Your vessel commands respect.”
“She’s a brute,” said Farragut with satisfaction.
Farragut had used the pronoun she-beloved. Intentional. Did not escape Donner’s notice.
“You will leave when?”
Farragut demurred. He was not about to tell the alien he had a flight in trouble. Answered only, “Shortly.”
Augustus asked Donner, “Have you ever lost a ship traveling between planets?”
The question—or the poser of it—took Donner aback. The Archon answered, sharply, t
o Captain Farragut. “No.”
(“He’s lying,”) said Augustus. (“I know.”) Farragut heard it. The answer was too quick, too adamant.
And, seized by a fit of coughing, Donner told Farragut he was done talking. Bade him go now, and take his LEN with him.
Back aboard Merrimack, Farragut turned to his IO and demanded, “How are the Myriadians getting between planets?”
“Transportation is one of Donner’s high cards. He won’t be giving that one away. It’s a tightly guarded government secret. It’s not stored anywhere I can access it.”
“Augustus already has it.” That was Lieutenant Colonel Steele, waiting in the displacement bay for his captain’s return. “He’s just not telling.”
Augustus smiled coldly. “Lieutenant Colonel Steele, you’re not even an educated man, so what is your grudge? You were never forced to learn Latin for your trade. Unless higher education is required for bashing heads these days?”
Farragut ran interference. “Colonel Steele is concerned that you’ll get into Mack’s computer and take over my ship.”
“I can’t do that,” said Augustus.
Farragut looked to Steele for a riposte.
“You can’t be sure,” said Steele.
Farragut’s blue eyes returned to Augustus, like following a tennis volley.
“If it’s so jolly possible, flattop, then you shove your brain in there and make her open fire on Palatine,” Augustus suggested.
Eyes back to Steele. “TR?”
Steele had nothing to answer that.
So Farragut returned to the problem of breaking Donner’s secrets. “Augustus, if I get you access to one of Donner’s military computers, would you be able to find the pattern?”
Augustus frowned. “Those antique computers have no remote access. It would have to be a physical attachment with a cable. And the Myriadian buses are deathly slow. I think it’s a 256-bit data bus. Be like trying to suck Lake Superior through a straw. I can’t stay awake that long.”
“What can you get me?”
“Tac detected a scheduled flight blasting off for the Rea system. The ship is passing the fifth planet of the Arra system as we speak—at a phenomenal seventy-five percent c.” Irony there. The Arran ship was crawling. “I could put a tail on it, see how the Myriadians expect to complete that trip in less than fifty-seven years.”
“Do it.”
“Requires my using one of Steele’s Swift flights.”
Captain Farragut turned to the commander of the Marines. “TR, lend us some dogs?”
Steele balked. “Last soldier that Roman commandeered ended up breathing in a goldfish pond.”
“At least I didn’t lose her,” Augustus returned fire. Drew blood on that one. “I’m pretty sure the Marine I commandeered is the only member of Alpha Flight currently accounted for.”
Farragut teed his palms to break off that discussion before it turned to fists. “Any thoughts on the disappearance of Alpha Flight, Augustus?”
“I think Lieutenant Colonel Steele is having trouble keeping hold of his troops.”
“Something useful, Augustus?”
“All holes in the ground are not trapdoors.”
John Farragut blinked, not making the connection. “What does that mean?”
“Means whatever got you wasn’t necessarily meant for you.”
“It got us.”
“So did Donner’s minefield. The minefield wasn’t meant for you either. Your self-absorbed attitude leads you to interpret everything in terms of self. Your flight’s disappearance has nothing to do with you.”
“It’s my flight,” Steele jerked the Roman’s attention back to him.
“But only for another few hours,” said Augustus evenly. “I looked into the Swifts’ checkout logs. They’re carrying supplies for a short patrol. Their oxygen is running out right now. Dakota Shepard is an air sucker. He’s already out. The women might last two more hours. After that, they’re the sky pilot’s flight.”
Sprung from sick bay, Kerry Blue reported for duty. Lieutenant Colonel Steele told her to find a streetlight and stand under it.
He must have seen the pride fall right out of her face. Disappointment sogged down her insides. She thought the world of this man, and he said that to her? She tried to project her thoughts in case he could read her mind: How dare you? How frogging dare you?
And she must’ve got through somehow, because Steele said next, “For the next five seconds I’m not your CO.”
She had heard about these moments—the colonel’s brief windows of opportunity. They came once in a blue moon. He did it to level the playing field when he stepped on someone’s tail and couldn’t take it back.
Cowboy talked often of what he would do given the chance. If Steele ever told him he had two seconds, Cowboy Carver would piss on Steele’s leg. Dakota tried to tell him two seconds wasn’t enough time to whip out and launch a pee. Kerry remembered saying, “I don’t know, Dak, Cowboy’s real fast with that thing.”
The point would remain forever moot. Colonel Steele never gave Cowboy any magic seconds. These opportunities were rare. And when they come, you better not blink, because they don’t wait and they don’t come back.
Kerry didn’t hesitate. She clopped him hard on the cheek. And with a second to spare, hit him again.
The second one startled him.
The end of five seconds brought Kerry to stiff, decorous attention. “Thank you, sir.”
Steele rubbed his square jaw. “I gave you too long.”
“Yes, sir!” Kerry wanted to jump up and down. Got him! Got him!
Thought she might have spied a hint of humor in the colonel’s ice-blue eye as he barked at her, “Dismissed!”
Kerry danced back to the forecastle. Ha! Got him! Got him! Couldn’t wait to tell Reg.
No Reg.
“Where’s Reg?”
Lots of eyes focused on anything but her. This was bad. This was real bad. “Where’s Reg?” Heard the wobble in her voice. Dread squeezed her chest.
She ran to the pod racks. Banged on the men’s partition. “Dak? Dak! Dak!”
Grabbed the first spaceman to cross her path—physically grabbed him by the front of the tunic and made him face her. “Where is my team!”
And wouldn’t you know it, she had a baby-faced cherry in her fist. Didn’t look old enough to drink. Held a rate above hers. He cowered as if Flight Sergeant Kerry Blue were a fire-breathing general. “Yes, um, I think I heard something about one of the Marine squadrons being, um, somewhat . . . overdue?”
Alice, when she fell down the rabbit hole, had company. An odd collection of chatty things. There was absolutely nothing here.
No sense of motion. And that was possibly the hardest part. If Reg at least had the feeling of going somewhere, then she might hold out the hope that she might at length arrive.
She was going no place but mad.
Crying hysterically had helped a little. Very little. For a time.
Too frightened to sleep, she was now exhausted on top of terrified. Imagining things. At the limit of hope, patience, discipline, all of it. She broke the lockout from the res pulse transmitter. Hesitated over the forbidden button.
She had been told over and over, don’t hit the res, no matter what. It will bring hungry gorgons.
She took a big breath and yelled: “Come and get it!” Brought her palm down flat on the button. She hadn’t even coded a message. Just shot off a res pulse like a flare.
She would be brought up on charges, if she lived. Leavenworth looked like paradise from here. They couldn’t do anything worse to her than this.
She slumped back in her seat, relaxed and relieved enough to try to sleep. Until she glanced over the readouts. Something was desperately wrong.
She wasn’t resonating.
She mashed the button again.
It resonated to the bounds of her force field, and not one step beyond. As if the universe ended at her hull.
Nothing out
there. No when. No where. This, this nothingness, this did not exist.
Coffined in hopeless horror, too extreme for screaming or tears. Her last resort had failed.
And that answered that.
She was in hell.
7
THE SHIP’S CHRONOMETERS WOUND UP the days, and still Merrimack haunted the Myriad. Captain Farragut refused to believe his missing Marines were dead. Believed against all sense or fact that they yet lived somehow, though everyone else, even Lieutenant Colonel Steele, now hoped only to recover the bodies.
He wished he might have used drones instead of live patrols. But without resonance and without human discretion, drones were useless for long-range reconnaissance when the operator could not tell the drones exactly what to look for.
The LEN wanted the U.S. battleship gone from Myriadian space. Wanted them gone yesterday, convinced that Donner would be easier to talk to without Merrimack lurking in orbit. Convinced that Farragut was holding a gun to the Archon’s head.
Fed up with the stalling, Ambassador Aghani demanded Farragut inform the LEN of his estimated time of departure. Captain Farragut could not confess that he had a problem. Not to these people. A missing flight was military confidential.
And telling the LEN that he had since dispatched a second flight would torque them off pretty good. Farragut did not want to recall Echo Flight from its surveillance of the Rea-bound Arran ship. He still harbored hopes of uncovering the Myriadian secret of interstellar travel. But he had run out of time.
Aghani repeated the demand. “Captain?”
Farragut inhaled long, a three-second stall in which answers might come to him—and smiled brightly at the end of it.
Captain Farragut invited the LEN diplomats to dinner.
Like Atalanta’s golden apples, a social obligation was a thing the LEN dignitaries could not just run past. They must—must—stop and be civilized. Representatives of the League of Earth Nations held hospitality sacred, especially out here where life was so fragile and tenuous. At any rate, they could not afford to be brusque in comparison to the American military.
Aghani accepted.
The last dogwatch arrived with still no sign of Alpha Flight and no report from Echo Flight. Farragut murmured, awaiting his guests’ arrival at the soft dock, “I’m running out of ideas here.”