The Myriad: Tour of the Merrimack #1

by R. M. Meluch

  “Eat slow,” said Augustus.

  The officers’ mess had been transformed into something approaching elegant. That Merrimack was a long-range vessel was no excuse for barbarism. Some thought a formal dinner was high silliness, but John Farragut could play it, could play any situation as it came. Could throw back shooters or savor a Chateau d’Argent with equal ease. Could listen to cellos or harmonicas (though he could, and did, play the harmonica). So he was altogether at home amid the pressed linen, the gold-plated cutlery, the snowy white china edged in gold leaf and navy-blue enamel. Dressed in starched whites and blindingly bright brass, he welcomed the ambassadors to his table.

  Augustus was dressed in formal Roman black of sedate design except for the brilliant red flourish across his back—either a wide sash or a narrow cape—draped from left shoulder to right hip. Augustus watched the captain launch his full arsenal of charm, treating the LEN to the full Farragut—greeting each guest in his own language without use of a language module. John Farragut knew bits of many languages, usually massacred the accent, but most people appreciated the effort spent in trying.

  The conviviality did not endure past the appetizers. The conversation at the captain’s table quickly took on the dimensions of a battlefield.

  Though English was the lingua franca of the League, the League members resented it and seized every opportunity to speak anything else. Aghani used Augustus’ presence as an excuse to commandeer the conversation into Latin.

  The language of Earth’s sometime enemy never lost its educated cachet. Aghani spoke Latin flawlessly. The U.S. officers fell into step, until Madame Navarro thought to check, in English, “We do all know Latin here?”

  Eyes flicked round the table, Madame Navarro’s quite sincerely concerned. Others searched expectantly for a confession of ignorance from one of the Yanks.

  And got it. “No,” John Farragut answered quickly.

  But since Farragut obviously did know Latin, he obviously covered for someone else. Would not say who. John Farragut, as usual, drew all the fire upon himself. He bluffed, “I’ve been told I’m really bad at it and I’ve been ordered not to try.” Then proposed cheerily: “English, why don’t we?” And smiled at everyone.

  TR Steele avoided his gaze, sat like a stone.

  Augustus withheld a smirk. Silently toasted the captain’s smooth flanking maneuver, protecting the dignity of his poorly educated jarhead.

  There was no such thing as a classless society. Certainly not on a military spaceship. Captain Farragut might as well be king here. Might as well be God. And TR Steele was a grunt.

  Built like a brick wall, broad-shouldered, thick-jawed, CO of the half-brig of Fleet Marines on board, TR Steele was not a picture of refinement—and this book was true to its cover. Steele had come up through the ranks starting as a private, his education all remedial and done late. Physical courage and horse sense he had, with medals to prove it, but no Latin.

  The flattop made a stiff, solemn presence at the captain’s table. Would not, even when invited, call Captain Farragut “John.” Probably fearless in the face of a gorgon horde, Steele seemed daunted by the dizzying forest of stemware at his place setting. Fortunately, he need only drink from all those glasses, not know how to fill them appropriately. And there were no kantiku glasses, so he needn’t worry about when to throw it.

  Now the utensils, those could be entertaining. Augustus could tell Steele had never seen a bariki hook in his life, or the cracker for the Cassiopeian conch, or the Nisarian skewers for the flaming munsrit.

  Augustus wondered if he could get Steele to use the bariki hook to retrieve the creamer from across the table.

  Probably not. Someone would rescue him. Either Farragut or Jose Maria Cordillera, who was seated to Augustus’ right—perhaps placed there purposely to head off just such an endeavor.

  Jose Maria Cordillera did belong here. Dr. Jose Maria Rafael Meridia de Cordillera was Terra Rican aristocracy.

  Terra Rica, a former colony of Spain, was on cordial terms with its mother country, and at war with no one. Jose Maria Cordillera owned roughly one-twenty-fourth of the dry land of that planet.

  Urbane. Soft-spoken. Humanitarian, with a strong sense of noblesse oblige. Jose Maria was strikingly handsome at age fifty-seven. His olive-toned skin was still supple over sharply sculpted bones. A man of medicine, he disapproved of cosmetic surgery except in the case of wounds, and did not always endorse it even then. Jose Maria Cordillera bore a scar on his brow, got it when his firstborn bashed him in the eye with her silver mug. You could not pay Jose Maria to repair that one.

  Jose Maria Cordillera kept the common touch. A nice man. A good man. Augustus found it easy to read what made Don Cordillera tick. Jose Maria Cordillera carried a Catholic burden of guilt. He had dedicated himself to saving a universe which had been altogether too good to him.

  The LEN rolled themselves out for Don Cordillera to walk on. It was such an honor to meet him. They were only surprised to find a man of his caliber and refinement on, well, on the Merrimack, no offense, Captain Farragut.

  “Where else should I be?” Jose Maria Cordillera asked.

  The ambassadors would not say so at the captain’s own table, but military and intelligence were antonyms in their lexicon. And “Department of Defense” was just too disingenuous. The U.S. ought to call it what it was, the Department of War.

  “I like to stay on the front line of discovery,” Cordillera explained. Merrimack operated on the frontier.

  “More like the firing line, I would say,” Aghani offered.

  “Often,” Cordillera admitted. “A doctor is a good thing to have in those circumstances, you do not think?”

  The LEN were appalled. “A doctor? They need a medic with a patch kit and a vat of penicillin. You . . . you, Don Cordillera, are a research legend.”

  “A legend. Well.” Cordillera smiled into his Riesling.

  “Your work with viruses was pivotal,” said Madame Navarro. “You have saved millions of lives. And if you count posterity, countless lives.”

  “And I see the Hive as a disease of galactic proportion,” Don Cordillera continued on that line. “A parasite. A very bad parasite that kills its host, its host being worlds. I am dedicated to curing it.”

  Aghani went rigid, chilled. He set his fork down with unsteady care before he should drop it. “You would cure an intelligence? Do we not have a duty to communicate with it?”

  The smack of the captain’s palm on the table made all the guests flinch back from their rattling china and rippling wine.

  Farragut glanced round with a sheepish grin. Lifted his hand from the table, a squashed ant flattened to his palm heel. “Sorry. I was . . . communicating.”

  “Ants on a starship!” Faustino Barron exclaimed, eyeing his food with sudden distaste. An excessively prissy man. Probably should not have seated that one next to Colonel Steele.

  “Time to let the aardvark out,” Farragut noted to the Marine orderly. Wiped his communiqué on the linen napkin in his lap, then waggled his fork. “Didn’t mean to interrupt. Carry on.”

  The window dressing, strategically stationed next to John Farragut, suddenly gushed in breathy admiration, “How ever did you discover three—three—Class Nine worlds!” Her enthusiasm may even have been sincere. Farragut was a fine looking man, especially in uniform. “That can’t have been luck.”

  “Of course it was luck!” Farragut laughed. “Blind, stupid, crash-flat-into-it luck. We were looking for the Hive world.”

  “Oh, but aren’t you afraid you’ll find it?”

  “Afraid? Ma’am, that’s what we’re here for. We’re hunting the Hive.”

  The picturesque one folded her forearms on the edge of the table, and leaned forward to rest her breasts on them. Putting all her cards on the table, apparently. She breathed, “Isn’t it . . . terrifying?”

  As he composed an answer, Farragut’s blue eyes took on a gleam that Augustus had never seen before, a look that made
Augustus set aside his own drink and observe. An amazing look, a bright, insane enthusiasm. And it was not directed at the young lady either. (Had to wonder about her. For a people who expressed such disapproval of Kerry Blue’s Mata Hari type espionage, this was an interesting choice of guests to send to the captain’s right hand. It was safe to assume her esteemed rank was very lately acquired, and very temporary.)

  Farragut’s bright eyes were not for her. He was envisioning the Hive. And that look was . . . battle crazy. It washed over his face, animated his whole being. Battle was a topic he could get excited about.

  And then he reined it in just as quickly. Wrong audience here. These people would not appreciate John Farragut’s idea of fun.

  The captain forced his enthusiasm back to room temperature, and answered benignly, “I kind of hope the Hive thinks I’m a little scary.”

  Aghani seized on that thought. “The Hive thinks. The Hive thinks. You admit the Hive thinks? Are we not then duty bound to make them understand us?”

  Don Cordillera came to the captain’s rescue. “ ‘Thinking’ is too strong a term. They react. As one-celled beings to light and heat. The components of the Hive have only the most rudimentary interaction with those not of its own kind—or those not of its own self, for we hypothesize that the Hive is a single, titanic, marauding entity composed of many macroscopic cells.”

  Farragut further interpreted for the LEN, “ ‘Rudimentary interaction’ in Hive-talk means if it’s not me, I eat it.”

  “Not entirely accurate, young Captain,” said Don Cordillera. “Burrs, gorgons, soldiers—all the Hive cells—have shown cannibalism. So, more precisely: ‘If it is not I, I eat it. If it is I, I may go ahead and eat it anyway. ’ ” And to the LEN, earnestly, “These beings—this being—the Hive is wholly without redemption. When I came out here, I assumed all spacefaring life would be inquisitive and benign and eager to talk. And now I find myself committed to nothing less than genocide. If I find the queen of the Hive, or the nerve center of the being, the single being the murder of which would exterminate the whole, would I do it? I ask myself: could I? And I must answer—yes. In a heartbeat.”

  “Even if they adapt quickly and might eventually be taught to share?” Madame Navarro begged for reason.

  “Burrs don’t share,” said Farragut.

  “They learn,” said Navarro. “They could learn.”

  “They learn that engineered metal—though itself inedible—often indicates that edible beings live inside,” said Jose Maria. “They learn that inedible metal spacecraft point the way to and from worlds full of edible beings.

  “Adapt they can, but only if it lets them eat—and eat now. They store nothing. They plant nothing. They eat their dead and wounded. They are an engine of entropy.

  “They have no higher conscious purpose. They have not the least concept of planning or investing. You would think something that voracious would learn husbandry, conservation. They have not.

  “The Hive kills host after host. If ever it asked a question, it would be: what is left to eat? It uses, it throws away. And would you even want to teach gorgons husbandry, so that they might plant people gardens for future harvest?

  “Do remember: entropy is a force of nature, too. What is natural need not be benign. The Hive is nothing less than the living, eating incarnation of the Ninth Level of Hell. Your Excellency, you come in peace and I admire that purpose. I am afraid I come to exterminate.”

  “Deal me in,” Lieutenant Colonel Steele spoke for the first time.

  Farragut lifted a finger to say he wanted a piece of that game.

  Commander Carmel lifted her glass. “Well said, sir.” Sir’d him even though Don Cordillera was a civilian.

  “Oh. Well. This is unfortunate,” said Aghani, grave.

  The delicate Mr. Barron, whose head motions brought to mind a chicken, gave a nervous glance up at the sprinklers in the overhead. His eyes flinched downward. Chin pulled in. Gazed upon his plate with loathing. Asked in great trepidation, “Are we dining in a chemical lab?”

  “Oh. Those.” Farragut nodded up at the sprinklers. “Standard equipment. All decks.”

  “I’ve never seen that on a Naval vessel,” said Barron, all but calling his host a liar.

  “They’re standard on my boat. We’re a Hive hunter. Those sprinklers spray neutralizing solution for that brown caustic goo gorgons melt down into when you kill ’em. Oh, hell.” Turned to the Marine orderly, “Tell the galley we might should skip the French onion soup.”

  “Captain,” Madame Navarro cut in on another tack. “Forgive me if I’m wrong or if I give offense for suggesting such a thing, but I’ve been given the impression that you, how should I say, that you like fighting?” And she shrank away from her question as if she had offended herself.

  John Farragut bit back the first answer that sprang to mind—probably a cheerful, “Are you nuts?” He said instead, soberly, “Not a good quality in a battleship commander, you don’t think?”

  “No!” she cried. The emphatic snap of her head set her earrings to swinging madly. “A man with that much destructive power at his command should have the utmost loathing for violence. The utmost.”

  “Then we differ.”

  “Oh, dear,” Madame mumbled with the utmost dread and disapproval. The utmost.

  “It’s the American way,” the American representative of the LEN commented with heavy irony, an apology for his barbarous kind.

  “War does have a purpose,” Augustus proposed, his first offering.

  “You mean other than expanding the Roman Empire?” Steele asked Augustus.

  Someone had thought to space the entire length of the table between the Marine commander and the Roman intelligence officer when making up this seating chart. It didn’t stop the cold salvos from soaring end to end.

  “Keeps you employed,” Augustus returned.

  “Colonel Augustus, I beg you to explain.” Ambassador Aghani sat forward, clearly troubled. “I find war senseless. Anathema. The final resort of brute impulse. You see some purpose in it?”

  “War trained humankind to survive out here,” said Augustus. “For centuries we were the only formidable enemy we had. There was, for a long time, an assumption among us that any race who could reach the stars would need to overcome internal conflict first. Fallacy, of course. Humankind reached the stars very nicely, still fighting one another. Aggression persists even as intelligence progresses.”

  “It’s a throwback,” Madame Navarro broke in. “Baby teeth to be spat out. A diaper to be washed, folded up, and put away forever.”

  Augustus ignored her. “Those millennia of internecine warfare prepared us for truly virulent foes. On first contact with the Hive, the LEN would have walked out to meet them, smiled, shown them your periodic table, and been eaten for your trouble. Aren’t you comforted that there persisted those of us belligerents with guns enough to blow each other to kingdom come, guns which, turned in a single direction, might yet stave off this mindless, soulless terror?”

  Madame recoiled. “You don’t mean to imply that Earth’s history of horror and bloodshed could be a survival mechanism, the purpose of which was to prepare us to survive a hostile ET contact?”

  “I don’t mean to imply any such thing,” Augustus answered. “I’m pretty sure I came flat out and said just that.”

  “Oh!” Madame Navarro appealed in the wrong direction, “Captain Farragut! You cannot agree with this hawkish pretext for violence.”

  “Well . . .” Farragut demurred.

  “No!” Madame Navarro insisted. “War is absurd!”

  “Well, yes, it has its bad moments,” Farragut confessed. “But so does the peace.”

  The League of Earth Nations considered Palatine’s conflict with the United States a civil war. Even though the League disapproved of a governmental system that allowed euthanasia, cloning, slavery, and colonization of inhabited worlds, those transgressions had never stopped any nation of the League—other than t
he U.S.—from recognizing Palatine’s government or from carrying on trade with its expanding empire.

  From the moment Palatine declared independence, the Romans and the Americans had been locked in a territorial race. When not at open war, the two nations waged a defensive aggression across a quarter of the galaxy. Their zones of influence expanded like rival pancakes, each trying to bubble through or around the other, while spreading ever wider and wider, planet-stabbing all the way—planting their flags in any solid ground, in every dirtball, from Rim to Hub—the object to hoist the colors, hike the leg, piss on every tree and declare “Mine!” and off they go.

  While the rest of the civilized world watched in disgust.

  “I don’t know about y’all, but our worst enemies have been good for us,” Farragut told his LEN guests. “After the Romans captured the Monitor, right quick we devised all kinds of low-tech and phase-shifting countermeasures to defend Merrimack against the Romans. And it’s those same measures that saved our asses in our first contact with the Hive. The Roman ship Sulla got eaten. We didn’t, and I have Rome to thank that I had a sword on me the first time a gorgon oozed through my force field, shut down my targeting system, and chewed through my hull. So God bless the Roman emperor.”

  The captain had only one taker to that toast.

  “You’re not drinking, Commander Carmel?” Aghani noted that Merrimack’s XO made no motion toward her wineglass to toast Caesar.

  “There is a reason I should?” said Calli. Calli was dressed in formal military whites, but she had done something artistic with all that long shining chestnut hair, and she looked positively imperial at the table, and made the breathy young woman with the plunging neckline next to John Farragut look vulgar.

  Captain Farragut intervened, “Mr. Carmel attended the Imperial Military Institute on Palatine. Doesn’t make her a Roman. It’s a good school.”

  “It is an excellent school,” Aghani allowed. “The best by some rankings.”

  “It was tough,” said Calli.