The Myriad: Tour of the Merrimack #1

by R. M. Meluch

  “The educational system on Palatine is the finest among all the nations and colonies of Earth, bar none,” said Aghani.

  “We are not a colony,” said Augustus.

  “Palatine began as a colony,” Aghani revised. “I was complimenting your educational system.”

  “You were stating fact, Mr. Aghani. Compliments are unnecessary.”

  “Colonel Augustus, where did you attend?” Madame Navarro asked solicitously.

  “I don’t recall that I did,” said Augustus.

  “No school? What? Were you programmed?”

  Madame Navarro meant it as a jest, but Augustus answered without humor, “I don’t recall that either.” Offered nothing more.

  Another LEN representative, who had had quite enough of his companions’ pandering to Rome, and quite too much to drink, set a fist and forearm on the table and launched into a scold at Augustus, “You don’t seem to realize the catastrophic brain drain planet Earth suffered under the Roman exodus to Palatine. Our world harbored and nurtured you for centuries. You used our societies—controlled many of them. You used our best institutions to perpetuate your language—religion, medicine, law, higher education—and not for the good of the masses. Oh no. All for the elite and for yourselves. Then the whole spiderweb of you packed up your scholars and your scientists and your judges and just left.”

  “Good riddance,” said Lieutenant Colonel Steele. “Take ’em. Better they go to Palatine where I can see ’em, than having a secret society sponging off Earth.”

  “Whoa, Mr. Steele,” Don Cordillera said with a slight smile. Attempted to drag the talk off in a lighter direction, “I could understand the resentment if you were a doctor, lawyer, or priest, but that’s rather harsh coming from someone who never had to suffer through a Latin class for his profession.”

  “You’ll never catch me talking Latin,” Steele vowed.

  And there it was. The brick that was bound to drop. Augustus lifted his glass in a toast to the other end of the table. “Semper fi, flattop.” And watched the Marine turn the color of cheap rosé.

  “I don’t feel the U.S. is in any way inferior to Palatine,” said Calli Carmel. “I think I’m in a position to know.”

  “Thanks for the backup, Mr. Carmel,” said Steele.

  Madame Navarro’s glass came down hard. “Mister Carmel. Mister Carmel. I do not understand this conceit of denying the sexuality of your female officers. As if femininity were not command material! You Americans must unsex your female officers in order to respect them?”

  “I am not unsexed,” Calli answered for herself without excitement. “The distinction is irrelevant to the position.”

  “There are no ladies in the Navy,” said John Farragut with a wink.

  Except on Christmas Eve, he thought, when the women pull those dresses from the bottom of their storage lockers, with those little bitty shoes, and transform themselves into amazing, soft, sweet-smelling, civilian-looking creatures, and it hurt. Last year John Farragut saw Hamster in that strappy little dress and those strappy little shoes, and he’d walked straight into a bulkhead. Hard. Carried away a mouse that lasted for days.

  Madame Navarro scolded Calli, “Your sex may be irrelevant to your position, but denying its existence makes you irrelevant. Are we no more evolved than we were at the dawn of civilization when Hatshepsut made herself an honorary man, because one must be a man to be Pharaoh? Submerging yourself to a male identity? Really, Miss Carmel.”

  “I am not an honorary man,” Calli said. “ ‘One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind’ only includes me if I am a man individually as well as collectively. I am a man. Happen to be a female one, but a man in fact, not honorary, not submerged.”

  “Oh, stuff and apology. The distinction cannot be so glibly brushed off. You are a woman. He is a man. The division is there. It’s biology. The U.S. Navy Space Fleet ought to grow up and acknowledge and accept the femininity of its female officers.”

  “Separate but equal?” Calli suggested faintly.

  The ensuing silence lay like a slab.

  Until Calli answered herself, “Not in this man’s Navy.”

  In the thick cessation of conversation, the soft music, the thump and hum of the ship, and all the background noises pushed forward.

  Through the partition that separated the captain’s mess from the xenos’ mess, shouts, mounting in volume, indicated that the scientific gathering was no more amiable than this one. It sounded like they were throwing things.

  Something flew past the open hatchway and rolled down the corridor.

  “What was that?” said Farragut.

  The Marine guard at the hatchway turned stiffly, shoulders dead square within his uniform of navy blue, eyes barely visible under his smartly centered white cap. Answered, “Muffin, sir. Blueberry.”

  “They got muffins?” Farragut lamented, wistful. Sounded like a funner party over there. More sincere at any rate. Still, “I can’t endorse muffin throwing.”

  Sounds of the melee grew louder. Shouted name-calling. A clash of a metal platter hitting the deck and spinning to rest.

  Jose Maria Cordillera rose, bid everyone else stay seated. He set his snowy napkin on his chair, and smoothed the creases from his square-shouldered charcoal jacket and wide trousers of coarse black Tussah silk. When he turned from the table, you saw his only jewelry, the simple clasp of hand-wrought silver which held back his long black hair.

  He exited the mess at a calm, cat-footed walk, his soft-soled shoes making no sound.

  The shattering of glass beyond the partition made Farragut worry belatedly if he ought to have given Jose Maria a Marine escort.

  And silence descended behind the partition.

  Moments passed with no sound but a few muted voices.

  Jose Maria reappeared in the hatchway, quietly composed.

  “What did you say to them?” Aghani marveled at the doctor’s peacemaking prowess.

  “I asked if they had any muffins.” Jose Maria produced a plate, lifted the linen to reveal a stack of them, still warm.

  “Muffins? With bariki and munsrit?” Faustino Barron balked at the culinary gaff, and gazed on Don Cordillera as if the esteemed doctor had grown tusks.

  “Works for me.” Augustus accepted a warm muffin from the basket, held it up in admiration. “Ah. Like LEN weapons. Like new. Only thrown down once.”

  “That was uncalled for,” said Guillame Kapila. “The League of Earth Nations has always accommodated Palatine.”

  Augustus gave a cold smile. “Which is why when the real menace showed itself, we allied with our most offensive enemy.”

  “Why, yes, they are all that,” Kapila allowed, the U.S. was offensive.

  John Farragut signaled foul. “Now how’d I get a two-front campaign going here? I expect that from him.” Him being Augustus. “But Dr. Kapila, what did I do to piss y’all off? You haven’t liked me from your first ‘Permission to come aboard.’ ”

  “Sir, I am certain you are well qualified at your profession,” said Kapila, making no attempt to hide his distaste for that profession. “But you stumbled into a Class Nine extraterrestrial intelligence with your battleship, blundered down to the planet’s surface, and started talking. That is not protocol. It is . . . stupidity.”

  “Worked at Hispaniola,” Farragut offered.

  Kapila’s eyes flared white. “Invoking the image of the earliest act of American imperialism is meant to make us feel better about this botched first contact?”

  “It wasn’t American imperialism actually,” said Farragut. “It was a Spanish-funded Genoese imperialism at the time.”

  “There were probably Romans aboard,” Steele muttered. Meant it to be snide, but Augustus said serenely, “Did you know Christopher Columbus kept his log in Latin?”

  Farragut covered his eyes. “Oh, for Jesus.”

  When all the LEN guests had gone back through the flexible walkway to their spheroid ship, John Farragut opened his stiff, stand-u
p collar and flung down his napkin into a wet burgundy stain in the tablecloth. “Was that hideous or what?” Pulled out his cuff links.

  “No vote for ‘or what,’ ” said Calli Carmel, taking the pins out of her hair.

  “TR, where are our guys?”

  Colonel Steele had already checked with the control room. His square, bulldog head moved slowly from side to side, grim. “Alpha Flight has not reported back. Drones haven’t picked up their IFF anywhere in the Myriad.”

  The Swifts of Alpha Flight were long since out of air. Steele was already figuring who he had to compose letters to.

  Dak Shepard had only a mom. This was going to kill her.

  Tough, mean Carly Delgado had no one but the Corps to call family. Big loss, that little girl was. Could have used a dozen Carlys.

  Twitch Fuentes. Steele never knew much about Twitch. Better find someone who spoke native Spanish to write that letter, because Twitch didn’t know too much English beyond lock and load, so Steele guessed his family didn’t know even that.

  Hazard Sewell. Military family. They’d understand. Didn’t mean Steele knew what the hell to say.

  “They’re not dead,” Farragut said.

  “All data to the contrary?” said Augustus.

  “I know they’re not dead,” said John Farragut.

  “Primary process thinking.” Augustus dismissed his certainty. Little boys and madmen believed that merely thinking things made them so.

  “We stay here until I find my guys. Echo Flight making any progress?”

  “Still surveilling the Rea shuttle,” Steele reported. “The Rea shuttle is now moving at eighty percent c.”

  Echo Flight was following a snail.

  “And at that rate they’ll arrive at Rea in . . . ?” Farragut left the blank to be filled.

  “Thirty-four years,” Augustus supplied. “Your years.”

  Farragut’s blue eyes roamed the overhead. A muscle bulged on his jaw with the clenching of his teeth, silent obscenities trapped within. “Something’s gotta happen.”

  “Given that Myriadian ships don’t carry thirty-four years’ worth of air and food, yes, something must. Buy you a drink, John Farragut?”

  “Oh, God, yes.”

  Though wine aplenty had graced the captain’s table, John Farragut had stayed keen and painfully sober, drinking only at toasts.

  “ ‘Have we not the utmost loathing for violence? The utmost?’ ” Farragut repeated his favorite quote of the evening. “I need something to wash this down.”

  Colonel Steele returned to the control room as Farragut marched down the narrow corridor, followed by Augustus, and unlocked the bar, and quickly made up for lost time. He pulled a tequila from the rack. Held it up, swishing the worm around the bottom of the bottle. “For Faustino Is-this-okay-to-eat Barron? And how about Madame Save-the-Gorgons Navarro with the strawberry-green lip tint. What was that about?”

  “Must be an Earth fashion. It’s not Roman.” Augustus pulled down a shot glass and slid it over for a hit.

  Farragut wagged his head as he poured. “I know I’ve been away for a while, but now I’m afraid to go home.”

  “What did you make of the twins?” Augustus coiled onto a barstool.

  “What twins? I didn’t see—oh. Her. The blonde.”

  “She had hair?” said Augustus—and caught a muffin mid-stern. He swiveled his barstool around, hailed his assailant in the hatchway. “Ah. Miss Carmel.”

  She’d brought muffins.

  Farragut lifted the bottle in toast to Calli. “My sexless XO!”

  “Oh, shut up.” Calli pulled up a barstool and rapped down a shot glass, open end up. “The LEN stalking horse was asking for you, O Captain, My Captain.”

  “The LEN what?”

  “The twins.”

  “Oh, for Jesus.”

  Command made John Farragut the most attractive man on board. He would have been attractive had he a toad face, which he didn’t. But command also made him inaccessible. Subordinates were off limits to an officer, and every man jack and jane on board Merrimack was John Farragut’s subordinate.

  Water water everywhere, but no one to sleep with. The LEN had set a glass of fresh water in front of the very thirsty.

  “The sentry reported she was trying to convince him to let her into your quarters,” said Calli.

  Farragut shrugged, wondered why he was even being told this. “So, why’d he have to check with you? Did he need help staving her off?”

  “He got rid of her all by himself. He was just making sure he’d done the right thing.” The sentry had done it by the book. And to the captain’s lack of comment, Calli said, “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “Did he?”

  “Calli!”

  She shrugged. “Just checking.”

  Parched, he might be, but John Farragut would not be herded. Would not be led by his dick. He was feeling singularly trapped, and his kind did not mate in captivity. Preferred to stay with Calli and Augustus at the bar.

  And soon the three of them set to addressing their empties by the names of the LEN emissaries, propping the shot glasses up, and knocking them over with muffins at ten paces.

  The clearing of a baritone throat broke up the shoot. All three turned.

  Ambassador Aghani stood, a rigid dark pillar in the hatchway.

  The captain and the XO froze like puppies caught chewing the carpet, muffins burning like guilty brands in their hands. Augustus juggled his, unrepentant.

  Aghani let the senior commanders stew in their juvenile poses for a long moment, then pronounced gravely, “I came to apologize for our behavior at your table, Captain. But I see the sentiment would be pearls before an unsuitable audience.”

  Farragut drew himself up. “What can I say to something like that?”

  “ ‘Pass the muffins,’ ” Calli suggested.

  Aghani pronounced soberly, “Sir, I demand, by the authority of the League of Earth Nations and the treaties to which we are bound, that your vessel depart Myriadian space without further delay.”

  “No, sir,” said Captain Farragut. The very last answer Aghani expected.

  Aghani knew Farragut to be impulsive, belligerent, stubborn, but never insubordinate. Aghani put the situation into words the naval officer might understand, “Given that I am the lawful authority here, what you just said is tantamount to mutiny.”

  “Oh, bullshit, sir.” Farragut slung his muffin aside, brushed off his hands. “When you were my guest, I couldn’t speak to you the way I wanted, but you are aboard now without my permission. I have a flight away and there’s no authority in the universe can make me abandon them. Simple disobedience to an illegal order can never be judged mutiny. We stay. Now get off my boat.”

  Deep wrathful breaths sounded loud through Aghani’s wide nostrils. His lips worked. He restarted in the voice of forced conciliation. “Very well. Stay. You will strike your colors and accept the LEN flag.”

  “No, sir.”

  “This is mutiny now.”

  “No, it’s not. I’m pretty sure I have to take an oath of loyalty before I can violate it.”

  “Law requires you accept the LEN flag while you operate in LEN jurisdiction.”

  Had him there. Farragut replied, “Make me.”

  Aghani blinked. Calli made a noise in her throat. Augustus shook with silent laughter.

  “I beg your pardon?” Aghani tilted one ear forward. Could not possibly have heard that aright.

  “I don’t accept your flag. I’m not leaving. You’re going to have to shoot us.”

  Aghani stared, airless.

  “No, wait,” Farragut revised. “Y’all have no guns. You guys open a dialogue. Send over your negotiation team. Y’all are so good at peaceful resolutions. And there you are.”

  Aghani could not speak. He turned, stiffly, mortified, to go. Felt something soft strike him between the shoulder blades, heard it plop softly to the deck.

  Did not turn to see who threw
it. Walked woodenly away.

  Farragut pressed his lips together, nodded. “You know, I might have handled that better.”

  “That sound you don’t hear is John Farragut’s career plunging down in flames,” said Augustus.

  “Oh, and thanks for the help!” Farragut bent down and retrieved Augustus’ muffin. Gave it back to him. “Nice shot, by the way.”

  “Plead the fifth,” said Calli.

  “You know you can’t plead the fifth in a court-martial,” Farragut scolded.

  “Not that fifth. This fifth.” Clanked an empty bottle on the bar. “Or this one. Or this—”

  “Oh, that’s going to make it all right!” Farragut propped himself up between a barstool and the bar.

  Calli’s hand beeped softly. She took a report from the officer of the deck: a salvo of courier rockets had just been launched from the LEN. Direction of Earth.

  Farragut blew out a breath through narrowed lips. “I gotta be gone before the Presidential order gets here, or Calli, you got yourself a big boat.”

  “Don’t want it,” said his second-in-command.

  “Bull.” Farragut knew her better.

  “Not like that,” said Calli.

  “Jesus Christ, where is my flight?” Farragut stared emptily down at the bar, unfocused. “ ‘Make me?’ I told a LEN ambassador ‘Make me?’ ”

  “John, you’re drunk.”

  “Crapulent. Isn’t that a fine Latin word for you.”

  Augustus, who had been matching him drink for drink, managed a perfect vertical on his brief sortie from the bar to unload several rounds.

  “You seem to have yourself a Roman,” Calli commented in Augustus’ absence.

  “I noticed.” Farragut squinted. “How’d I do that?”

  “You’re the finest commander I have ever served, John Farragut. For him being a patterner, it took him long enough to figure that out.” She clapped him on his broad shoulder on rising. “I’m boiled. Good night. Good morning. Good something. Outta here.”

  Augustus oozed back onto his barstool in time to catch Calli’s long-legged retreat. A lot of motion in her walk. She let her waist-length hair fall free in its chestnut glory. “And that is not a bad piece of work.”

  Farragut turned to regard him in surprise. “Rumor said you were alternating current.”