The Myriad: Tour of the Merrimack #1

by R. M. Meluch

  Came the expected call: Secure the guns. Wing report to the Swifts—except Alpha Flight.

  “What!”

  “Whoa, Regi! Watch the pitch!” Dak shook a finger in the ear that received Reg’s shriek. “Help me, here. The barrel’s stuck.”

  Reg leaned on the lever with Dak, trying to haul the extended barrel back inboard. She grunted, a high-pitched girly grunt, “Why everybody but Alpha Flight? Why not us? What’s wrong with us?”

  “Why you asking me? Push! Put your weight in it. Aw, nuts. Can I get somebody fat on here?”

  Carly, not fat, jumped on the canted lever; then Twitch, then Kerry.

  The lever gave way suddenly with a tumbled pile of Marines.

  With all the ship’s barrels locked inboard, the ship’s force field smoothed over and intensified against the gorgons’ assault.

  There were fewer of them now—the gorgons—and it was safe to launch small ships to gun down the remains.

  The Marines of Alpha Flight sat useless as the rest of Red Squadron and the whole of Blue Squadron stampeded for the port and starboard flight decks to take the battle outside.

  To add insult to injury, Colonel Augustus was receiving clearance to launch his Roman Striker into the fray.

  Hazard Sewell took in all the doleful eyes around him, his grounded, insulted flight looking to their leader for help. “Come on,” Hazard said, and his flight followed him to the command platform.

  Flight Leader Hazard Sewell halted just outside the open hatch, at attention. He waited some moments, ignored. Inside, the control room operated like a living machine, Naval officers and specialists attentive to their stations, conferring in quick, cool efficiency.

  Hazard cleared his throat in the hatchway.

  At last, Lieutenant Colonel Steele turned.

  “Sir,” Flight Leader Hazard Sewell spoke for the rest of his flight. “With respect, sir. Why not us?”

  Kerry Blue’s eyes silently added exploding shells to that question. Glared at Thomas Ryder Steele. Her lips trembled. She thought the moose was protecting her. Pissed her off. She was a United States Fleet Marine, for God’s sake.

  Steele spoke lightly, too indulgently, eyes on Kerry. “Alpha Flight, report to your Swifts.”

  And they did, running, only to find their fighters in pieces all over the starboard maintenance deck.

  The boffins had dragged out any part of the Swifts that might give a clue about Alpha Flight’s journey through the kzachin to nowhere. Even Kerry Blue’s Swift was disassembled. She recognized her pieces, all coded 0045—hexidecimal for sixty-nine. More boffin humor. “Why my crate!” Kerry cried. “I didn’t go into the frogging wormhole!”

  “Yours is the control specimen,” Reg told her glumly. “They take a normal one to compare the weird ones against. Cinderella, we ain’t going to the ball.”

  The monitor screens gave the control room a view of what was happening outside. Displayed the unlikely picture of Fleet Marine Swifts firing upon Merrimack. They scorched the gorgons off the force field shell with flaming gas before the wriggling monsters could insinuate their way through the ship’s distortion field.

  More eerie still was the sight of a Roman Striker among the Marines, blazoned in Flavian red and black, picking off burrs with surgical precision.

  “Captain, you have to see this.”

  Everyone who could see it gawked. The Striker spat pulse pellets, ten rounds per second, one gorgon per round. He did not miss. He did not touch the force field.

  “Sir, he’s not even grazing our shell.”

  Neither did Augustus hit the Swifts that strayed into his firing path. Missed them by literal hair’s breadths.

  The tac specialist could not close his mouth. “This is impossible.”

  Farragut gazed in amazement. “I’m glad he’s on our side.”

  “For now,” said Calli.

  “For now,” said Farragut.

  The little fighters quickly scoured Merrimack’s hide free of burrs. Then the sortie turned into a game, with Swifts vying with each other to bag the strays, but Farragut sent the recall. “We have an SOS to answer.”

  The stray gorgons were too few to form up into a viable ball to survive an interstellar voyage. Gorgons needed to swarm in order to achieve FTL. Solo, they were thousands of years from anywhere. These lost monsters would eat each other or disintegrate before they ever made planetfall.

  The LEN’s resonant message had been a brief one, instructing Merrimack where to pick up a courier rocket, which would carry the full message of dire import. The LEN at least had the sense not to resonate from within the Myriad, but this decoy was a bald one.

  “The Hive will figure this one out,” Jose Maria Cordillera said. “A swarm will follow the rocket trail. Or it will go to the nearest yellow star. And that is Arra.”

  Nine hundred light-years must have seemed like a safe distance from the true source of the message. But it was only six times the diameter of the Myriad. The Hive would figure it out.

  On top of that, there was every indication that the Hive would recognize the sender from the harmonic. There were infinite discreet harmonics. The Hive would know from this particular harmonic who was out here.

  Farragut marveled. “For a bunch of learned people, the LEN can be hanged stupid. This had better be important. If Donner’s taken hostages, I’m going to let him keep them.”

  As soon as Merrimack gathered all her own aboard, Farragut gave the order to pick up their coal cars—the oxygen bricks—and proceed on an intercept course with the courier rocket, flank.

  Calli advised, “Captain, the telltale is still active. We have Hive sign.”

  “Run. Random vector.”

  “Running sir. Eight hundred c. Still singing.”

  “Bad words. Foul language.” Farragut slapped the arm of his chair, rising. “We got a clinger.”

  One of the aliens must have insinuated through the force field and now rode along between the force field and the hull.

  “Get it out.”

  But the systems tech reported, “Negative burrs on the hull. Repeat, we have no burrs.”

  The com tech reported, “Well, it’s somewhere close enough to bother the telltales. And it’s got to be pinging up a bloody storm.” The tech put the telltales on audio, a chittering scream of crickets and cicadas. You couldn’t hear the gorgon itself, but you could almost put words to it, shrieking to swarms far and wide: I got the Merrimack ! It’s here! It’s here!

  “Turn that off.” Farragut turned to Calli. “When you’ve looked everywhere and can’t find it—”

  “It’s in you,” Calli finished for him.

  Farragut spoke to anyone within earshot: “Somebody find that squealing maggot and squish it.”

  “Aye, aye, sir!” Calli opened the loud com to broadcast: “All hands, all hands, we have an intruder on board. Look for a gorgon. Systems, clear the vents. Battery, blow the guns clear.”

  “What’s happening?” the rookie asked as Alpha Flight returned to gun bay twenty-four.

  “Bug up our nose,” said Dak, ratcheting down another shell, big as his chest, and Dak was a big man. “Force field is thinnest over the guns. You gonna open that thing, Reg, or do I gotta talk dirty to it first?”

  Reg pulled at the breech lever, muttering. “Piece of frogging fripping low bid crap is stuck.”

  Dak joined her on the lever, grunting.

  The rookie hung back, scowling. “Why do you guys talk so prissy? Why can’t any of you just speak Anglo Saxon?”

  “Hazard don’t like it,” said Kerry Blue, trying to push at the lever with her foot.

  “So what’s that got to do with it?”

  “Two stripes on his sleeve says we frogging do as he says. You gonna help here?”

  “What are we doing?” The rookie was accustomed to auto loads. He had never seen anything like Merrimack ’s manual loading system.

  “Wasting energy—Cheese and rice, Reg, what’d you do to this thing?” Dak
dropped off the lever, sweating.

  “Ick, Dak, stop dripping on me.” Reg wiped her arm. She stopped on a sudden thought. “Force field goes away at the barrel. Barrel’s an air lock. You can’t open the breech if the barrel is uncapped.”

  “We capped it,” said Dak dully, sweating like a shower wall.

  “Did we?” said Carly.

  Dak looked at Kerry. Kerry looked at Reg. No one could remember doing it.

  “I bet you didn’t.” Reg turned the crank. Came a muffled thunk of a tampon snugging home. “You didn’t, you baboon!” Reg slapped the barrel. “Try the breech now!”

  Dak turned to the rookie as if this had all been an instructional show. “Like that, you see? The barrel sticks out through the force field, so the easiest way for anything to get into the ship is through the barrel.”

  “Provided no one fires the gun,” the rookie filled in.

  “Which is just what we’re gonna do,” said Dak, pulling open the breech. “Fuck!”

  Dak’s jump knocked Reg backward onto the deck. She crab-skittered away as lashing tentacles, wide and black as bullwhips, blossomed from the breech.

  Terminal sucker mouths latched onto Dakota Shepard’s cheek, tore at his uniform.

  More legs sprouted from the breech as a fat alien struggled to squeeze its blobby body through the barrel.

  Dak screamed in pain. And Kerry Blue was there with a sword, hacking off ravenous stalks. The severed pieces fell, thrashing, stumps spurting caustic brown dry/wet sludge from the cut ends, mouth end still grasping. Kerry danced over the biting pieces, shrieked at the stinging acid seeping through her uniform. She kept slashing till Dak staggered free, and Reg hit the sprinkler. The compartment rained neutralizing solution, slicking the deck.

  The full gorgon emerged like a balloon, its bulbous, space-black body filling out and rounding, freeing more tentacles.

  Quick. They were more than quick. But you didn’t have to chase them. Gorgons came to you.

  Reg stood still, shut her eyes, and whipped her sword in a lemniscate in front of her and let the burr reach for her. She felt the resistance of impact, the squirt of caustic blood, the flapping of severed ends at her ankles. She slashed harder.

  Face shields, all polished and ready, hung within reach if only Reg could afford the two seconds to put one on.

  Reg cried, “Don’t you be flapping all them sucky mouthy legs in my face, you frag bag. Suck my steel, space squid!”

  Dak seized a face shield, skated on the slick wet deck to the stumpy side of the wounded alien to stab at its bloated body. “Die, greta, die!” For they were all gretas to Dak Shepard.

  Brown acid spurted. Dak twisted his blade in the wound. Gretas self-sealed a simple puncture wound. The thoroughly ruptured alien emitted a grosteque noise, like a balloon sputtering air.

  And it died. Dissolving into a brown puddle of neutralized sludge. The heat shut your eyes. The stink stopped your breath.

  Carly yapped, “Catch that! Catch that!” chasing a severed tentacle thrashing across the deck.

  The xenos had yet to get a gorgon part into stasis to study it intact.

  Twitch hurried to fetch a container to collect Carly’s prize.

  “Oh, you know it’s just gonna die,” said Kerry, not moving to help, even as the tentacle dissolved in Carly’s hands. “See?”

  Carly screeched at the melted crap in her hands. “Oh, futon!”

  There was money in it, a viable gorgon biopsy. Even though no one was even sure gorgons qualified as a bio.

  Dak turned his face up at the sprinklers, letting the soothing solution pour over his face. When he blinked his eyes clear, he screwed up his face at Reg. “ ‘Suck my steel, space squid?’ ”

  The rookie stood in the pool of brown slime. “Is—is it dead?”

  “Does it look dead?” Carly said, hands under the sprinklers.

  Kerry Blue rubbed stinging brown slime off the back of her hand to reach her caller. “Commander Carmel. Gun crew twenty-four. We got the singer. Waxed it.”

  The XO acknowledged.

  “Lab, are we quiet?”

  The telltale cicadas had stopped their shivering.

  “Ants are going back into the sand. Looks like we’re clear, sir.”

  Farragut nodded. “Let’s go pick up the LEN’s rocket.” And, under his breath, “Dumb shits.”

  “Their message was spectacularly ill-advised,” Jose Maria Cordillera rephrased.

  Hazard Sewell asked Team Alpha, “How’d the new guy do?”

  “Who? The frozen pizza?” Carly shot back, daubing Dak’s facial burns with salve.

  “Oh, no,” Hazard moaned. “The new guy froze?”

  “He . . .” Twitch had a tough time saying anything bad about anybody. Had a tough time saying anything. “Did a fine job of staying out of the way.”

  “Oh,” said Hazard.

  Said Kerry Blue: “He’s no Cowboy.”

  The day’s journey to intercept the message rocket gave Augustus time to sleep off the ordeal of plugging in to patterner mode. By that time John Farragut had worked up a fine anger at the LEN.

  “They thought that just sending a courier rocket out of the Myriad would keep the Hive from tracing that res pulse’s origin back to Arra? The LEN have badly underestimated our vermin!”

  Intercept and retrieval landed two messages from the LEN. One message, for John Farragut, ordered the immediate return of Merrimack to the Myriad.

  “Can they do that?” Calli asked doubtfully. She knew the LEN had jurisdiction over Earth business in the Myriad, but she did not think their arms were long enough to haul Merrimack back on just their say so.

  “They think so,” said Farragut.

  The second message was for Don Jose Maria Cordillera. It contained a lot of data quite outside Cordillera’s fields of expertise. He passed it on to the appropriate xenos.

  The xenos were not long in formulating a report.

  “So where’s the fire?” Farragut asked the xenos, assembled in one of the labs. The looks on the scientists’ faces did seem to indicate a genuine emergency.

  Dr. Linley, head of the astrogation team, stammered a bit. “The kzachin—the wormholes. They’re multiplying.”

  “And?” Farragut prompted.

  Dr. Linley stammered himself into incoherence.

  “And the Myriad is shrinking,” Augustus answered for Linley.

  “And it’s bloody shrinking!” The xeno gripped a console to stop his hands from shaking.

  The laws of physics said the globular cluster must degenerate, grow diffuse, torn apart by tidal forces. Instead, the Myriad was contracting, minutely, definitely. At an accelerating rate.

  The astrogator lit up the image brought by the courier. It was of the Myriad. Then he overlaid the image with glowing lines that mapped all the connections between the kzachin inside the Myraid. Collectively, the lines curved toward the center, making the cluster look like a string bag. One need only pull a string to close the whole thing.

  And according to Linley’s calculations, the aberration must have started nearly ninety years ago—coinciding with the arrival of the first colonists from Origin to the Myriad. It was then that the globular cluster’s natural expansion began to slow, then stop, then slowly, minutely, eventually reverse into contraction.

  “The Myriad is not fixing to collapse in our lifetime at that rate,” said Farragut. “This was worth betraying Merrimack’s position to the Hive?”

  “It’s the acceleration, sir,” the xeno’s voice shook. “It’s geometric.”

  In geometric progressions, minuscule effects could get rapidly out of hand.

  Farragut glanced across all his xenos’ frantic faces. “What’s causing it?”

  “No idea. No idea with any hard science behind it. Except everyone on the team hypothesizes it ties in with the kzachin—because of the curvature of the connections.” Linley fluttered a quaking hand at the string bag image. “And because it began when the Myriadians starte
d using the kzachin.”

  Of all the kzachin, only the kzachin through which Alpha Flight took its journey had no connecting point. That wormhole, the one everyone now called the Rim gate, showed as a solitary dot at the outer perimeter of the cluster.

  “Well, hell, there it is,” said Augustus.

  “There is what?” said Farragut.

  Augustus pointed at the dot. “I’ve found Origin.”

  “You mean the gateway to Origin,” said Farragut. “We already suspected that.”

  “No,” said Augustus. “I found Origin.”

  “Where is it?” Farragut saw only an empty point in space.

  “It’s ten billion years away.”

  “Ten billion light-years?”

  “John Farragut, I speaka ze English better than that. I said years, not light-years.”

  Farragut was still lost. “Something you chose not to communicate earlier, Colonel?”

  “I said nothing, because I didn’t believe it. Still don’t. As Arthur Conan Doyle said via Sherlock Holmes: when you eliminate the impossible, what’s left, however improbable, must be the truth. So I reconsidered. But there’s nothing left except the impossible. So I reconsidered again. Dismissing any idea as obviously impossible is certainly bad science.”

  A buzzing, shiver, and chirp inside the lab made all the xenos inhale.

  A dropped glass crashed, shattered.

  One of the xenos sobbed.

  The flutter of moths, the scrape of cicada wings. The desperate plop of insect bodies beating against glass confines.

  Farragut turned slowly to one of the lab’s terraria.

  Ants poured from their tunnels.

  Hive sign.

  “Augustus, I’m going to make you explain whatever it is you just said—Hold that thought,” said Farragut, and into his caller: “Calli. We have Hive sign.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Find it. Get it off.”

  “It’s not a gorgon hanging on this time. The last one must have ratted us out. Long-range res scan shows two swarms converging on us.”

  “Anything headed toward Arra?”

  “Negative. They seem intent on the Mack.”