by R. M. Meluch
Augustus assented quizzically. He thought Farragut had given all, but after downing a liter of water and a bag of cookies, he was spry enough to tuck a small shepherd dog under his arm and slide down a ladder to downbelow levels.
The captain’s walk involved prowling through the remote compartments of the ship where the dog sniffed for the wounded and incapacitated man and the fugitive gorgon. Paused along the way to greet his crew and Marines by name, ask if all their mates were accounted for, praise them, listen to their bragging, their observations, their battle stories.
Apparently the Marines of Team Alpha had a new secret weapon in the form of pretzels. . . .
Colonel Steele walked a waking nightmare through Merrimack’s battle-scored corridors. He had lost a team. An entire team. And though he loved all his Marines with a soldier’s passion, still the guilty “Thank God!” stole into his thoughts when he learned it hadn’t been Team Alpha who had been eaten alive in the galley. And still he didn’t know if she was all right.
She. The only she. The center of his universe.
Like being eaten alive by a gorgon from the inside out, needing to know and not being able to ask. Where is she?
Needed to know. Needed as hard as he needed to breathe.
And then, as if needing could produce her, there she was.
Knew her by her walk, the loose, easy set of her shoulders, that free-jointed, rough and ready way of moving. The coarse fabric of her fatigues, soaked and patched with gorgon guts and neutralizing solution, adhered to her hips, her ass, making her walk a thing of wonder that brought him to full attention.
A bunch of iguana-green leaves huddled in the crook of her arm—her strange Arran pet. And she dragged her sword carelessly at her side, its tip bumping over the deck grates.
Steele’s voice, coarse and dry—what came out at all—could scarcely form one word. “Marine.”
She turned. Pushed back a loose lock of wet hair with a cheery, weary smile. “Hi.” She lowered her lizard plant to the deck. There was no one else in the corridor.
Her sword clattered to the deck as he grabbed her.
Cold fabric quickly warmed between their bodies. He tore himself from her lips only to see her face, her eyes, her smile.
“You’re a gorilla, Thomas.”
It jarred him, his name on her lips. He liked it. Liked it a lot. He held her face in his big, callused hand. It wasn’t right a soldier should have such soft skin.
She laughed under his mesmerized gaze. “I look like hell.”
“No, you don’t,” he rasped. Swallowed her breath. Hands all over her, assuring himself she was whole and real and here. She was astonishingly, achingly real, and soft in all the womanly places.
Too late, he heard the footsteps. Almost upon them. There was no springing apart fast enough, so he held tight. If he must be caught, he would not be caught skulking.
The gallumphing footsteps rounded the corner with Reg Monroe’s jaunty, “Yo ho HO!-ly Mary Mother of God!” Clapped a hand over her eyes.
Kerry went from cat-tense to relaxed in the span of a quick heartbeat. “Oh, sheeps. That’s just Reg. She don’t see nothing.”
Reg parted two fingers to peer through her hand at her commanding officer. “Code thirty-three, Mid-deck.”
Code thirty-three. Fire code. Steele knew without her saying so that his fair face had gone flaming red. What idiot ever let women in the Fleet Marine anyway?
He let go of Kerry, squared his powerful shoulders, cleared his throat. Damn tough to look forbidding wearing your career dropped round your ankles. Struggled for an appropriate command.
Reg sounded a retreat on her own. “I gotta go get a bucket of vacuum.” She scooted away down the corridor.
Steele stood rooted, volcanic breaths loud in his chest.
“Reg isn’t a problem.” Kerry’s feminine voice was light. Thawed him. And he wanted her too badly to worry about his career’s dive.
“We should move this out of the corridor,” Steele grumbled.
“You got a private shower, don’t ya?” Kerry gave a foxy wrinkle to her nose.
Dumb idea. Splendid idea. “You’re going to be the death of me, Marine.”
“We need a shower, don’t we?”
There were worse ways to die.
A very clean Kerry Blue blithely hooked up decking grates, clearing the way for maintenance bots to scour the subflooring of blood and neutralizing solution and dissolved gorgons. Her lizard plant crooned jubilantly from its perch on her shoulder.
A belligerent clank! signaled the arrival of Reg, letting her patch kit drop. Fists posed on hips and she put on that snottified attitude, that little foot just pattering away against the deck. Reg wasn’t tall enough to make that look at all scary. “You said you didn’t like Colonel Steele. Lie to me, bitch babe?”
“I said he wasn’t cute,” said Kerry. “He’s not cute.”
“Well, how is he? Give, sister. How many times?”
“Ssst!” Kerry hissed Reg silent. Someone was coming.
Dak. Whistling. Dumb and happy as a baboon, dragging the refuse wagon behind him. Come to unload the maintenance bots’ reservoirs.
“So, Blue!” he popped a hose into place. “I guess your boyfriend looks pretty good for a ten-billion-year-old man.”
“What? What boyfriend?” Kerry blustered, guiltily quick, face on fire.
“Donner,” said Dak. “The Archon. I hear talk he’s really old.”
“Oh. Oh.” Kerry’s panic subsided. False alarm. Dak was talking about Donner. Ancient history. Forgot there had ever been anyone before Thomas Ryder Steele. “Oh, him. Yeah. I heard that about him,” Kerry babbled.
“Kerry Blue’s decided she likes those older men,” Reg snickered.
“Reg, shut up!”
“I didn’t say nothing. Dak, did I say nothing?”
Dak was lost in space. “What did you say?”
“See there?” Reg threw a triumphant grin Kerry’s way. Then under her breath, “Give me a number, bitch babe, and I’ll shut up.”
Kerry hissed, “I lost count.”
Reg squealed into her hands.
Dak, accustomed to conversations going wide or over his head, turned his attention to the deep cargo pockets of his fatigues. Fished out a fistful of pretzels.
“Whoa, babes,” Kerry stopped him. “You allowed to eat our new secret weapon?”
Dak crunched, offered Kerry a pretzel. “Don Cordillera says they’re nothing special. The ‘composition’ isn’t special. Thinks it’s the shape that’s tripping the Hive’s jump jets. Thinks the gorgons are mistaking them for something else shaped like this. Move it, mutt.” Dak kneed aside a dog that had parked itself in the middle of the corridor where Dak wanted to park his refuse wagon next.
The dog, a standard poodle named Pooh, barked an objection, moved to the side, and sat back down.
Dak dragged his refuse wagon along, glanced up. “Yo ho ho. Lookit here.” He hooked the overhead latch and pulled down the grate to reveal a glassy black dome clinging like a giant obsidian barnacle between decks.
“It’s a—oh, crap.” Dak dropped the hook, gave Pooh a pretzel. “Good dog.” Pushed the rest of the pretzels into his pocket to free both his hands. “Tell the captain we got a—a thing.”
Kerry dashed to the nearest intercom. “Control Room! Flight Sergeant Blue reporting. We got a—oh, hell. Dak, what is it?”
Dak stood on top of a squat, square maintenance bot to get a closer squint at it.
Spoke through a mouthful of pretzel. “A gorgon egg. A gorgon turd. Something gorgony.”
Kerry relayed into the com, “—a gorgon thing attached to the overhead, mid-deck, Section Nine A.”
The OOD acknowledged, said she was alerting the xenos and sending a security team.
Dak turned around on his bot to scowl toward the intercom. “Security team? And what are we? The garbage detail?”
“Shhh!” Reg raised forefinger to lips, catching the edge
of a sound shivering somewhere down the passageway. “Hear that?”
A scraping of cicada wings.
Hive sign.
The dog barked.
As behind Dak’s head, the solid mass moved, developed features. Pincers sprouted from the shiny black mass. Circled round Dak’s neck. And closed.
“Dak!” Reg’s scream pierced the ship end to end.
Kerry seized the welding torch from Reg’s patch kit, flamed the gorgon. It let Dak’s body tumble as it melted.
Reg scrambled on hands and knees to catch the rolling head, tried to push it back onto the gushing neck, keening, “Medic! Medic! Medic! Man down! Man down!”
Augustus stood at the tableside, an attentive statue, until they zipped up the body bag. He only spoke when prompted, “What?” by a vexed medic under the Roman’s oppressive gaze.
“On a Roman ship, he would have lived,” said Augustus.
“I didn’t see you helping put that man’s head back on, Roman,” the medic bristled, pulling off bloody gloves.
“I have never done it. I only know that it is done.” Augustus quit the sick bay.
The dead Marine’s mates gathered round the bag, Reg’s high squeaky sobs the only sound for a long time.
Cole Darby frowned, feeling very old. The other Marines had stopped calling him Peetz halfway through the melee. They called him Darb now. He put an arm round the sobbing little Reg, and she did not shake him off. Cole Darby was in. Hell of a way to get there. Asked, “Dak married?”
“No,” said Reg, sniffling.
“Was,” said Carly.
“Ten billion years ago,” said Reg.
“To a gorgon,” Carly added.
“Her name Greta?” Darb asked.
Reg blinked drowning eyes up at him in amazement. “Now how did you know that, Darb?”
Cole Darby rolled his eyes sadly. “Oh, I’m just frogging psychic.”
Twenty-four hours counted quickly down, in which time the holes in the ship’s hull were sealed, normal pressure restored, gun bays restocked, barrels cleaned and capped, decks swabbed and dried, swords sharpened, personnel either rested or boosted, and computer controls taken back off-line in preparation to meet the second swarm.
Once upon a time, spaceships would tow their morgue behind them with the oxygen bricks. Now that was dragging bait. Merrimack carried her dead inboard.
Captain Farragut praised his company and crew on their victory, and stirred them up to do it again. We lost some men and women to the bad guys. Here was a chance to make the monsters pay. He told you he wanted a dozen gorgons each to die with the name of one of the fallen on your lips. And he named them, every one. It was a long list.
When he was done, you were mad. You were ready.
Team Alpha beat on the hull, chanting, “Dak! Dak! Dak! Dak! Dak!” as Merrimack heeled round to meet the second swarm.
Laws of tactics held that if it works once, do it twice. If it fails once, don’t try it again. If it works twice, don’t try it three times. Ramming a swarm had worked once. It had shattered the first swarm, killing many of its members, and breaking it down to a survivable battle.
There was little doubt of what tactic Merrimack would use this time. The crew hunkered down for impact, irrational, but difficult not to when two faster-than-light objects were set to collide.
“Force to the fore,” Calli ordered.
The tac specialist reported, “Impact in five, four—”
You saw it on three. The dead ice ball seemingly hanging in space on the monitor.
“Two—”
“It loomed in enormity, in menace. Icy, cratered, black, frigid death.
Merrimack hurtled to the countdown’s end. The swarm ballooned to fill the screen, infinite, all-consuming.
Plunged into that hideous grinding roar. The sound shredded the nerves, overloaded the dampers. Resounded in the hollow corridors. Sounds of solids tearing, of absolute zero igniting under searing friction.
Gunners crouched at their weapons, ready to blast the gorgons the moment Merrimack broke back into starlight on the other side of hell.
And then the noise stopped, but no star field returned to the monitors.
Gunners hesitated. Where was the target?
And then the realization. They were inside the target.
Merrimack had not come out the other side of the swarm. She was still moving, but so was the target, on the same trajectory.
Merrimack sped onward, embedded in the heart of the swarm, her crew entombed alive, miles of solid hunger pushing in on all sides.
13
LIEUTENANT COMMANDER Glenn Hamilton recognized the power play as soon as she walked into it. The LEN had summoned her urgently from her Spit boat immediately upon her arrival in the Myriad, only to let her wait in an empty chamber, gloomily lit. At last the LEN filed in, taking all the chairs, leaving her standing before a line of them seated behind an imposing slab of judicial desk. A single hot light came on in her face, so she could no longer see theirs.
Then, without greeting, the demand.
“Where is John Farragut! Where is the Merrimack!”
Glenn Hamilton did not answer immediately. Waited for them to give away some dominance by insisting. And so they did.
“We specifically ordered Merrimack’s return! You are not Farragut. Those two little missile-toting shuttles you brought are not Merrimack. Why is Merrimack not here?”
Glenn Hamilton—the Hamster—took her time composing her answer. Her petite size and doll-like looks had forced her to practice a calm, professional manner for a long time now. Her voice was pleasant, feminine, authoritative.
“You ordered Merrimack away,” Hamster stated. “We went. Merrimack is out of LEN jurisdiction now. Captain Farragut does not take orders from the LEN in open space. As I recall, you sent to the Pentagon before we left. Have you received the Joint Chiefs’ response? May I please see our orders?” She put out an expectant hand.
Expecting what she got. Nothing.
She pressed the LEN noses into the power shift: “In the name of the Merrimack, I respectfully demand to see our orders from the Joint Chiefs.”
That brought one out of his seat, all but pounding on the desk. “Young lady, you do not grasp the seriousness of what you have done!”
Hamster consciously kept her own torpedo tubes capped, and answered calmly, “No, sir. You do not recognize the seriousness of what you have done, and I remind the ambassador—” She shaded her eyes against the light. “That is the ambassador back there?—that my rank is Lieutenant Commander, not ‘young lady.’ ”
She still could not see him well. He became the single bushy eyebrow that loomed over his deep eyes.
“This inquiry will not devolve into the trivial. Where is Merrimack!”
An inquiry now, was it? “Merrimack is engaged in defusing the threat caused by the LEN when you emitted a resonant pulse in this stellar neighborhood. By resonating, you have jeopardized not just our mission but the safety of the three inhabited worlds of this star system. This cry of wolf may summon the wolf. The Hive is very good at tracking—”
“Hive, Hive, Hive. All that exists with you military types is your enemy, no thought to the innocents on the battleground. You will undo what you have done!”
“Can you be more specific?” Hamster requested.
“Don’t play coy with the world government!”
Could always count on the LEN to wave that about as if the world government had enforcement authority.
She tried to answer. “Merrimack made contact with the Myriadians. I cannot erase their memory of that. We gave them no technology. As for what you want undone, I am at a loss, sir.”
“I think you may actually believe what you say, Mrs. Hamilton. Farragut would send in a stooge to lie for him in all ignorance. Which is why we demand John Farragut himself. Not you.”
“I assure you this stooge has full authority to speak for Captain Farragut.”
“Authority. Yes, y
es, Mrs. Hamilton,” he tut-tutted her. “But not the knowledge. This is a waste of time.”
“I would agree. But I still have my orders to execute—”
“You will not.”
“I am under orders to give you a message, and you shall get it one way or another. It’s a warning—”
“Indeed. A little late in the day, Mrs. Hamilton.”
“You may call me Lieutenant Commander.” Mistake. Heard it coming out of her mouth. Playing their game now.
“Yes, Mrs. Hamilton,” said the Eyebrow. “Do please, give us your warning.”
“You are to stay off the transportation phenomenon which the locals call kzachin.”
“The traps,” he retranslated the word more to LEN satisfaction. “And what will we find inside them? Which trap holds the hidden answers to this plot?”
“The kzachin are not hiding anything. Not in the conspiratorial sense. There is no ‘plot.’ The kzachin are dangerous.”
A huff behind the light. A chorus of huffs, actually. Something—perhaps a pen—dropped to the desk in disgust. A new voice, possibly female, breathed like a curse, “You people.” Then, out loud, “What has the U.S. military done here!”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Pardon not granted. Unforgivable.”
“That was just an expression.”
“It always is coming from your kind. What kind of weapon or experiment or trap have you inflicted on these innocent beings in your monomaniacal genocidal vendetta against the life-form called Hive?”
Oh. Our monomaniacal genocidal vendetta. Why didn’t you say that in the first place?
Glenn Hamilton decided to steer the narrowest of courses to get out her message. “Use of the kzachin appears to be linked with the contraction of the star cluster Myriad. The kzachin also exhibit a lack of symmetrical performance. We are concerned that the apparent time distortion observed in travel back and forth on a kzachin may be an actual time distortion. I warn you, strenuously, of the danger of causal violation.”
“Causal violation is impossible.”
“Well, damn, I hope so,” said Glenn Hamilton. Winced inwardly. Hoped they hadn’t recorded that. “Our xeno team has identified the Myriadian home planet of Origin. It’s Xi. Run the data yourselves.” She surrendered the data bubble she had been charged to deliver, eager to have done with it and wash her hands of these people.