by R. M. Meluch
The specialist heaved a useless breath. “It’s our best and only shot.”
“Line ’em up. Straight shot out the back. Drill me a vent.”
“How many cannons are we bringing on-line?”
“All of ’em. Aim anything out the back that can be aimed out the back. For the rest, rake, drill, blast, shoot until we redline.”
“And if we redline before we break through to the surface in the back?” Calli asked quietly.
“Then push the line. There is no choice here. We do this or we die here. So we do this.”
“Yes, sir.”
Captain Farragut picked up the loud caller to brief the ship. Heard himself talking, but no echo of his voice through the corridors. “And God bless, there goes the loud com.” He tossed the caller over his shoulder. “I’m going to tell the crew in person. Set it up, Calli. Wait till the gorgons eat through to our force field, then give it all we’ve got.”
“You want to wait that long, Captain?”
“I don’t want to waste a single erg shooting dead gorgons I don’t have to.”
Augustus followed him off the bridge. “Don’t shoot until you see the blacks of their pincers?”
“Don’t swing at the first pitch,” said Farragut.
He bounded through his ship, informing his people of the situation and the plan. Arrived on mid-deck, where smoke still rolled in a thick gray cloud from the ruptured hatch of gun bay twenty, its fire wall bowed in, gore spattered on the corridor’s inner bulk.
Farragut waved through the smoke to peer through the hatchway to the carnage within. A blasted rent in the hull left a clear view to dead gorgons mashed against the force field’s invisible barrier.
“Holy God.”
Farragut knelt to pick up a button still sewn to a shred of fabric. He held the button between his palms as he might hold the hand of the dying. Spoke with deep tremolo, “Who is this?”
Augustus watched the fire-suited Marines around him. All in John Farragut’s hands. That button might have been—might still be—any one of them. The captain held them in his hands, asked their names. John Farragut owned these people.
A flap-eared youth asked, “We gonna buy it, Captain?”
“Hell no,” Farragut answered in a big voice, with a smile and a wink. “It’s a piss-poor day to die!”
The Farragut magic that Augustus so loathed infused hope and heart into those despairing faces, when he knew even John Farragut could not get them out of this one.
The captain made his rounds, spreading his idiotic hope through his doomed ship, until the familiar sick hum of gorgons trying to insinuate through the force field surrounded them. He raced back to the bridge. “Stand by!”
“Standing by.”
“Do it, Mr. Carmel.”
“Fire Control!”
“Fire Control, aye.”
“Bring beam cannons on-line.”
“Cannons on-line. Aye.”
The lights dimmed. The beam chargers cycled to full power.
“And we are charged and green, sir.”
Calli gave the order: “Fire. Fire all banks.”
“Firing, aye.”
The lights dipped again. Sound razored in the confines, a raking sizzle and burn with a closing wall of heat. A ghastly unhealthy warble permeated the beleaguered force field.
Calli and the systems tech looked to Farragut. “More power to the force field?” Calli asked.
“Negative.”
“Aye, sir.” They needed everything for the guns. If the guns did not cut through, then the force field would only prolong the dying.
An alarm sounded. A red light flashed on the console. Systems reported: “We’re cooking. Guns turning to auto-shutdown.”
“Override that,” Calli ordered.
“Aye, sir.” The tech switched to manual.
“Someone give me a depth,” Farragut demanded.
“Nine meters to the surface.”
“We’re getting power spikes!” said Systems.
The swarm interference had reached the beam controls. The firing system fluctuated between shut off and overload.
“Shut down all but the rear-firing cannons,” Farragut ordered. “Maintain fire to the stern.”
“Maintaining stern fire, aye. Five meters to surface.”
Beam chargers whined high revs, then drooped, then screamed.
“Engines redlined! Engines shutting down!”
“Override!”
“Override. Aye, sir.”
“One meter to surface. And clear! We are clear to vacuum!”
“Shut down beam cannons! Shut down! Shut down! Take ’em off-line!”
Sounds wound down, the singed smell already clearing with a sudden influx of vacuum-cooled air.
Farragut had thought the vent would stay open only briefly, but the swarm did not collapse in on the burned tunnel, perhaps by virtue of its deadly heat, or perhaps the beams had cauterized the dead into a hard pipe.
The sense of relief was short-lived. The ship could breathe. Now what? You could hear the gorgons wheedling through the force field.
“How many did we kill?” Farragut demanded.
“Thousands.” But before anyone could cheer, the tech reported, “We are still badly outnumbered.”
Augustus specified, “From one thousand to one, we stand now a much improved five hundred to one—counting our dead, and I don’t believe those are up to the task. We’ll end up looking like the Sulla.”
“Stow that, Augustus. Can we still steer?”
“Yes, Captain,” Calli answered. “But we still can’t achieve FTL. By the time we get anywhere, we will be the Sulla.”
“Can we push another engine out?”
“If you can push a pig through a pitot tube.”
What Augustus’ answer lacked in respect, it made up for in clarity.
“I see.”
A replay of gun bay twenty on a nuclear scale.
“If we try that, the swarm will be dead, but so will we,” said Calli. “Has it come to suicide?”
“No, it has not. Nobody die till I say so. And not today. That is an order!”
Augustus saw the MP at the hatch roll his eyes, could read the skewed eyebrows: Right, sir. Whatever you say, sir. But also saw the men grow heartened in spite of themselves.
Farragut prowled his control room like a bear wanting a back-scratch and not a tree in sight. “I just want to scrape them off. And there’s nothing out here. What’s out here?”
“Nearest solar system is four light-years off,” said Tactical. “We don’t have that long. No comets of any size on the scan.”
The force field groaned. Five hundred to one.
“I don’t want to be eaten alive, John,” said Calli quietly, statement of fact.
“How about our engine?” Farragut directed the question to Tactical, not to Systems.
“We can’t get one out,” Tactical reported, confused. He thought they’d already made that clear. “We’ll die, too. And that’s against my orders today, sir.”
“I mean Engine Three.”
“It blew up,” said Tactical, feeling peculiar in stating the obvious.
But Augustus saw where this was going. “The antimatter.”
Farragut nodded. “The antimatter from Engine Three can’t have achieved one hundred percent annihilation. The containment chamber would have blown something clear.”
Calli snapped fingers toward Tactical. “Res scan. Antimatter. Look for it in the area where we jettisoned Engine Three.” Then turned to the captain. “You’re right. There must be something left. But it will be only particles and they’re flying every which way, fast.”
“Particles will do,” said Farragut. “Particles are all we want. We get too much antimatter, we’ll blow ourselves up.”
Tactical located the antimatter ejected from the explosion of Engine Three. A tenuous, expanding bubble of it.
And Merrimack, cocooned within its ravenous living asteroid, execut
ed a lumbering turn into the path of the nearest, largest cluster of it.
Reg Monroe gripped and regripped her sword hilt like a batter waiting for the pitch. Watched the dead layer visible through the tear in the hull over the galley, a brown mass smashed against the force field.
The dead began to move.
Carly breathed, “There they are.”
Mandibles appeared first, moving, sucking up the remains of their own kind. The force field shimmered and whined as the living monsters began to ooze through the distortion barrier.
Mesmerizing, grotesque, gorgons contorted themselves, flattened, elongated, slithered. And then the first pointed black claw pierced clear to atmosphere. A long serrated leg pushed free, stretched, then another, the thing laboring to pull its body out of the force field, as from thick mud. It expanded as it emerged, forming a shape, organizing a mouth, till it dangled by a single claw, spiderlike, seven meters above the deck, weightless in the limbo zone between the force field and ship’s gravity well. Legs waved, searching for purchase, trying to acquire up and down; the body reshaping, shell hardening.
Cole Darby hissed, “Can’t we shoot it?”
“Don’t you dare,” said Reg. “Hive mind’s got the computerized sights fubared. And even if you gots a dead eye, you see where’s he’s at? He’s outside the gravity. That’s worse than shooting into water. Refracts your shot. And you miss and you hit the force field? One of us be eating your shot. Got it?”
Cole Darby bowed his head. “Got it.”
The ship’s loud com clicked. The boffins must’ve got the calibration recoded. The XO announced shipwide to ready swords, prepare for boarders, and stand by for impact, Merrimack was about to ram antimatter.
Reg glared back at the loud com. “We are ramming what? We are ramming what? What did that woman just say?”
“Eyes up, Marine.”
“I gots my eyeballs on your boarders, Mister Hazard Sewell.” Reg regripped her sword. “I see them crawly things hanging up there like the eensty weensty big ass spider. You just tell me: we are ramming what?”
Merrimack lost speed in the turn that put her in the path of the antimatter.
“Just as long as we make contact,” said Farragut.
“We’ll make contact, sir,” the navigator assured him.
“How much antimatter are we facing, all told?”
The sensor technicians conferred over the readings. “Between a centigram and a decagram.”
“What kind of explosion can we expect from that?”
“You want to know if we can survive it, sir? I don’t know.”
The ship’s engines fed antimatter into the annihilation chamber in precise amounts, measured down to the atom. This mixture would not be precise.
“We’re in for somewhere between a twenty- to a two-hundred-megaton blast.”
The captain exchanged glances with his XO. Said, “Choose your poison. Fire or chewing.”
“I’ll take fire,” said Calli.
“Fire, it is.”
“Fifteen seconds to intercept with the antimatter,” Tactical reported. “Thirteen. Twelve.”
An abrupt change in the ship’s ambient sounds silenced his countdown. The moan of fluctuating energy fields now overlayed with a physical metallic scratch and scrape of hard claws on hull. “They’re through the outer perimeter.”
And a report from below: “They have gorgons in the galley. Requesting permission to use flamethrowers.”
“Negative,” said Farragut. “We are low on oxygen. I want to be able to breathe when this is over.”
Augustus lifted his brows, said nothing. Optimistic order, that.
“Five seconds to impact. Four.”
The specialists tensed. You had to resist the instinct to brace yourself against something. Grabbing hold of something only makes you look silly if you live through it, or sends you to your Maker cringing if you don’t.
A glance to the commanders showed Calli Carmel, tall, trim, picturesque, masked in cool dignity, standing in easy posture. Her hands, clasped behind her back were white fists.
John Farragut, alert, bright-eyed, ready to spring into his next action upon impact. Expecting to live.
The Roman colonel, Augustus, behind him, laconic, expecting to die. Going to do it with his eyes open.
“Two, One. Contact.”
And nothing. Nothing more than the continued sickening moan of insinuation, and the escalating scritching on the hull.
A curse from the helm.
John Farragut turned, looking like the boy in the Kentucky field when his M-100 didn’t go off. “What happened? Did we miss?”
“Force field, sir,” Tactical groaned. “Theirs.”
A coherent swarm—and this one was entirely too coherent—maintained a weak forward screen against particles in its path.
“We’re not going fast enough,” Tactical issued the postmortem. “The antimatter particles didn’t pierce the swarm’s force field.”
The clashing of sword-on-pincer carried from below. Calli reported quietly, “They’re in.”
Five hundred to one.
14
SOMEONE SPOKE AN EPITAPH: “That’s it.”
Farragut thundered, “No, that is not it! Where is that antimatter? Did it bounce?”
“No, sir. We have it.” Tactical struggled to explain quickly, “A swarm’s force field follows the contours of the swarm shape. So there are pits and pockets in it. We caught the antimatter in those pockets. It’s coming with us. It’s just not contacting any matter.”
“Good. There has to be some matter out there,” said Farragut. “We push the antimatter into the matter—” He gave a loud clap to explain the finish. “We don’t have to be going fast. We just have to touch it.”
“Particles, Captain,” Tactical reported somberly. “There are particles of matter out there. We are light-years from anything substantial. Annihilating two particles at a time isn’t going to produce force enough to pierce the swarm field and kill a significant number of gorgons—assuming we can even line up our approach to collide one matter particle into one antimatter particle. It’s going to be like throwing one grain of sand into a beach and targeting one specific grain of sand—while moving at near light speed.”
“Makes hitting a hundred-and-three-mile-per-hour Kyle Norton fastball look easy,” Farragut offered.
“You got it, Captain.”
“Need a bigger bat,” Calli muttered.
“I need a brick,” said John Farragut.
“The oxygen!” Couldn’t be sure who all in the control room shouted that.
Merrimack had dropped her oxygen reserves before battle. Bricks of matter as big as coal cars.
“Res scan,” Calli barked.
“Oxygen bricks located,” Tactical reported. Fed the coordinates to the navigator.
“Calli, can you steer us—and our antimatter—on a collision course with our oxygen bricks?”
“I’ll make it happen, John.” Looked to the helm who nodded, “Happening, sirs.”
“Just how low are we on oxygen?” Farragut thought to ask.
“We’ll pull it out of our water if we have to,” said the XO. “If I get eaten alive, I’m not going to feel much like breathing.”
“My thoughts.” Farragut nodded. “Somebody give me an estimated time of impact?”
Calli deferred to the helm, who answered, “Ten minutes, sir. Maybe nine if I can squeeze some acceleration without cooking us.”
“Calli, your boat. I’m going below.” Farragut exited the control room, sword drawn.
“He loves this part,” said Augustus, and followed him.
The gorgons had chewed a flanking route around Team Alpha where they were holding the galley breach. Kerry Blue sliced gorgon limbs off as fast as they emerged from the ductwork into the corridor outside the galley, while her team held off the main onslaught within. She grunted a song to herself:
Five hundred bundles of legs on the wall
; Five hundred bundles of legs.
You take one down
And hack it around
Four hundred ninety-nine bundles of legs on the
wall.
Her sword dragged heavily as if pulling from a gravity sink. Her arms became elastic bands that had lost their snap. She should never have started counting bundles of legs on the wall. Zero was so very far away.
She was hacking number four hundred and eighty-nine when a crashing and peripheral motion told her a gorgon had dropped from the overhead behind her. And she could not afford to turn.
She sliced mandibles out of her face, the muscles in her back tensing into a knot of primal terror, awaiting the pain, any moment expecting the jaws to pierce her spine. She whirled—
To a splat of gorgon innards hitting her face shield.
The offal slid off to reveal John Farragut cutting down the flanker.
“Ho! Shitska! The high-priced talent is on deck!” Kerry blurted.
The Roman, Augustus, darted past both of them in two long strides to cut down number four hundred eighty-eight coming out of the wall.
Captain Farragut nodded to Kerry. “As you were. Hold out, Flight Sergeant. We’re almost out of this.”
Sweat streamed through her scalp, soaked her sides. Her muscles quivered. Eyes burned. “Really, sir?”
“Yes. Really.”
It was so easy to believe him that she didn’t. But a nod from the Roman told her it was really so. She could trust Augustus to put a rosy outlook on nothing.
He didn’t tell her that getting out of this might involve sudden death. But they were almost out of this one way or the other.
Came a sound like an ocean roar in a hurricane, like a thunder roll on a mountain, as loud a noise as Merrimack ’s dampers allowed to sound.
The end-of-the-world roar shook the ship. Kerry crouched to the shuddering deck.
John Farragut winked and was on his way down the corridor, quick as Santa Claus.
“God provides for drunks, fools, and John Farragut. Or did I just repeat myself?” Augustus followed him.
Kerry scarcely heard him for the din. She pulled herself up from the quaking deck, holding onto the bulk. “This is good?” Her words were swallowed up by the roar. She shouted, “Is this good?”