by R. M. Meluch
But the officers were gone. And so were the gorgons, which had been clawing out of the duct. Number four hundred eighty-seven never came.
Kerry staggered to the galley hatch. She clutched at the frame and hung onto it with sudden vertigo upon the sight of the gorgons, pressing against the force field over the galley, suddenly tearing away in a blur of living, writhing sludge. They scraped across the energy barrier, shredding, with a noise between a scream and an avalanche. A pelting river of them raked across the energy field.
And abruptly cleared to a light as bright as Merrimack permitted to shine through its screen. It shut the eyes.
When the stabbing brightness gave way to cool darkness against her lids, Kerry opened her eyes to beautiful midnight. Green clouds of afterimage floated on her retinae, as she blinked at the peaceful stars showing through the rent in the hull.
She inhaled deeply, able to breathe again with the death shroud’s lifting. As if the swarm had been pressing on her chest.
The air stank.
The roaring subsided, and Reg’s screech pierced her eardrums, calling God by very familiar names.
Twitch and Carly were doing an elaborate gloat ritual, part flamenco, part chicken dance. “Now you see ’em, now they’re frogging spaced!” Cowboy used to be very good at that dance.
Hazard Sewell muttered to his God.
Kerry pointed up with her sword to the very peculiar sight of some remaining gorgons caught in the act of insinuation. The few, the squashed, hung within the force field like insects preserved in invisible amber.
And preserved they were. Still alive, the monsters pressed inward, relentlessly, toward food.
“So which one’s gonna drop first? I got a dime on that one.” Kerry wagged her sword. “Squiggy there.”
“I got the runt,” said Cole Darby. “The one with the fire in his eye.”
“That’s not an eye,” said Carly. “I think that’s an asshole. I got Gimpy there.” She picked out a gorgon, which was oozing through the field, leaving one of its legs behind.
“I think mine’s dead,” said Darb. “I want a new one.”
“Cost you.”
They fell to arguing about it, till the Navy gunners showed up to relieve them. “Orders from Lieutenant Colonel Steele. Team Alpha report to the hangar deck. Get some space under your butts, Marines.”
Flight Leader Hazard Sewell put up his sword, barking. “Come on, dogs, let’s go walk ourselves!”
Renewed, awake, alive, Kerry jumped at the chance to fly again. She gave her sword over to a navvy. “Here, spaceman.” She yelled back to him as she ran: “Just let me know which one of those buggers drops out of the overhead first! There’s money on it!”
Jose Maria Cordillera appeared at the captain’s table, impeccably groomed. His long hair was clean, glossy, neatly parted and held back with a silver clasp. Only the slightest bulge of an elbow wrap under one brushed sleeve hinted that he had been in a fight for his life or suffered any strain from it. That and when he seated himself slowly, as if he might break, his back aristocratically straight, “I am too old for this.”
John Farragut poured a stiff one for his friend. Alcohol flowed freely throughout the ship with the captain’s blessing in the wake of desperate battle, to reward the living and mourn the dead.
“Mo tells me you got a reading on a dissolving gorgon,” Farragut prompted.
“I did,” Jose Maria confirmed. “Our valiant young Marines endeavored to corral one into my scanning chamber, where it promptly expired for the recorders.” He did not sound happy. “I do not know what to make of it. I should like Augustus to review it.” His dark eyes found the empty place at the table.
“He’s dead asleep,” Farragut answered the absence.
Augustus, who had been chemically jacked awake for forty-eight hours, had fallen asleep, hard, directly after the second battle was won.
Jose Maria lamented, “I am not even sure our patterner can help. I just want a second opinion.”
“You have a theory?”
“I have a weak hypothesis based upon an unrecognizable agglomeration of molecules. Their form? It is like trying to reverse engineer a human being from a pool of sixty-five percent oxygen, eighteen percent carbon, ten percent hydrogen, three percent nitrogen, two percent calcium, one percent phosphorus, and two percent sixty-odd other elements. Even in my snapshot of its living form, what is missing is apparent cohesion. What holds this being together? The normal molecular bonds—they are not here. I cannot make sense of its digestive process. A Hive cell eats left- and right-handed proteins alike, though I could not isolate a single protein in its own makeup. It converts organics to energy, but can this process be more akin to combustion than digestion? I should like to hear Augustus laugh at me for that one.”
“They convert organics to what kind of energy?”
“I fear Augustus shall laugh. I fear more that he will not.”
Farragut pressed, “What kind of energy, Jose Maria?”
“Resonance.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“In an insane way, it makes perfect sense. What else could give them fluidity and cohesion in vacuum at temperatures at near absolute zero? It must be resonance.” Jose Maria took a long, fortifying drink, set down his glass. “And I shall venture further out on this most precarious limb and postulate that resonance is Hive.”
Farragut gave his head a quick shake as if he had water in his ears. “Resonance is a by-product of Hive existence?”
Jose Maria shook his head slowly, eyes on the amber dregs in his glass. “Resonance is Hive existence. The Hive and all its swarms and all its cells—what we call gorgons—are a titanic resonant being, and we the parasites within it.”
“Oh. So we kill the enemy, we cut our own line of communication.”
Cordillera had to smile. The captain had no awe for the vastness of such a being, no compunction at the prospect of being a parasite within it. Only keep his lines of communication intact, and that was all right with Captain Farragut. “If I am right, there is that risk.”
“How weak is this hypothesis of yours?” asked Farragut, not liking the sound of this.
“Feeble enough. Here.” Jose Maria Cordillera refilled their glasses to propose a toast. “To Augustus laughing.”
Augustus woke in a depleted torpedo storage bay, his mouth cotton and dust, his eyelids stuck together. Faint scent of wood spice in his nostrils. He spoke to the scented air. “I heard Spanish music.” And he rolled his head, cracked an eye to see who was with him.
Jose Maria Cordillera, sitting on one of the few remaining torpedoes, lifted a finger from the guitar to claim responsibility.
“How long have you been here?”
“A while.” Jose Maria produced a computer bubble. “Can you sort this?”
Augustus held the bubble up, squinted at it. Tossed it to the deck, where it rolled through the grating to the metal. “No.” He covered his eyes.
“Shall I leave?”
“No. Play. Order coffee.”
Augustus did not stir again until the hatch thumped open and shut and the smell of coffee filled the torpedo bay. He smirked at the bearer. “You’ve been busted down to orderly?”
Captain Farragut set down the coffee service. “I want in on this discussion.”
“No, you are running away from your recorder,” Augustus saw through him. “You don’t want to record any more of those letters.”
“There’s that,” Farragut admitted.
He had lost a lot of crew. Made for a lot of anguishing letters home to Mom, Dad, spouse, sweetheart, and—God forbid—child.
Jose Maria set aside the guitar to pour the coffee.
“Don’t give Farragut the guitar, whatever you do. He’ll play that country western caterwauling.”
“It’s bluegrass caterwauling,” Farragut corrected, stung.
Augustus rolled over the edge of his pod and, whether at the prospect of bluegrass music or from the poun
ding within his head, retched. He had little to bring up.
“Is that from wiring up into patterner mode or from . . .” considered what to call his encounter with the Hive mind. “The interference.”
“How would I know?” Augustus sat up, reached for the coffee. A tic moved his gaunt cheek.
“They scared you,” Farragut guessed.
Augustus replied tersely in scatological Latin.
“They got to him,” Farragut told Jose Maria.
“I . . . am so pissed I can’t see straight,” Augustus breathed in strong emotion he had not felt in this lifetime.
“Did you touch the Overmind?” Jose Maria asked.
“If you can call it that.”
“Does it—do they—think of itself as singular or plural?”
“The questions assumes a fact not in evidence.”
“Which fact is . . . ?”
“That it thinks. It doesn’t think. It’s all gut instinct. In fact, that’s it: it’s a gut. Your alimentary canal can function without a brain, and so does it. When I was connected to the Hive, I had no knowledge of the whole, any more than one lung would know the existence of another. I got only impulse, not thought.”
“So what ‘impulse’ did it send to you?”
Augustus scowled in thought, trying to recall, or to interpret, what he had received when the Hive had taken over his connections. Farragut and Cordillera waited.
At last. “This is filtered through my interpretation, mind you. I . . .” Augustus started over in robotic monotone: “Destroy anomalous entity.”
“Me?” John Farragut asked. “ ‘Anomalous entity.’ Was that me?”
Augustus gave a hard, thin smile. “You didn’t look like the rest of us.”
For a moment Augustus had been one with all those crawling ravenous things. Anger twitched again under his eye.
“How close did you come?” asked Farragut. “To shooting me?”
“Not.” Augustus turned his attention to his coffee, held the cup in both hands, let the steam thread up his nostrils. “I have my own fail-safe.”
Of course he would. To keep him from being turned against Palatine.
“I forgot,” said Farragut. “You’re programmed to self-terminate.”
Augustus snorted. “I am not programmed. I am not a cyborg. The organism governs here. I am in control.” A little too insistent there. “And anyway, who could shoot those blue eyes.”
The blue eyes blinked. “You could.”
“Well, yes. But not because some thing told me to. What’s your body count?”
Farragut demurred, not liking to reduce his losses to a number. They numbered eighty-one. “It’s what we call a Pyrrhic victory.”
“Pyrrhic is good. Statistically, you should not have won at all.”
“Told you, I don’t do statistics.”
“I know. Here is the statistical curve,” Augustus drew the curve in the air. “And way out here is John Farragut, one of those outliers we throw out of the calculation.”
“That’s why you’re on my boat.”
“That’s why I am where John Farragut is,” Augustus admitted. He took Jose Maria’s hand, turned it over to check his chronometer, an antique Jose Maria wore on his wrist. August 5th. “Is this right?”
“Some hangover you had, Augustus,” said Farragut. The patterner had slept the clock round twice.
“You throw a hell of a party, John Farragut. Where are we?”
“Twenty parcs out of the Myriad.”
Augustus lifted his brows. Merrimack was a lot closer to the Myriad than when Augustus had passed out. “The reason for this incautious haste?”
“A ‘singular’ haste, Colonel Augustus,” said Jose Maria. “Donner threatens to change history. We must stop him.”
“Or maybe I want to do it myself,” said Farragut. And to Don Cordillera’s appalled expression said, “It’s a thought.”
“A much-thought thought, Captain Farragut,” Jose Maria said sternly. “A dangerous thought. The old question comes to mind: If you could go back to 1938 and kill Hitler, would you? Let us say you do. Let us say in doing so you also escape the classic paradox of erasing your own birth, which would, of course, mean there would be no you to go back and kill Hitler. Let us leave that loop alone arguendo. Let us say you go back. You kill Hitler. You save the lives of six million Jews and you prevent World War II.
“Without their Axis allies, Japan fails to bomb Pearl Harbor. You save Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So then all those farm boys and coal miners who left the plow and the pick to enlist on Monday morning, December 8, 1941, never left your country. They never married their French and English and Italian brides. They never attended university on your GI Bill. All the encounters that led to your end-of-the-millennium Baby Boom never happen. The children and grandchildren of those uncreated people are never born.
“In short, you have just erased the lives of millions of people who would otherwise be alive today. How do you justify it? Because your motives were pure? Because the six million lived? Because Hiroshima and Nagasaki lived? How do you trade lives?”
“I am not going back to kill Hitler,” said Farragut. “I’m thinking about going back ten billion years and sixty-odd klarcs away to try to mess up the Hive’s history.”
Never one to let things just happen, if he believed history could be altered, as John Farragut did, then he was all for taking the offensive. “There’s a time portal. What’s to stop us from going back and trying to exterminate the Hive before it can be born?”
“We do not know when the Hive came into being. Ten billion years is a long time in which to hold onto a plan.”
“So we don’t wait. If we can identify the Hive home world, then go back and identify the plasma and dust that will coalesce into the Hive home star, blast the holy peaches out of it and interfere with its formation . . . ?” He trailed off, inquiringly.
“Assume it is possible,” said Cordillera. “Assume you try. What if you get it wrong? Multibody dynamics are complex. In erasing the Hive we could erase humanity.”
“Thousands of light-years across the galaxy?” said Farragut, dubious.
“Ten billion years is a long time in which stars may move. It may be that we and the Hive sprang from the same dust from the same supernova. We destroy them, we destroy us. Or perhaps the Hive ate some other invader who otherwise would make landfall in 1099,” Jose Maria pulled the date out of the air. “Some time before we could defend Earth. Or perhaps in your meddling you redirect the comet that brings the first amino acids to Earth. There are too many variables. Too much time. The moment of intersection is critical—that instant when events you change intersect the history of Earth, no matter how minutely. Everything after that moment is in peril.”
“And you really think events sixty klarcs and ten billion years away can affect Earth? I mean realistically, not wild long shot.”
“They have done,” said Jose Maria. “They do. The Hive is upon us now. The Hive crossed humanity’s path eight years ago. So let us imagine you succeed in your quest. You erase the Hive from Earth history—take away that intersection—then anyone born after it, will not be.”
“Will not be what?”
“Born. Events are interdependent. History is a tower of cards. Remove one card, and this particular structure ceases to exist. The smallest change will have vast consequences. How much does it take to alter the path of one sperm? A missed transport? A second beer? Roll left instead of right? A mote of dust? A sneeze? You take away humanity’s intersection with the Hive eight years ago, then everything from the wreck of the Sulla forward is vulnerable to change, beginning with the children. After that? Who knows. Perhaps we are subjects of the Roman Empire. The possibilities are myriad, so to say.”
Farragut looked quite deflated.
“I do hope I have discouraged you,” said Jose Maria.
Farragut nodded, conceding, reluctantly, the point. He spoke a lingering regret, “I took an oath to defend the Uni
ted States.”
“And I took an oath to do no harm. The past is Pandora’s box. It behooves us to keep what is in there in.”
“Then Donner is in a very dangerous position.”
“Very. We have taught him that faster-than-light travel is possible. We have told him his home world, Origin, is doomed to die. Donner has the ability to transport that knowledge back to a time when such things cannot exist. If he preserves Origin from its disaster, then those beings of ten billion years ago will expand across the stars, changing worlds—”
“Killing Hitler.”
“So to say.”
“Then we have to stop Donner from telling Origin about us. Augustus?” Farragut turned to his Intelligence Officer for his take on it.
While John Farragut and Jose Maria were talking, Augustus had lain back down and closed his eyes. He looked dead. His gray lips moved: “Let him go.”
“Let him go?” Not the answer Farragut expected. “Donner could erase us all.”
One eye opened a crack. Augustus spoke condescendingly, “We are here, are we not? Which means he didn’t, now doesn’t it? This is basic. This is entropy. The arrow of time flies one way. You know this stuff. You sound like a pair of self-important college students having a weighty dorm chat—which doesn’t surprise me coming out of you, but you, Don Cordillera, I mistook for a grown-up. The ability to alter the past remains what it has always been, a silly romantic notion and beneath you.”
Jose Maria spoke earnestly, hand over heart, “I am Spanish.”
“Makes you a silly romantic?”
“Romance is never silly.” Jose Maria picked up the guitar again.
“You are disappointing.” And to Farragut, “You are at least predictable. Before you get too power drunk on this most urgent and desperate mission of yours to save human history and planet Earth, do remember that compliance with physical law is not optional. It’s self-enforced. Your philosophizing is nothing but warmed-over sophomoric hash. That you are sitting here in my torpedo bay, talking, means you were created and no one went back and changed what is. God won’t allow it. Creation won’t stand for it.”