by R. M. Meluch
Carly and Reg told her.
“Shit.” No wonder Reg was mad. Nobody risked that much for a girl they called the welcome mat. Farragut must have done it for Colonel Steele.
But then, who had Colonel Steele put it all on the line for?
“I feel like Lois Lane,” Kerry said shakily.
And funny, now that she thought of it, the man who had come flying to her rescue, flouting orders, had not been Cowboy.
Man of Steel, Cowboy had called him. Colonel Steele as her Superman. Right.
“You are lobster red, soldier girl. You okay?”
“Yeah.” Let go of thoughts so insanely unbelievable they pushed themselves away. “Yeah.” Kerry shoved nonexistent bangs from her brow. “I need a target. Where’s the frogging Romans?”
Orders came over the loud com for all hands to stand down from battle stations. Target was withdrawing from the system.
Kerry slapped her gun, rising. “Aw nuts!” She was in the mood to shoot something. “Frogging Romans.”
“Hey, if you want frogging, I’m here for you, Kerry.”
Kerry shrugged off the heavy ape arm that draped across her shoulders. “Shut up, Dak.”
Merrimack remained on low alert, monitoring both of the Roman Legions’ retreat, in case it turn out to be a ruse.
But the battleground had changed. There was nothing here anymore that Palatine wanted, and a lot that it didn’t. Farragut did not expect the Romans to challenge him for the Myriad again. This earth was pretty well scorched.
“Captain!” the com tech reported, startled. “There’s a sleeper message in your cache.”
“From who?”
“It’s a res message—untraceable. And it’s not signed. But it’s in Latin.”
All hands in the control room paused at their stations and fell silent.
Farragut said at last, “Well, let’s have it.”
“It’s in Latin,” the tech repeated, unable to comply and rather proud of it. He printed off the message and surrendered it to the captain.
“So what’s this say—whose Latin is better than mine.” Farragut passed the printout to Calli.
Calli translated aloud, “ ‘Next time, when I have a clear shot at something other than your back, prepare to yield to Rome as my prize of honor, or else die for the glory of the Roman Empire.’ ” She handed the printout back. “ Standard Imperial bullshit.”
“That’s from the Striker!” someone whispered.
And Farragut shouted as if he could make himself heard through the hull across the lengthening light-years that lay between his ship and the Striker. “I’ll be waiting for you, asshole!” He turned sheepishly to Calli, with a shrug of his big shoulders. “Standard U.S. bullshit. He let us go.”
The crew on the command deck bridled at that suggestion, except for Calli, who said, “No, sir. He let you go. That message is talking to a singular you. There’s a difference in Latin.”
“Sirs?” the young sensor tech broke in, mystified. “Wasn’t that a miss?”
“He didn’t miss,” said Farragut. “He was perfect.”
And Calli countered the tech’s question with another question, “What are the odds of a miss that close accidentally being at the precise angle, depth, and strength to disturb the event horizon at the exact location which would free our SPT boat?”
“It was a million-to-one shot—” Mr. Emerson started, broke off as he heard what he was saying. Asked incredulously, “He can do that on purpose?”
Calli turned back to the captain. “That was a patterner, John.”
“A what?”
“An augmented man. I’ve never actually seen one, and Rome swears they don’t exist. A patterner is a kind of Frankenstein monster/secret weapon/cyborg kind of man. Admitting the existence of patterners would be admitting that Rome is playing with brain experiments on live subjects.”
“Violates the Cygnus Convention,” said Farragut. “Not to mention any Earthly sense of decency.”
Calli gave a sideways nod, allowing the truth of what he said. “Palatine denies it here to hell, but patterners have to exist because that had to be one. It was an inhuman shot. It was too perfect to be accident and too complicated and unique a task to ask of a targeting computer without preprogramming for these bizarre conditions.”
Farragut gazed out the port as if he could see which way the Striker had gone. “I wonder how he’s going to explain this back at Palatine. Letting a battleship go. Not just letting us go—he sprang the Merri-Mother-of-God- Mack from a black hole. I hope they don’t crucify him.”
“Don’t worry about him,” said Calli. “The record shows he fired on Merrimack, and Merrimack returned fire. Even if Imperial Command sees through that charade, they’ll reprimand him for failure to deliver a victory and that will be the end of it. The Empire understands standard bullshit. It’s a Roman invention.”
Merrimack returned to the F8 system within the Myriad. The doomed planet Arra hung in a tranquil sea of stars, its clouds reflecting brilliant white into space. To look at the starry, starry sky you would have no idea what had just happened. How to tell the Arrans their world would be dead in less than ten years? The distorted orbit would kill most of the planet’s life before the neutrino barrage arrived to blast whatever survived the wintry hell.
The stars looked the same in the Arran sky. Captain Farragut did not know how to make the Arrans understand that quite of few of those stars were gone.
He supposed the Arrans would get an inkling once messages from Rea and Centro stopped coming, and when their interplanetary shuttles discovered the kzachin entirely missing. But they might just as easily conclude Merrimack was responsible for that breakdown.
“If only we could communicate better,” Farragut mourned. “If we had had time to decode their language. Maybe we could have made the Arran leader understand he must not go through the Rim gate. I could have stopped him. Damn the language barrier.”
And because of it, 900,000 intelligent beings and an entire ecosphere was gone. Just like that. Thousands of unique life-forms native to the planet Centro, extinct.
Nine hundred thousand dead. A number too big to absorb. Beings he had never met. Without faces, without names, they became a blank, hideous statistic, with numbing power. The mind’s defensive inability to take in numbers that large when spoken in the same breath as “dead” kept him from wrapping his mind around it. Captain Farragut could scarcely get his arms round his own eighty-one dead.
“I could have done something. If I could have talked to the Arrans, this would all be different.”
No need to communicate the danger to the Romans. A long-range res scan confirmed all Roman vessels exiting the Myriad, in a tearing hurry to cede the poisoned ground to Earth. In abandoning the field, Palatine had just saddled Merrimack with thirty million refugees. The planet Arra would need evacuating. And perhaps in more dire need, three million Reans—their colony remote, cut off from their government, from supplies, from communication—the Reans faced shortages, famine, anarchy.
Evacuation was further hampered in that the xenos were having trouble identifying whom to contact on Arra and Rea to organize such an operation.
“I thought you said the whole Myriad had one autocrat,” Farragut confronted Dr. Patrick Hamilton, who had managed what communication they had with the inhabitants of the Myriad.
Dr. Hamilton explained with much mumbling and throat-clearing, “Well, Captain, they may have had. But actually, it seems the Arrans have broken down into a sort of, well, civil war.”
“Oh, for—!” Farragut rounded on the commander of his half brigade of Marines. “Finish it for them, TR!”
Captain Farragut stalked down the corridor, slapped a bulkhead. Felt its reliable solidity under his palm. Thumped it again, fondly.
“I should have been able to do something.”
He’d thought he was alone, thought he’d been talking to himself, but received an unwelcome answer behind him.
“
I shouldn’t worry about it,” the little bird woman, Lu Oh, sauntered softly up the corridor. “So beings who should have been dead ten billion years ago manage to implode their future colonies. If we fail to save them from self-destruction, then whose fault is that? And since they destroyed the wormholes, we can be thankful that they kept that secret from falling into Roman hands.”
Farragut gave a weak, unhappy smile. “Well, Colonel Oh, that’s one way to look at it.”
All those life-forms, and a wealth of knowledge, lost, perhaps eradicated entirely. Gone as if they’d never been. The link to an ancient world—perhaps the first sentient world in the universe, gone. Farragut could not even imagine what had been lost here.
And Lu, brave and strong when she was in a soft place, was quite happy with the loss as long as Rome lost it, too.
Lu had strolled to a viewport, open to the spangled heavens. “Craps,” she said. “Thought we found a secret mode of FTL travel and got instead just another globular cluster with a black hole in the middle of it.”
“Another?” Farragut did a double take. “There are others?”
“Yes. Globular cluster M 15 has a black hole at its heart. NGC 6624 has one. NGC 6441 has one—”
Farragut broke off her catalog of imploding globular clusters: “How many?”
“Twelve,” said Lu. “The Myriad makes twelve.”
“Really?” He joined her at the viewport to gaze at the stars. “What caused the other eleven?”
Kerry Blue’s patrol displaced up from planetside after a double watch of peacekeeping duty. Double shifts beat the holy hell out of being poked, prodded, and studied by xenos for aftereffects from being inside a black hole. Would have been triple shifts, but Colonel Steele wasn’t letting his people sleep on Arra for fear of hostage-taking, so for eight hours Kerry got to return to a civilized, climate-controlled place, where people understood her when she told them to stick it. She went in search of Cowboy.
She found him with a cigar clenched between his teeth, passing out boxes of more. With the lifting of res silence there had been a mail call. Seems Cowboy had received some news.
Someone shoved one of the brown, smelly rolls of weed at Kerry Blue. “It’s a boy.”
“Him?” she pointed the cigar at Cowboy. “By who?”
Kerry and Cowboy hadn’t been together but a few months, and Kerry didn’t waste jealousy on yesterday’s news. Had to be some past-tense bimbo on the squadron’s last R&R on Earth. Kerry bit off the end of the cigar, spat. “So who is the little mother?”
“His wife.”
The voice went on talking at her, vital statistics, pounds, inches, name—he’d named him Cowboy—as Kerry turned to ash.
Colonel Steele, still wearing the mud and soot from the field, gave his report to Captain Farragut. The populace had been burning the capital, with no idea they were scrapping over carrion. And Steele was ready to leave them to it.
“I’m not,” said Farragut.
Steele admitted soberly, “Neither am I.” He hated police actions. Preferred killing the enemy to trying to quell unruly civilians. Was no good at it. He hated giving the captain a bad report. Hated failing him—and right after disobeying his direct order.
Farragut hadn’t spoken again of a captain’s mast. Steele felt it hanging in the room, unspoken, unseen, but definitely there, like his own reek.
“Permission to ask a question, Captain.”
“TR, you don’t have to ask permission to ask me anything.”
Yes, he did. TR Steele used to be a boot. He would never lose his respect for authority. Would never, no matter how many times invited, ever call the captain John.
Steele spoke stiffly. “I heard what you and the Mack went through to get us out of the black hole. I’m not saying I’m not grateful to be alive, Captain—I am—but, was I worth it?”
“Didn’t do it for you, TR.”
“I’m glad to hear it.” Steele did not want that burden of debt on him. The ship, all its officers, his two companies of Marines—they had all been on the line. He never wanted his Marines to die on his account. The reverse was acceptable, but those boys and girls weren’t here to defend TR Steele.
“It was for Rome,” said Farragut.
“Rome?” Steele spat that word out of his mouth like it was shit.
“They think we’re weak. If we can’t stare down the Romans and not blink when the stakes are big, we’ll never get ’em to the bargaining table. I had to show Palatine this is how we do it in the U.S.A.—” He broke off, squinted up at the vent. “Who is howling?”
Kerry Blue shredded Cowboy’s pod, the sheets, the pillow, his clothes, his pictures, screaming with every tear.
Cowboy arrived on the scene at a swagger, shirt open to the dimple of his navel in his flat, hard abdomen.
His cigar dropped from between his teeth. “Ho! Blue!”
Kerry spun on him. “You lying, cheating, rat bastard! ”
She might have shredded him, too, but suddenly she was suspended off her feet, flailing at air.
She stopped struggling when she realized who had her. The braid on the cuff, the breadth of the arms, the hardness of the torso at her back froze her.
“Cheese and rice, Kerry Blue! Are you insane?” Cowboy stalked toward her.
“Back off, soldier!” Steele’s thunder battered Kerry’s eardrum, and he dropped her, hard.
Steele’s blue-eyed glare swept over the wreckage and returned to Kerry Blue. “Explain yourself, Flight Sergeant.”
“Yeah, explain yourself, dick breath!”
“Shut up, Carver!” Steele roared. And again: “Flight Sergeant Blue.”
Kerry shrieked, tears in her eyes, her nose thick. She’d been crying for a while. “He’s married!”
And today is Tuesday. What was her point? She didn’t know Cowboy was married? She cared? “And that means something to you?” Steele argued, baffled.
“What do you think I am?” she keened.
“Easy,” Steele shot back.
“No shit, sir,” Kerry admitted. Declared, “I am not an adulteress.”
Tough to keep from laughing. The little tramp had morals. Steele’s spirits lifted, stupidly.
“You’re just an old-fashioned girl, aren’t you, Blue?”
He saw hurt surprise in her eyes. That little lower lip quivered anger. Steele had to get her the hell off this deck before he saluted her.
With the blackest of scowls Colonel Steele posted Kerry Blue down to the underbelly of the ship to stand guard over serious nothing. He dispersed the gaggle of Marines come to gawk at the remains of Cowboy’s spacely belongings.
And to Cowboy, “This pod is a sty, Marine. Clean up your mess.” Then blotted Cowboy’s record for protesting the order. Felt good doing that. TR Steele could not remember ever despising anyone more in his life, and might have considered murdering Cowboy Carver, if Steele were not so sure the jack stud was going to die young. Not that Steele believed in clairvoyance. He simply knew it was going to happen.
Some things were just inevitable.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
PART ONE - Uncertainty Principle
Chapter 1 - Anno Domini 2443
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
PART TWO - Functions of Chaos
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
PART THREE - A Rational Universe
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
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