by R. M. Meluch
Kerry Blue’s jeans were form fitting, threadbare across the ass. They showed off Kerry Blue very nicely.
“Can I have them?” Gunner said.
Cain scowled. “What you gonna do with them? Sleep with them?”
As if it were obvious, Gunner said, “Well, yeah.”
Cain threw the jeans at Gunner’s face.
Gunner sounded blissful from under the denim. “Thank you.” He pulled the jeans off his face. “Hey, Kerry. Any time you want to borrow these you know where to find them.”
“I remember where you live,” Kerry told him.
“Do ya?” said Gunner, a lament. Been a long time since Kerry Blue been around.
Space Battleship MERRIMACK SBB 63
Colonel TR Steele stood before his Marines assembled in the cargo hold. It was the only place on board where two companies of Marines could fit.
The Old Man stood six foot even. Wore his white-blond hair buzzed short. His skin was white when he wasn’t crawfish red from bellowing like a drill sergeant. Looked younger than forty years, but that was because he’d needed a few rounds of repair work after the war.
The medics as well as the intelligence officers had taken a hard look at Steele after his time in Roman custody. Steele had some unscheduled body work done on Palatine. That made everyone, especially TR Steele, hugely nervous. The IOs had run him through a nanosieve before allowing him to return to duty.
Colonel TR Steele commanded a loyalty of the kind only ever seen for John Farragut. But where Farragut was dramatic, TR Steele was a brick.
Like John Farragut—like any man—Steele could get real protective around a woman.
And now Steele was standing in front of his Marines, barking orders and feeling like he had his pants around his ankles because he knew that just about five-quarters of these guys knew that he was practicing docking maneuvers with Flight Sergeant Kerry Blue.
Do not look at Kerry Blue.
There was Flight Leader Cain Salvador. Alpha One. His best man. Mixed race. Sleek and powerful as a seal. Cain was a solid Marine.
Until this morning, Cain Salvador had been a Flight Sergeant, flying as Alpha Three. That was until Espinoza went and got herself pregnant.
Replacing Cain as Alpha Three was a she-guy, came over from the Rio Grande. Hard core. Cute face, elfin cheekbones, broad top shelf. The Marine was out here to fight, not to dance. The knuckles of both hands were tattooed DNFW—Do Not Foxtrot With. And the red X on her brow in the third eye position announced that she was equipped with a dragon—an appliance more vividly called a sausage peeler. Her name was Geneva Rhine. Nothing to do but call her Rhino.
Alpha Four. Carly Delgado. Whip thin and cuddly as razor wire. If you want your squad to take prisoners, you don’t send Carly in. Not that Carly was vicious—okay Carly was vicious—but it took a lot more mass and muscle to take an enemy captive than it did to make him dead. Carly couldn’t take captives. Carly could do dead. At her size it was self-preservation.
Carly was attached at the hip to Twitch Fuentes, Alpha Five. Quiet, calm. Steady as an anchor. Just tell Twitch what to do; you know it’ll get done. Twitch understood spoken Americanese. He just didn’t speak it. Used to. Said something stupid once and hadn’t tried again since. No one remembered what it was except Twitch. Steele did not want to know that Twitch couldn’t read.
Into the Alpha Seven spot came another all-American mongrel by the name of Asante Addai. Part Colombian, part Mayan, part some kind of slave-descended Black, part sub-Saharan Arab. One hundred percent U.S. Fleet Marine. Asante had spent a year in college between tours, decided it wasn’t for him. Moved like a boxer, light on his feet. Asante kept his springy black hair shorn close to his head. He wore a lot of scars, which he never got repaired. Medical gel would have healed those over. But, as Asante said, “I don’t do the pink crap.”
Steele stood through roll call of the Wing and the Battery. Then he informed them of their destination—Zoe. There had been an attack, but the initial crisis had passed. There had been no further attacks. But it was not over.
How Admiral Farragut knew that, Steele didn’t ask.
We’re running out to the end of the galaxy to rescue the admiral’s pet hamster, and I’m not questioning orders.
Steele would do the same for Kerry Blue.
It would take Merrimack no less than a month to get to Zoe. The admiral could have chosen to wait for more information or more hostile activity, or he could get his big guns in motion now.
John Farragut had a sense for these things. The man could smell smoke before there was a fire.
Steele had no doubt that by time his Marines got to Zoe, hell would be loose.
Director Izrael Benet stalked out of his tent.
The rest of the LEN expedition members were gathered around the fire pit at the center of camp.
Some of the xenos turned, hearing the director coming. He was stomping.
Izzy Benet shouted, “Who summoned the U.S. military!”
There was much looking about, eyes meeting blank eyes, quizzical murmurs.
“What?”
“What military?”
“Are they here?”
“Apparently,” Benet started, making a show of struggling to keep his temper and losing. “The United States is sending a battleship here!”
“Why!” several xenos asked at once.
“Someone—” Benet’s gaze fell upon Glenn—“told them we were under extraplanetary attack.”
Dr. Suri Chin said, “Who would tell them a thing like that?” Dr. Chin had not been on board the Spring Beauty.
Most eyes found their way to Glenn. She was traveling under the name Glenn Hull, but, as she was married to Patrick Hamilton, the xenos could put the pieces together.
Director Benet looked to Patrick in suspicion and betrayal. “She’s a thug, isn’t she?”
The implicit slight in reducing his wife to a pronoun to her face did not escape the linguist. Patrick bristled. “Glenn is a decorated line officer and veteran of the war.”
“The war,” Director Benet said witheringly. “Funny how anyone who was in the war is proud of it.” Disbelief and disgust thinned his full lips.
“Funny that,” said Glenn. Rome had declared the war, and claimed the United States of America as a Roman province. “I just didn’t want to learn Latin.”
“Everything is an attack to your type,” said Benet.
Glenn nodded. Possibly. “Especially an attack.”
“The war is over. Your kind just doesn’t get it.”
No one who called you your kind ever meant you well.
Glenn kept her voice even. Let the facts throw the punches. “Then explain what happened to the Spring Beauty.”
Director Benet said, “You wrested the controls of a LEN spacecraft away from the authorized pilot and crashed it into the ground causing widespread injury and total destruction of the craft.”
Glenn asked, “What do you make of the piece of manufactured metal lodged in the Beauty’s hull?”
“I don’t pretend to have any idea what that shard is. It could be U.S. make for all I know. You’re either covering up your blundering into an asteroid field, or you’re staging a pretext for your country to send guns to the Outback. Your Admiral Nelson—I beg your pardon—Farragut is establishing a bridgehead to the Perseus Arm. The U.S. has no bases in Perseus space. That’s it, isn’t it? You’re coming to take over Zoe! By God, this is monumental. It’s an outrage.”
“Director Benet, you are wrong,” Glenn said evenly. “The Spring Beauty came under attack by multiple hostiles.”
She glanced to Manny for support, but the pilot still wasn’t volunteering his version of the story.
Benet challenged, “So where were these space invaders when all the previous expedition ships were arriving at Zoe? Isn’t it odd that your combatants mysteriously showed up only to attack you?”
Glenn had no answer to that.
Benet went on, “I suppose you
are now going to tell me they’re Roman.”
“They’re not Roman,” Glenn said.
“Thank you. Finally, a rational statement. Now.” Benet made a show of looking up at the sky. “Explain why there is no rain of aliens following up on their first strike. Funny that your attackers didn’t press their advantage. Isn’t that what your kind does? You must be disappointed.”
Disappointment was not what she was feeling.
“There are spacecraft that can’t handle an atmosphere,” said Glenn.
Director Benet said, “When your battleship arrives, you will get on it and depart.”
Glenn was afraid of what she would say, so she kept silent. She’d never liked the League of Earth Nations.
They wish we’d go knuckle-walk back to our caves, and we veterans, well, we just want to shoot them. That left Patrick in the middle, the worst place to be.
Patrick tried to explain, “You’ve got to understand, Izzy is an administrator. He’s a fund-raiser. He’s accustomed to overstating his case for dramatic effect. He goes hyperbolic. Don’t take it personally.”
“Patrick,” said Glenn, her palm up. “Please stop talking.”
Izrael Benet was right about one thing. When her battleship arrived, she would get on it.
Space Control detained the Terra Rican racing yacht Mercedes in port on the planet Aotearoa in the Perseid arm of the galaxy.
Aotearoa was a New Zealand colony, but the officer who boarded the Terra Rican yacht was Roman.
The officer extracted data from Mercedes’ control console and demanded of Jose Maria de Cordillera, “Purpose of your travel?”
Nobel Laureate Jose Maria Rafael Meridia de Cordillera was a Renaissance man. A true aristocrat, he owned an enormous tract of land on the former Spanish colonial world of Terra Rica. At one time Jose Maria had served as Terra Rica’s ambassador to the United States of America.
He was a slender, gracious presence on the elegant spaceship.
“Por favor,” Jose Maria said. “Why am I under scrutiny of Rome while I am on a New Zealand colonial world in ANZAC space? I am a neutral.”
“Don Cordillera, if you are a neutral, then I am the tooth fairy,” the officer said. “No. Back up. I actually have been the tooth fairy.”
“I also,” Jose Maria said.
“If you are a neutral, then I am the Little Mermaid.”
Roman Imperial Intelligence suspected that Jose Maria de Cordillera had planted the nanites that had incapacitated mad emperor Romulus.
Imperial Intelligence was right.
“Are you of the Romulii?” Jose Maria asked.
The Roman officer recoiled, aghast, as if the mere suggestion of being a Romulus supporter were a lethal contagion. “No! You brought down a Roman emperor in wartime. An action, de facto, NOT neutral.”
“I consider myself a citizen of the cosmos,” said Jose Maria. “And there is no present war. May I not travel freely?”
“Purpose of your travel?” The officer demanded again.
“To establish trade relations between Terra Rica and Aotearoa.”
The officer’s shoulders slumped a bit in impatient annoyance. “We know your business here. But you are leaving here. Early. Abruptly. Why?”
“I answer a call from a friend.”
The officer would know from the ship’s communication log that the friend was Admiral John A. Farragut.
“Where are you going?”
“I am certain that Mercedes has already told you my destination,” said Jose Maria.
A course to the planet Zoe, deep in the Outback, was loaded into the racing yacht’s nav sys.
“I’m asking you, Don Cordillera.”
“My son, sometimes redundance is not good. Sometimes it is just redundant. May we go?”
A string of small moons stretched across Phoenix’s night sky in their phases like broken pearls. Nox and his squad of pariahs slept out in the open in the badlands. Dry winds lifted fine dust and scattered it over their bodies.
The former Antonians had been disenfranchised retroactively. Damnatio memoriae. Damnation of memory. They never existed. They were not on the deme rolls. They had no gens. No family. They could not hold land. They had no rights, no country.
They were simply not.
Disconnected as the wind.
They slept outside, hungry.
All their intangible assets had been seized.
Faunus owned a small hover for getting around, but it couldn’t carry all seven of them, so they hadn’t traveled far from base.
They had no credit.
Nox had coin.
They had talked about going to one of the spaceports on Phoenix, one of the foreign ones, where they might buy things with coin and not get spat on.
For now they were hoarding their money and using their survival training to scavenge in the desert. Finding work without going into slavery was going to be tough.
Nox touched his blood-crusted earlobe where they’d ripped out his ID capsule. He felt its loss like a missing limb.
He wanted to go back. He wanted to be whole. He wanted to be Roman.
Never look backward or you’ll fall down the stairs.
He turned his head. Leo lay next to him on the hard ground. Leo was awake too. His eyes were open, gazing up at the moons. He asked wistfully, “Hey, Nox, what’s it like having a mother and a father?”
“Nothing you can’t live nicely without,” Nox said. “What they don’t tell you is you’re just a pedestal for your sire’s galactic ego. I’m not going back if that’s what you’re thinking.”
Leo stayed wistful. “Anything is better than this hole.”
“No,” said Nox. “This is my hole. I dug this coiens hole.”
Galeo turned out to be awake too. He rose up on one elbow to look across Leo to Nox. “Going back is worse than the ninth circle of hell?”
“That’s another thing they don’t tell you,” said Nox. “Hell has a subbasement.”
“You’re an American, aren’t you, Nox?” Nicanor said.
“No.”
Yes, he was, and they knew it.
“You could go home,” said Nicanor.
“Fuck you.”
Why weren’t any of these guys sleeping?
Pallas rolled up to sit, elbows resting on his bent knees. “Why don’t you go, Nox?”
“Yeah,” said Leo. “You were born in America.”
Nox sat up. “Are you going to keep throwing that in my face?”
“No, that’s not what we mean,” said Pallas. “We mean you have somewhere to go. Why don’t you?”
“I can’t.”
“They’d execute him,” said Orissus. “He’s a traitor.”
Nox said, “I am not a traitor. Getting born in the States wasn’t my choice. I chose to pledge to Rome.”
“Well, the Americans will think you’re a traitor,” Orissus said. “They would execute you if you went back.”
“No, actually they wouldn’t,” said Nox. “I’m just not going.”
“Nox has a mother and a father,” Leo told Orissus.
“Rome is my mother and my father,” said Nox.
“Not anymore,” Orissus said. “So says Rome.”
“I am Roman,” Nox said. “So say I. I am what I make me.”
“And we made ourselves buzzard cud,” said Faunus.
“Yes, Best Beloved,” Nox said, deflating. “We did.”
“What do we do now?” said Galeo. “Fall on swords?”
They didn’t have swords. Rome took them.
“Too late. That won’t redeem us in anyone’s eyes,” said Pallas. That door had already shut. “It would be another act of cowardice now. No use hurrying out that exit.”
Nox felt the universe crapping on his head. It was time to stop whining, excusing, blaming. Pick up your cards and play your coiens hand.
“I’m with Pallas,” said Nox. “Dying is not my first, second, third, fourth, or fifth choice.”
“So
where does going back to your parents rank?” Leo asked.
“It’s not even on the list.”
“But this is hell,” said Leo.
“Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven,” said Nox.
They stopped talking. Nox’s blustering words sounded great, but they were hollow. Meant exactly nothing. The words were fine-smelling bullshit.
Yet they echoed over and over in Nox’s mind, spinning in a loop.
Reign in hell.
Reign in hell.
8
AFTER NIGHTFALL THE FIFTY-SIX MEMBERS of the LEN expedition sat, gathered around the fire pit at the center of camp, talking, acting as if all were clear. As if the things that nearly killed the new arrivals weren’t still upstairs.
Glenn kept glancing toward the sky, flinching whenever she saw a meteor.
Sandy Minyas toasted marshmallows on a ten-foot pole.
The flames leaped bright and fierce in the oxygen-rich air.
“Hang onto your eyebrows around the campfire,” someone warned the newcomers.
What eyebrows?
When Glenn stowed her gear in their tent, she’d discovered that her eyebrows had jumped ship sometime during the Beauty’s descent. Their absence gave her a young, astonished look.
Her red-brown hair had been singed ragged as a hornet’s nest. She sheared it off. Now she looked like a young astonished Marine recruit.
Patrick talked shop with his colleagues around the fire and ate marshmallows.
Glenn walked to the edge of camp.
A wide perimeter ring of sanitized dirt isolated the camp from the surrounding native growth.
No one was afraid of alien infection. Human infection required the Zoen pathogens to have DNA. Even without a xenomicrobiologist in camp, the explorers knew there was no such thing as alien DNA.
The dirt perimeter was there to protect Zoe from invasive terrestrial species.
DNA was a robust structure. Theoretically, terrestrial species could compete with native species for basic resources. Local life was carbon-based, so there could be competition for the same proteins, sugars, ni-trogenated soil, and habitat.
Terrestrial life could disturb the natural balance. So the expedition maintained a buffer zone and kept its hydroponic vegetable gardens sealed in greenhouses inside the camp.