by R. M. Meluch
Merrimack continued onward with Valerius in front of her, the Strigidae and Accipitridae surrounding her on all sides, high and low. When their flotilla tripped the Roman perimeter net on slow approach to Daedalus Station, Calli Carmel was on the command deck of the Valerius to receive the hail. A bank of floods illuminated the Roman craft and the dark Merrimack erased of all insignia.
“What ship?” came the demand.
“What ship?” Calli shot the demand right back in crisp aristocratic Latin. “Get that infernal thing off me, skakker. We are not here. You see nothing.”
A very long pause followed, stretched long. Marines, huddled at their guns in Merrimack’s battery, got tired holding their breath. One whispered, though there was no point in whispering, “This isn’t gonna work. No way this can work. They’re checking. They’re calling reinforcements.”
“No way this would ever ever fly on Earth,” said another, ready to shoot his way out of this.
But they were not dealing with Earth. After fifteen minutes the floodlights went off. The Roman guard ships wore away.
Calli Carmel did not join in the expressions of shaky relief breathed by her attendants. That had been the easy part.
The Merrimack parked in dead space with the Valerius, both Strigs, and four of the Accipiters. Calli, her attendants, and a small Latin-speaking tech crew approached Daedalus Station alone in the fifth Accipiter.
Daedalus Station stood dark as surrounding space. The Accipiter’s scanners picked out the familiar silhouette docked there. Like a titanic spearhead. There she is.
The Monitor.
Calli’s pilot guided the Accipiter to a station dock. Her crew secured the lock, ventilated the tube, and opened the ship’s hatch.
Calli and her attendants—an appropriately odd number of them, five—marched smartly up the tube, in perfect step for the surveillance monitors. Calli inserted her old Imperial Military Institute ID into the reader at the side of the locked hatch.
And klaxons blared throughout Daedalus Station.
7
COMMANDER CARMEL’S GUARDS turned pale, cold, but resisted breaking into a panicked run as the alarms shrieked. They stayed at disciplined attention, as picturesque as a president’s pallbearers.
Calli appeared nothing more than annoyed. She inserted her rejected ID again. And again. She hit the reader with her palm heel in a grand show of impatience for the monitors.
The Roman sentries who came to investigate the irregularity saw, via the surveillance monitor, a very pretty decurion on the other side of the hatch beating the ID reader and spewing invectives—Latin, Anglo Saxon, vulgar English. “I—am—so—damn all—tired—of—this—programmer—iggarspit! I’ll show you technology that works!” She pulled a Roman disrupter from her thigh holster and took aim at the ID reader.
The hatch hastily opened. “Decurion!”
Good thing they stopped her, because the disrupter would not have fired for her. The weapon was coded to a deceased Roman from Valerius.
The ranking sentry saluted, and put out his politely demanding palm. “May I?”
Calli chucked her ID at him and made to continue on her way past him.
The sentry called after her, “Domna, this is an IMI pass.” He sounded apologetic.
“You idiot, this is—” She stalked back and seized her pass from him, looked at it angrily, and let her high outrage dissolve into chagrin. She snarled under her breath, “Balls.” Threw her Imperial Military Institute ID to the deck. Patted her pockets, produced a Senate ID, and clipped that one to the outside of her breast pocket as if that put everything in order. “Where is the idiot in charge here?”
“This way, Domna.”
The praefect was not a self-assured sort. Direct attack by a strong, angry, scenic decurion set him immediately adrift. “I don’t understand. You are saying the IFF stratagem did not work?”
“You call that debacle a stratagem? We lost—” Calli interrupted herself, as if catching herself giving away too much. Finished softly, cryptically, “It had mixed results. I need to see—” She flipped out a palmscreen, made to consult her notes, and read from it in stilted English, “—the ‘pilot override.’ ”
“The pilot override has nothing to do with IFF. Anyway, we haven’t been able to access the pilot override. May I see what you have there?”
“Absolutely not.” She flipped her palmscreen shut and pocketed it. “I am not here to answer your questions. I will see the Monitor now.”
“At once, Decurion.” And to the sentries who had brought her, he said, “May I see the decurion’s authorization?”
The sentries opened empty hands. They did not have it.
The praefect extended a requesting palm to Calli, “May I?”
Calli spoke arctic steam. “I understood this was already handled.”
“I’m sorry, Decurion. I’m sure it should have been, but you know how it goes.”
“No. This is not how it goes,” said Calli, cold menace.
“I—” The praefect didn’t know whether to apologize or try to explain, and didn’t know how. “This is a secure project, you understand. Is there someone we can contact?”
Calli gave her long chestnut hair a mesmerizing toss with a turn of her graceful neck. Her voice became silken knives. “Yes. Do. Immediately. Numa Pompeii.” She dropped that fifty-megaton name with breathy menace, “You check with him personally. Tell Numa you are giving me a headache that could last for nights.”
A threat, sexually charged. Her already tense escort struggled to remain expressionless. That Calli Carmel possessed beauty beyond any measure was simple fact. But none of them had ever known her to use it. Danger arced like an ozone burn. The XO was pulling out all the weapons in her arsenal here. They were in deep trouble; Calli Carmel had fallen back on her looks.
The praefect rose.
Daedalus Station was protected in its isolation, and Palatine was light on its internal police in secure places. A Roman was sworn to the Empire, and the Empire in turn trusted its citizens. Its soldiers more so. Betrayal of that trust was repaid with extreme brutality that extended to your children and your spouse. You could trust your fellow Romans to do their duty.
The praefect assumed the decurion loved her family. It did not occur to him for an instant that she might not be Roman. “This way, Decurion.”
“If you are going to send a message, use the resonator, not a bloody telegraph!”
Rufus Novo had not realized he had been tapping. He set down the stylus, apologized through the partition, and turned up some white noise for privacy.
He flipped the decurion’s discarded IMI pass over and over in his hand. Tapped it.
So all standard procedures and protocols crumble in front of a beautiful angry woman. Just like that. Callista Carmel was not on any list Rufus Novo had seen. This was too irregular.
Inattention to procedure was what got Rufus Novo posted to this bunghole of the Empire in the first place.
Still, it was not for Rufus Novo to question a decurion’s word.
He had run a check on the IMI pass. The pass was genuine and valid, if very old, and this Callista Carmel was the coded holder. The card reader had only rejected her access to the station, not her identity or her ownership of the pass.
He cross-checked her identity with Imperial Military Institute records, and found that, yes, Callista Carmel had attended. Graduated. Cum laude.
That should have stopped him, but he tried to pull up her subsequent military career history and got nothing. Novo could not find which Legion she belonged to.
Gave him a queasy feeling. She was either not on the roles, or Rufus Novo was treading on some very deeply placed toes here.
Should have stopped right there.
Got it into his head to call Numa Pompeii. (Hadn’t she told him to? Immediately? Personally?)
Well, the personally part had been directed at the praefect, but Novo decided someone ought to do it.
He located the
general’s calling code in the universal log. Local time zone information came up as he logged the code into the com.
Middle of the night, Isis Station.
Should have stopped right there.
It only made sense that a man like Numa Pompeii should have companionship that was the caliber of a woman named Callista. A tall beauty with wide almond eyes and a walk like a gazelle. Novo had to wonder if he were about to step on the big man’s dick. And wake him up to do it.
Rufus Novo tapped.
The Numa Pompeii he knew kept his head and his dick in separate quarters.
Rufus Novo initiated the call to Isis Station.
Calli moved about Monitor with one eye on her palmscreen, as if she needed a diagram to find her way.
The praefect followed her. He was a gaunt man, more scientist than soldier. His name was Rubius Siculus. He had become keenly attuned to politics and what patrons could do for you or to you. “May I ask, Decurion, the nature of the problem General Pompeii has with us out here at Daedalus?”
“Strategus” was the word Siculus used. General. It was Numa Pompeii’s rank. Though most people called Numa Pompeii by his most august title of Triumphalis.
Calli answered grudgingly, “Merrimack has her protects on. Someone tipped our hand. This is unforgivable.”
The praefect saw that Calli knew quite a bit about the project. More than he, apparently. “That can’t be. We detected first phase success. Merrimack shut off her IFF at—”
“—At precisely fourteen hundred thirty-one hours and fifty-eight seconds PPMT on the eighth,” Calli finished for him.
The engineers of Daedalus Station quickly checked their logs. Looked up again like a lot of bobbleheads. Gave astonished nods to the praefect. She was right.
They wondered how she could know that. No one outside Daedalus knew that.
She had to be Imperial Security. Imperial Security had tentacles no one else could see.
The attitude around her abruptly transformed from guarded suspicion to deferential dread. No one barred her way to Monitor’s control box. By now the engineers were only mildly amazed that she opened it so quickly when they had been trying for weeks. They only asked, “How did you do that?”
“How did you not,” said Calli. Not a question. Scorn rather.
She made a show of pulling Captain Matthew Forshaw’s authorization from the control box.
An engineer dared a defensive grumble, “If I may say so, Decurion, we could work more efficiently out here if those who have information shared it with those with a need to know.”
She gave a cold, cold glare as if reading the engineer’s ID off his badge and committing it to memory for later treatment. “I will make sure your comments are shared with those who need to know.”
A voice, as clear as if originating in the compartment with Novo rather than from two megaparcs away, answered from the com: “Ops. Isis Station.”
Rufus Novo tried to imitate the confident brusque menace that had carried the decurion past any challenge, “General Pompeii, at once.”
Didn’t work. “Who are you?” the querulous voice returned.
Novo quailed. Why did she have to ask that? He wasn’t anyone. “Rufus Novo. Daedalus Station.”
“Rank!” the dragon at General Pompeii’s gate demanded.
“I—I’m a sentry on Daedalus Station. I have been ordered to check something with General Pompeii. Personally.”
“You’re a what? Who is your CO?” The dragon was old guard Roman, with little or no love for Novos—those come-lately Romans, whose kind had not suffered through the Long Silence. “Have you ever heard of chain of command, Novo?”
“I have orders.” Sort of. “I am trying to verify an authorization to a secure site.”
“The triumphalis is asleep.” She hung out Numa Pompeii’s augmented title. Not just a general. An enormously successful conquering general.
“Wake him up.”
A dead pause. Then, “Novo, are you tired of living?”
“Just tell me—Decurion Callista Carmel—does she have authorization to the project at Daedalus Station? Can you find that for me?”
“Hold,” the voice ordered.
Novo waited in silence. Except for the sound of his own tapping.
“What are you doing now?”
A Roman engineer tried to peer over Calli’s eagled shoulder as she loaded numbers into the resonator, a 160-digit harmonic code (being the birth dates of John Farragut’s twenty brothers and sisters in ascending order, except for the twins, placed third and sixteenth).
Calli said only, “You do know that one ship can control the other, if you know what you’re doing?”
“Yes, Domna. That’s what we’ve been trying to do.”
“I did say ‘if you know what you’re doing,’ did I not?”
Rufus Novo waited at the res com. Tapped.
He braced himself for what voice would eventually sound over the com. Or would the answer come in the form of Daedalus Station sentries bursting through the hatch, dispatched to arrest whoever was making midnight calls to Numa Pompeii?
The clarity and immediacy of the voice made Novo jump in his seat. A familiar, crumbly, booming baritone he had heard so often on military broadcasts. Joy in it, “You have secured the Merrimack!”
Novo choked, his face burning, stammered, “No, Triumphalis.”
The sleepiness came through now in the growl, “Then why are you calling me!”
Because I’m a bit of an idiot, Triumphalis. “It’s about Decurion Carmel—”
“Callista! Is she asking for me?”
Callista. By any gods left in the world, Novo had gone and done it. Callista.
Novo, you just woke up a senator/strategus—a triumphalis—fourth man in the Empire, to challenge his girlfriend.
“No Domni, I—Does Decurion Carmel have authority to access Monitor’s master codes?”
Very cross, completely mystified by the question, Numa said: “I have no doubt that Callista Carmel has full authority to do whatever the hell she wants on either Monitor class ship. What is your question?”
Novo foundered. “That was the question, Domni.”
A curse. Dead air. The click of disconnect.
Novo dropped his forehead to the console. More than a bit of an idiot.
Numa Pompeii’s bedchamber was a spacious compartment on Isis Station, soaring two decks high and decorated in overwrought senatorial splendor. The heavy tapestries, the muraled overhead, the ornate bronze filigree were not to his taste, but rather expected of his august rank. He settled back into the velvet-and eiderdown comfort from which he had been roused.
Unsorted thoughts came, as they often did as he drifted toward sleep.
Callista Carmel.
He had not thought of that silly, ridiculously pretty bitch in a long time.
Didn’t know who she had smiled at to get into the Institute. The only women General Pompeii trusted in the fighting ranks looked like well-upholstered tanks.
Calli Carmel had called for him. Good. He needed a laugh right now.
The general was a man of duty. He accepted the great responsibility that went with his great power and these gods-awful rich tapestries. The matter of another Kali weighed, crushing, on Numa Pompeii’s broad shoulders. That pinheaded Novo had no idea.
He had chuckled when he’d thought Callista Carmel was in captivity and asking for him, as if she thought she could get any special consideration from him.
But the error was his. She had not asked.
So why had her name even come up?
Numa Pompeii had been anticipating for several weeks now a report from Decurion Diomede Silva of the Valerius with news of Merrimack’s capture. Numa had not been expecting a weird question from a no-ranking Novo.
Does she have authority?
Yes, Terran operations were not compartmentalized like the Empire’s. Which was why this ploy—using the Monitor to control Merrimack’s IFF—ought to work. The t
wo ships were too closely linked. Such a danger never presented itself in vessels of the Imperial Legions.
Why was anyone asking after Callista Carmel?
And why call her decurion? A clumsy, inaccurate translation of her Terran rank. Why try to translate it to Latin at all? The Novo was ignorant, but was that the all of it?
The nagging seed grew weeds in his comfort.
And Numa wondered if he had not been speaking at cross-purposes with his midnight caller.
He rolled to his com. “Gemma, get that man back on the com!”
“Who, domni?”
“Whoever just called me. Get him back on the com now.”
Calli dispatched the five members of her escort, one by one, back to the Accipiter on pretext of fetching this or that, until all five were safely off Monitor. She muttered, apparently to herself but meant to be overheard, “What the hell is taking them so long?”
There was nothing for them to fetch, and she certainly did not want her attendants to come back. In case something went wrong now, only she would die.
Calli’s Accipiter was powered up and ready to run—without her, if need be.
Calli immobilized Monitor’s air lock hatches, including the open hatch where the docking tube connected the Monitor to Daedalus Station.
Standard ship design in any modern vessel included a trigger enabling the automatic shutting and sealing of all interior hatches in case of sudden decompression. Calli disabled that feature on Monitor. All open hatches were now frozen open.
Personnel aboard Daedalus Station, except for those in the compartment adjacent to the docking tube, would survive a sudden separation. Anyone on board Monitor would die.
There was a term for it back on the Mack—letting the vacuum in.
“What are you doing now?”
Calli stood up, faced the praefect, Rubius Siculus. “You know what? I can do nothing here. Some squid-head trying something very scientific like trial and error triggered all the fail-safes and has locked up everything.”
Red in the face, palm out, the praefect ordered, “Decurion, I need to see what you have been working from. I insist you hand over your notes.”