Wolf Star (Tour of the Merrimack #2)

by R. M. Meluch

  No ship from either side had interfered in Merrimack’s and Scipio’s single combat, not out of chivalry but because the two had been merged into one force field and neither side could shoot the foe without damaging the friend.

  Sensor-blind and occupied with their own survival, no one on Merrimack had been aware of what had been happening in the battle for the Citadel. They had just got Scipio’s com tuned to the U.S. channel, and Merrimack ’s techs were just learning how to aim Scipio’s guns when the U.S. recall sounded. All ships were ordered to abandon the field.

  The U.S. assault force had managed to damage the Catapult, and the fleet was withdrawing.

  Captain Farragut requested permission to press the attack. He was told to withdraw; the objective had been achieved.

  “No, it’s not! The objective has not been achieved. Get Mishindi on the com!” Farragut shouted, then begged Admiral Mishindi to let him continue the siege. “Damaged isn’t good enough. We have to destroy it. I’m still in this!”

  “Captain Farragut, you have your orders.”

  “We can take out the Cat!”

  “Not your call, Captain Farragut.”

  “Please, sir!”

  “Not my call either. With. Draw.” Bit out two distinct words.

  “Where’s Calli?” Farragut asked. “Is Calli still trapped inside the grid?” Nothing would stop him from going back and getting her.

  But no. Calli Carmel’s Wolfhound was in retreat back to Earth with the rest of the assault force. John Farragut had no more excuses. Nothing to do but drag Merrimack back to Earth under Scipio’s power.

  PART FIVE

  KALI

  22

  ˝“YOU BLOODY MINDED APE!” Admiral Toracelli railed at Captain Farragut. That for show in front of the LEN investigators. In private, with a near grin, he said, “John, you’re a wild man.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you were told to ask for a tow if you got overridden.”

  “I got a tow,” said Farragut.

  Toracelli waggled an admonishing finger at him. “Someday. Someday.”

  “What is the LEN doing here, sir?”

  “Demanding a restoration of the cease-fire.”

  “Bullskat!” Farragut was volcanic.

  The admiral continued calmly, “We said something to that end. A lot more roundabout and polite. The LEN are bringing the United States up on charges in the World Court for violating the cease-fire and for barbarism. Quite a speedy process, you know.”

  Speedy as Plutonian mud. Farragut sat. You could fight a whole war before LEN injunctions could go into effect.

  “And the LEN are naming you personally for war crimes.”

  “Me?” Didn’t believe it. Felt it like a punch in the gut. War crimes. “War crimes?”

  “We’re standing for you. Not to worry.”

  Farragut was not worried. He was insulted. And, a feeling man, deeply wounded. “War crimes!”

  “The swords. All too gruesome.”

  “I was boarded. The lupes didn’t ask my permission, and I sure as hell didn’t grant it. I hadn’t surrendered. I defended my ship.”

  “You beheaded Commander Sejanus. Beheaded him. On his own bridge.”

  “Was he more dead than if I’d shot him?”

  “You do see the point, though?”

  “No. No, sir, I do not. It was combat. The LEN is taking off points for neatness?”

  “The combat part is the sticking point. Rolls us back to our being the side to break the cease-fire. You see, it wasn’t a lawful combat to begin with in the LEN books.”

  “What do you want me to do, sir?”

  “John, we’re getting you out of Dodge on the first stagecoach.”

  “As long as that stage is the Merrimack, I’ll be happy to go.”

  “The Mack is vulnerable.”

  “I think I just proved she’s not.”

  “We still don’t know how Rome’s getting your codes. Carmel was a prime suspect.”

  Farragut’s back stiffened. “I trust Cal better’n I trust my own mama.”

  “She did turn in a superb showing at the Citadel. Carmel, that is, not Mrs. Farragut.”

  Captain Carmel had not shown the least hesitation to fire on Romans she had known at the Institute. Nor they at her. It was a typically Roman sort of respect.

  “Still, it looks like you have a Roman mole,” Toracelli went on. “And I’m damned if I can find him. In its current condition, do you honestly trust Merrimack with your life?”

  “Change her phases, I trust her with all our lives in the Deep.”

  “Who said you were going Deep?”

  “Where else? Shotguns need two stations. We dinged the Near Cat. There has to be a Far Cat. And since a whole bunch of Roman Legions didn’t displace through to the Near Cat when we were attacking it, that means there’s lots of stranded Romans in the Deep End.”

  “More than likely,” Toracelli acceded.

  “Where is the Far Cat?”

  “Not precisely sure.”

  Farragut’s eyebrows skied. “Then where precisely am I going?”

  The grav disturbance had given a rough plot—a stellar neighborhood. But it could not pinpoint the location, or even narrow it to a reasonable haystack in which to search.

  “An adviser will brief you when you clear Fort Ike.”

  Oh, hell. I’m picking up another spook at Fort Ike, thought Farragut. “Not Colonel Oh,” he insisted.

  “No. Not Colonel Oh. She’s flying a desk. Not even CIA.” Toracelli assured him. “One more thing, John. Kali.”

  “Calli? My Calli?”

  “No. K-A-L-I. Indian goddess with fangs, bloody tongue, skull necklace, dead baby earrings, walking over her husband’s dead body. That Kali.”

  “What about her?”

  “It’s a Roman code word, associated with the Deep End. We had thought it was the Far Cat. But a thing named Kali—” he let the sentence hang.

  “They don’t build to import avocados,” Farragut finished for him.

  “Exactly.”

  Farragut sat forward, forearm across knee. “Vic. You’re talking to me here. What aren’t you telling me? Where am I going?”

  “Honest to God, I don’t know.” Toracelli laughed at the bizarre sound of that even as he said it. “Our source is not talking.”

  “We’re mole-infested and you trust this source without so much as a—” He broke off with the coming of the dawn. Who could win that kind of trust. “Oh, for Jesus.”

  Because suddenly he knew who he was picking up at Fort Eisenhower.

  “Permission to come aboard—is that the correct way to phrase the request?”

  “As if I could stop you. You’re a determined man, Jose Maria.”

  Captain Farragut’s civilian adviser boarded Merrimack like a houseguest, with a bottle of Spanish wine in hand and a kiss on either cheek.

  “I’ve had easier times digging a tick out of my hide than keeping you off my boat.”

  “Please,” Don Cordillera protested, hand to wounded heart. “The tick is a parasite. I am a symbiote. I know the location of that which you seek, and I need someone to take me there. And so.” He spread his arms to say here he was, on board Merrimack, bound for the Deep End.

  Farragut inspected the label of the bottle in his hands. A fine vintage Rioja. “This has lived way too long. Come on and help me put it out of its misery, and tell me how the hell a Terra Rican neutral civilian happens to know where the Far Cat is.”

  Kerry Blue. In flagrante.

  Her partner jackrabbited away. Couldn’t ID him from the white ass that bobbed through the hatch.

  Flight Sergeant Blue shrugged her jumpsuit up over her shoulders to free up her arm and hoist a salute. Left her still unsnapped stem to stern, leaving a sliver peek of young strong spare flesh on display.

  Colonel Steele, revving up to yell at her. Too mad to think of what to yell. Distracted. Kerry Blue didn’t wear underwear. Left a tuft of
wayward fur on show. Steele snarled, “You’re out of uniform.”

  Kerry looked uncertain. Her salute wavered. “Uh, yes, sir.” Not sure if she’d been given leave to do something about it. And because he looked so red-faced mad, she dropped from attention, snapped up, resumed her salute.

  Steele growled, jerked his head in the direction of the hatch through which her partner had made his escape. “Carver?”

  “No-oo!” Two or three syllables worth of no. “Not if he was the last—” Met the colonel’s ice-blue eyes. Stopped. Said, “No, sir.”

  Too much protest. Told Steele what he already knew—that she was still stuck on Cowboy Carver.

  At least she was making a real effort to try to hate him.

  For Steele, hating Cowboy required no effort at all. Of all the men who had used Kerry Blue, Cowboy Carver was the one Steele wanted most dead. Cowboy was the worst. Because Kerry Blue had loved him.

  Steele did not demand a name from her. He did not want to know. He paced back and forth in front of her, mad as hell, with nothing acceptable to say. Finally: “Marine, do you want to transfer out?”

  Shock on her face. Her answer emphatic, “No, sir!”

  “You are ruining morale.”

  Her brown eyes got very wide. Dumbfounded, she blurted, “Sir?”

  They called Kerry Blue the morale officer. She was no Trixi Allnight, but she was here, she was real, and she was usually to be had. And she gave no reports on her studies of comparative anatomy.

  “Discipline,” he corrected himself. Glad his face was already a furious red. Ears felt like they could ignite his hair, were his hair long enough to touch them. The only morale Kerry Blue was crushing was his. “You’re bad for discipline.”

  “I didn’t think it was that big a deal. What I was doing.”

  Not to her, it wasn’t. It was a big deal. To him.

  Tough. Soft. Pretty, in a rode-hard way. A good-hearted tramp. Not stupid. Not smart. Not a real deep thinker. Kerry Blue lived for the moment. Open. Everything that was Kerry Blue was right out there. She would follow him to hell.

  “Sir, I want to stay.”

  Like removing his own rib, Steele told her, “You are going back to Fort Ike on the next LRS.”

  John Farragut and Jose Maria de Cordillera had euth anized the Rioja as well as a respectable Barca Velha, and were halfway through a bottle of Cassiopeian Barbaresco when Jose Maria got round to answering the question of how he knew the location of the Roman Far Cat.

  “My wife, my Mercedes, accepted an irresistible engagement with the Palatine government. In the nature of a terraforming.”

  Dr. Mercedes Francesca Diego de Seville de Cordillera was a preeminent xenoecologist who had made many practical contributions to human colonization efforts. Her specialty was the successful insertion of Terran life-forms among native species without upsetting the natural balance, thus preserving the alien ecosystem while establishing a cohabiting system capable of sustaining human settlement.

  The assignment that Palatine offered to Mercedes had been secret and long term. So secret she did not even know where she was bound until she arrived. She was permitted to record messages to her husband, which were scrutinized and sanitized before delivery to Terra Rica. Even Jose Maria was not to know the planet’s—which was to say his wife’s—location.

  But Mercedes and Jose Maria had a code, the sort of code only a man and a woman deeply in love for thirty years could devise. And this man and this woman had stratospheric IQs so not even a Roman patterner could detect a code within their missives, much less penetrate their meaning. All their secret words were based on referents not contained in any database, things known only to two people in the universe.

  So Jose Maria came into possession of the coordinates of a planet in the Deep End called Telecore, which served as the supply base for the construction of the Far Cat.

  Which coordinates he gave to John Farragut.

  Farragut tentatively accepted the data bubble. He admonished the Terra Rican, “This is a betrayal of neutrality.”

  Terra Rica was strictly neutral in any conflict between the United States and Palatine. And Jose Maria de Cordillera was a man of no small consequence. A personal violation of neutrality could put his world in a bad position with the Roman Empire.

  “Apparently, there is no trust between us for me to betray,” said Jose Maria. “I am trying to get to my wife. That is all. If the Romans will not take me, their sorrow if I seek help elsewhere.”

  “I don’t get it, Jose Maria. Why do you need me? If you want to go, why not just go? Take one of your own yachts. You’d be a hell of a lot more comfortable. And you could’ve been there by now. Terra Ricans are allowed to use the Shotgun, and don’t tell me you can’t afford the toll.”

  Jose Maria lifted dark eyes to the low overhead with exposed ductwork. “I can afford luxury. Does not mean I need it. I prefer to go aboard your battleship, young Captain.”

  Farragut set the data bubble aside carefully. “There is more to this story than you just told me.”

  “And so there is.”

  Jose Maria set aside his drink, continued soberly.

  Mercedes had been homeward bound on board a Roman ship, the Sulla, when her messages ceased, and Sulla was never heard from again. The ship came in to no port. Its crew—Jose Maria managed to get the ship’s manifest—were not to be found. He contacted relatives of Sulla’s crew. They were all steadfastly silent, the way good Romans could be.

  If Jose Maria could get to the planet Telecore, he could backtrack Sulla’s molecular trail, perhaps pick up a transmission.

  “Only if they were transmitting electromagnetic signals,” said Farragut, which surely Jose Maria knew. “You can’t trace resonance.” Then thought to ask, “Can you?”

  The Nobel Laureate shook his head no. “I cannot. But if Sulla met a foul end, as I believe it did, it must have transmitted by all means possible. There would be an SOS.”

  And any SOS was, by necessity, traceable to its source.

  “Wouldn’t someone have picked up the SOS by now?”

  “I believe there was one. Palatine already answered, shut it off, and whited out the sphere of waves coming toward traveled space.”

  Opened Farragut’s eyes. “That is quite a conspiracy theory.” Jose Maria did not strike John Farragut as a paranoid man. But, “Death of one’s wife will do things to your head. I know.”

  Jose Maria had not said that word aloud, but he did not argue it. “I am deeply sorry that you know that, young Captain.”

  Farragut found himself with a mouth full of foot and couldn’t spit it out. He apologized, “I sure didn’t mean to say your wife was—might be—” hitched on the word. Blundered on, “Dead.”

  Jose Maria closed his eyes, shook his head with a sad, benign smile. Refused the apology, admitting, “I believe that she is.”

  “No. I shouldn’t ever have said that. I didn’t mean it. I don’t know that. You can’t know that.”

  Jose Maria lifted bright black eyes as if finding something interesting in the piping. Let the tears drain inward, unshed. “That is the cruelty of it. The false hope. And it is false. Because I know.”

  “That’s just worry talking.”

  “Concretization is the scientific term. But you must believe me. I know. Sulla met with more than an accident.”

  “What? Did you find something in Mercedes’ last message?”

  “Nothing said. Things unsaid. The silence round Sulla’s disappearance runs too deep. It was not long after that we began to hear whispers of Kali.”

  Farragut said he had heard that whisper.

  “Whispers only. Nothing more,” said Jose Maria. “A project the size of Catapulta—Shotgun—call it what you will—it does not lend itself to total secrecy. Too many workers. Too many specialists. Too much equipment. Too much money changing accounts. It was secret in the details, but everyone knew Rome was building a Catapult.

  “I can find no one who knows o
r is willing to speak anything of Kali. You can tell those who do know by the dire look that overcomes their visages at the mention of its name. And they do not speak.”

  “Not a warm puppy sort of a name,” said Farragut. “Sounds like a name for a terror weapon.”

  Jose Maria gave a provisional nod. “Something terrible. Kali is the Destroyer.”

  “I thought Shiva was the Destroyer,” said Farragut.

  “Kali is Shiva’s consort. Consort of Time and the Destroyer. The goddess Kali was enlisted to kill demons, which she did, and drank their blood. But once there were no demons left to kill, she kept on killing across the cosmos, annihilating all in her path.”

  “Sounds like a Roman weapon run amok.”

  “I do not know. It does not do to parse Roman code names too finely. I think it is safe to say this Kali is a destructive thing. And I know in my heart of hearts, by accident or by purpose, it destroyed Sulla.”

  23

  A DOZEN OR SO LIGHT-DECADES into the Deep, some one and eight or twenty of his buddies started pounding out Farouq’s Percussive Symphony Number 3 on the overhead with swords. It started that way. Had since devolved into a ship-wide ’cuss jam that was loud enough to shake the vacuum.

  Someone clacked out a soprano counter line on the kirki sticks. Could be Kerry Blue and Carly Delgado. Someone else pulled an interesting twok twok twok out of what sounded like a cannon barrel.

  And someone was way off beat. Probably that big lummox Dak, who had always been rhythm-free. Or Serge, bashing away like an orangutan on sprox.

  Whoever had sleep cycle during the middle watch was S.O.O.L. because Farragut put up with the noise. Farragut was probably drumming on the hull with his usual exuberance.

  TR Steele had taken his dogs aboard lots of ships. Had respected most of their captains, none more than this one. None had surprised him more than this one. Energetic. Fearless. Farragut never shrank from a dustup. And Steele’s dogs loved him. Farragut could dive in and be one of them—the front liners—howling like a coyote, drum on the wastewater stack, without losing his command presence. Something Steele could never do. Could only get a headache from the boisterous ’cussing, and wish he knew how the hell Farragut did that.