Wolf Star (Tour of the Merrimack #2)

by R. M. Meluch

  Blessed the chime for general quarters that pierced the din, shutting down all the artistes, and had them running for the gun bays.

  Merrimack had picked up an SOS.

  Jose Maria de Cordillera beat Farragut to the command center, his heartbeat still pounding out Farouq’s Third. “What ship?”

  “Not Sulla,” said the young Officer of the Watch, who knew Don Cordillera’s story.

  And Jose Maria was disappointed until he saw the ship.

  “Holy God.”

  Thanked God it was not Sulla. The drifting husk of a ship looked for all hell as if it had been chewed. The SOS was a dormant signal.

  “Dormant?” said Marcander Vincent. “Hell, it’s dead.”

  Merrimack illuminated her floods and turned several slow circuits round the wreck, to identify what it had been—Roman make, big, a transport, nominally civilian, but the sort that often served as pack beast to the Legions of Rome.

  “Cal—” Farragut started. Stopped.

  Not Cal.

  His hand landed on his XO’s shoulder, and the captain hung his head, apologetic. “Ah, hell, Bast.”

  He had not slipped like that in weeks. Sense of danger made him fall back on his old faithful. But Calli was not his anymore. Wondered if the admiralty had given her the Monitor. He’d been rushed out of town too fast to know.

  His XO was Sebastian Gray now. Same height as Cal. Same age. Not as fun to look at. Easy enough to work with. Had not shown what he had under fire on Merrimack yet. Deserved respect.

  The captain took names seriously. The misspeak was not a minor uf in John Farragut’s book. He started over. “Commander Gray, what are we looking at?”

  A wide scan located the derelict’s cargo cars strewn over several milliklicks like dead planets of a dead star. The food cars had been pillaged, the machine carriers and oxygen bricks left intact.

  After multiple scans turned up no contagion and only moderate corrosives on board the derelict ship, Farragut ordered Old Glory reeled in and a Red Cross run up the yard.

  He sent a medical team with a Marine guard on a skiff to board the wreck. They limpet-docked and entered through an existing hole in the hull.

  It was slow work. Flight Sergeant Kerry Blue negotiated the passage gingerly through the tear, mindful of the jaggedness of the metal edges and the flimsiness of her spacesuit. The suit’s material was actually rugged but unnervingly thin.

  A lock of hair, come loose from her band, floated in Kerry’s face. She tossed her head inside her helmet trying to puff the strands out of her mouth, her eyes. Floating ends tickled her nose. She lifted gloved hands to her faceplate on reflex, pawed at the visor.

  “Something wrong with your suit, Marine?” That was Flight Leader Hazard Sewell doing a Colonel Steele impersonation.

  Kerry spat. Hair stuck to her lips. “No, sir.”

  Black. Even the stark light of their lamps could not dispel the blackness within the dead ship. The wreckage inside had mostly found a resting equilibrium against the bulkheads. There was not much floating about loose. The ship had been this way for a while.

  Torn, corroded holes pocked the corridors as if the ship itself were diseased. The clear signature of Roman beam fire scored the decks. It took some real nutsifac tion for the crew to have done that to their own ship. Or maybe banshees had got hold of the weapons and gone on a rampage. Kerry had seen some weird things out in the Deep, but this was a tough read.

  They discovered uniforms on most decks, shredded and darkly stained, but no bodies in or near them. No bodies at all.

  They did find dog tags. Collected those. Two hundred forty. Two hundred forty-one. Two hundred forty-two. And would the frassing MP turn off his helmet mike or count to himself please?

  Nothing remained of the ship’s food stores. The ship’s weapons were all here. All had been discharged, emplaced guns and sidearms alike. The wreck, her name was Hermione, had put up a fight for all she was worth.

  The ship’s mess was devoid of even coffee beans. Hydroponics had been harvested messily but completely. Holes with dirt trails gaped in the soil of flow erpots in the officers’ quarters where houseplants had evidently been yanked out by the roots. The chief’s fish tank was frozen to the overhead by its own water, its artificial plants encased in the ice, but not the fish. The fish were MIA.

  Computer banks waited, unscathed, for a command. The pattern of mayhem spoke of rage and perhaps hunger, but not of human intelligence. Knowledge was power, and the attacker had left Hermione’s knowledge behind like so much junk.

  Kerry found pieces of shoes—soles, grommets, and laces, but not the rest. She recognized the Roman military type. The missing parts would have been leather. Also missing was the wool lining of a very nice ylene jacket.

  The Romans were keen for woodwork, but Kerry hadn’t seen any real wood on board.

  A floating milky gleam caught the light of Kerry’s headlamp. She gathered in a couple of the pearly beads, stilled them in her gloved fist, then opened her hand for a look.

  Yelped. Flung them away.

  “Marine?” Hazard’s alarmed inquiry sounded in her helmet.

  “Teeth!” she screeched. “I got teeth!”

  “Fangs?”

  “No, you dwit! Somebody’s teeth!” She rubbed her gloved hands on the nearest surface as if something were stuck on them that could be wiped off. The teeth had been terribly clean. That didn’t matter. There was teethness on her hands. She danced off the bulk, altogether creeped.

  Merrimack hailed the med team. The unfamiliar voice that sounded in Kerry Blue’s helmet had to belong to Commander Sebastian Gray: “Survivors?”

  “Negative.” Kerry Blue recognized the answering voice as the MO’s. Mo Shah was about five paces away from her, methodically collecting floating teeth. “Personnel are being gone. Probably being dead. They are not being here.”

  Kerry was not sure which nightmare was more hideous, that the crew were dead or that they were alive somewhere, in some state, naked and without teeth.

  “Then haul on back to Merrimack.” Captain Farragut’s voice this time. “We’ve just been pinged.”

  Kerry joined the orderly scramble for the skiff.

  A hail of something pelted the skiff. One of the somethings smacked Kerry’s shoulder as she towed herself aboard the skiff. “Captain, we’ve been tagged!”

  The Marine behind Kerry pulled the tag off her suit and chucked it out to space.

  Merrimack’s lookout reported, “Roman signature coming in high and hot on the eights. Single. Looks like a Fury. Closing.”

  A relief in a way. Anyone would rather face Romans than whatever had done this to Hermione.

  Farragut’s first orders were for the force field tech to scrub the tags. “Any homers on your screen?”

  “Negative, sir.”

  The com tech reported, “I’m receiving the Roman’s demand: Move away from the Roman ship Hermione or be destroyed.”

  “We have a Red Cross flying?” Farragut checked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  The Roman Fury came into engagement range. Engagement range was anything within a quarter light-second, the range within which a ship’s scanners perceived a target approximately where it actually was. The range was closer than the distance between the Earth and the Moon.

  Farragut said, “Inform the Roman we are a rescue ship responding to an SOS.”

  Still the Fury approached, all weapons ports open. It deployed another flock of homing tags. Its commander called Farragut a murderer. Told him to take down the false flag. He meant Merrimack’s Red Cross.

  “We found your ship in this state,” Farragut responded. The Fury had to know that. The threats were all bluster and cover fire. “Stop it with the spitwads.” Already Merrimack’s outboard lasers seared the second round of tags off Mack’s hide. “You can’t shoot a rescue ship.”

  “Get away, you carrion eater.”

  Carrion? So the Roman knew the ship was dead? How did the Rom
an know that? Did he know that? Or was this more bellicose talk?

  “Get your lice off our property, Merrimack.” The Roman referred to the U.S. med team. “Do not touch the flight recorder. Touch nothing. You are not a rescue ship.”

  “Neither are you!” Farragut shot back. “Your boys and girls on Hermione are dead and you know it. You’re a salvage scow.”

  A silence. To call a soldier a salvager was the deepest insult. The Roman came back with a spitting, angry, “Strike your Red Cross.”

  Farragut knew he’d just been dared to step out in the alley and say that. He put the com on mute and asked the Og if the med skiff had made it back aboard. Told yes, Farragut ordered his new XO, “Strike the Red Cross. Get us a firing solution on the Roman Fury and stand by to fire.”

  Commander Sebastian Gray’s brows lifted, but he issued the orders and reported back, “Striking Red Cross, aye.”

  Targeting had nailed a sounder bull’s-eye on the Fury, but held fire. The Roman ship flew no Red Cross, but it was still inside the rescue zone.

  Very strict, tacit rules held out here. Everyone was vulnerable out here. When not part of a battle zone, hostiles observed a one light-second no-fire radius around the source of an SOS.

  Farragut asked the Roman if he wanted to step outside, then moved Merrimack outside the radius.

  He was only slightly surprised that the lighter Roman Fury took up the challenge.

  Tac reported: “Roman Fury is leaving the radius!”

  And because it did so, Farragut ordered, “Stand by to switch control routine.”

  In the natural order of things, the smaller Fury was no match for the battleship Merrimack. This dare was in no way even, unless the Roman was packing spare aces on board.

  Merrimack’s controls flickered. “There it is,” Kit Kittering reported from Engineering. Expected it. “Roman Fury is attempting override.”

  Merrimack shut down all its code recognitions and activated the backup routine. The battleship’s controls stabilized immediately. Plan B was working.

  “Your mole doesn’t have up-to-date information,” Commander Gray commented.

  “Doesn’t look like it,” Farragut murmured, glad to hear his new exec sound impassive. “Let ’em have it.”

  The XO ordered, “All stations, fire at will.”

  The Fury had no Plan B. At its failure to sabotage Merrimack by mimicking her old command codes, the enemy ship turned tail, squidwise, to retreat at its most defensible angle.

  Despite her greater mass, Merrimack was a powerful, quick ship. She ran down the Fury, forced it to turn, dropping it out of FTL.

  The Fury waddled at sublight speed, angling for an escape vector. Merrimack bludgeoned the Fury with broad waves of disrupter spreads—bludgeoned carefully, trying to crack the eggshell but still leave the yolk intact. Great fire sprays struck the Fury’s inertial screen.

  Realizing there could be no escape, and that the Merrimack would likely smash the yolk along with its shell on one of these salvos, the Fury ran out the white flag with the symbolic half roll. The Roman surrendered.

  “Anyone get the idea Farragut is just a little disappointed we didn’t get boarded?” Cowboy sheathed his sword and stowed it in Kerry Blue’s locker with suggestive motions of the blade. “I think he gets off on that swashbuckling skat.”

  “So do you, you boon.” Kerry Blue slammed the locker shut on Cowboy’s fingers.

  Interrogation of the Fury’s crew—there were fifty of them—gave little clue as to what had befallen the derelict transport Hermione. The prisoners claimed not to know. Their insistence was too adamant. They knew. And they were afraid.

  Merrimack circled back to dead Hermione, shut off its SOS sounder, took the hulk in tow along with the Fury, and continued on her voyage to the Far Cat.

  Roman craft had a certain majesty to them. Where American ships had a belligerent beauty in the clean, brute, utilitarian lines of their equipment, the Romans added stylistic design components. Only details, but telling details. A blunt, rounded end to a metal shaft where a simple square cut-off would have done. Their colors were richer. Their objects looked more substantial. They suggested grandeur, permanence.

  Lieutenant Glenn Hamilton sat on the Fury’s command deck. Felt as if she were on a stage set. And she was getting into character. Ensconced in a chair like this, she had to be monarch of something or other. She was tempted to try on the cape.

  Romans could also go way over the top with flashy, gaudy accoutrements of past glory—oak wreaths, capes, gold cuirasses molded with muscle, shiny greaves, boots, all kinds of boots, embroidered togas, and those leather-flanged armor skirt things a man had to have truly great legs to wear with confidence. Though the Romans’ undress uniforms were very dignified, practical, and sharp, their dress uniforms could be Las Vegas flashy.

  So there was a deep-scarlet command cape with embossed gold shoulder pins draped over the Fury’s command seat, demanding to sit on Glenn Hamilton’s shoulders. She refrained. Partly because the thing was awfully shiny—borderline, or maybe over-the-line tacky—but mostly because Lieutenant Glenn Hamilton was five foot one, and the cape would drag on the deck, making her look like a little girl playing dress up instead of a Roman domna.

  She seldom felt short on board Merrimack, unless someone reminded her with the stupid nickname Hamster —and thanks a heap for that one, John Farragut. She was accustomed to giving orders to truly big Marines. But the dimensions of this Roman ship were overlarge. Monumental was the word for it.

  She assumed an imperial posture.

  She was reviewing the ship’s log when the Aldebaran scarab crickets, which clung heraldically to the hatchway, let out a chorus of chirping. Startled, Glenn Hamilton checked her chron. No, it was not later than she had thought. It was the scarab crickets that were off.

  Some Roman with way too much time on his hands had conditioned the insectoids from the time they were larvae to sound off at intervals precisely coinciding with the changing of the Roman watch.

  The Aldebaran scarab crickets were big, at least one foot long, bronze-colored, metallic-looking, and so seldom moved they might well be fixtures. The Romans used them as architectural decorations. The scarab crickets had that grotesque elegance Romans fancied. Their distinctive lines, a popular motif in Roman jewelry, were familiar to everyone, though Glenn Hamilton had never expected to be sharing decks with live ones.

  She had got used to the giant bugs, scarcely knew they were there, till they started singing out of time.

  “Who wound up the gargoyles?” said the tech who was trying to decipher the Fury’s navigational computer.

  Glenn Hamilton turned toward the hatchway and ordered the decorations to shut up.

  They obeyed every bit as well as any Terran insect would.

  “God bless it!” Glenn rose from her seat, as suddenly one gargoyle detached and swooped across the cabin with a whirring of metallic wings. The deck officers ducked with wordless shouts.

  “I didn’t know they had wings!” one cried from under a console.

  Other giant scarab crickets detached from their posts and set off in bulk-bouncing panic throughout the Fury.

  Glenn Hamilton hailed the Merrimack, “Captain, I may have a situation here.”

  And immediately winced at how inept she was going to sound explaining why she was bothering Captain Farragut to report badly timed scarab crickets. No wonder she had only been “acting” exec of the Merrimack. Couldn’t see Sebastian Gray making a misstep like this. Hoped Farragut didn’t have her on the box, and the new XO wasn’t listening in on her transmission.

  She was rescued by an improbable coincidence. Over the open com, she heard Marcander Vincent on Merrimack ’s command deck sing out, “Occultation at four by twelve by one twenty!”

  They had a situation.

  24

  “I SEE IT,HAMSTER. Good eye.Join up and go dark.” Lieutenant Glenn Hamilton was not about to tell Captain Farragut she had not sighted the bo
gey. That her situation had only to do with an antic scarab cricket.

  “Tuck us into Merrimack’s force field,” she ordered her skeleton crew. “Take us dark.”

  Her crew were some moments figuring out how to obey, unfamiliar with the Fury’s controls. They must have hit something wrong—or else a timer had run down to zero—because the Roman ship suddenly went darker than they had wanted.

  “Merrimack. Hamilton.” Glenn opened the com. “We—uh—blew a fuse.” The accepted term for when you accidentally uffed an entire system. “We are flying dead stick.”

  It was hardly unexpected that the Roman ship would have system bombs in place in case of capture. Something had cued the Fury that it was no longer in Roman hands, and the ship refused to obey any more enemy commands.

  “Do you have life support?” Farragut sent.

  “Yes, sir. And com, apparently.”

  “Suit up your crew in case there’s a second bomb. We’re going to hook you.”

  “Aye, sir.” Glenn clicked off. “Crew to space suits,” she ordered, then dove out of the way of a swooping scarab cricket. “And contain those gargoyles!”

  One of the Aldebaran monsters alighted in her command chair, and jacked itself up on its six legs, buzzing, its eyes—all four of them—staring at Hamster in bugly rage. Or was that horror?

  Lieutenant Hamilton lifted an image tablet with which to squash the scarab cricket, but she hesitated too long. Looked at it too long.

  The scarab cricket’s size, the quantity of whatever was inside it, the prospect of that whatever squirting out all over her magnificent chair, made her think better of the squashing course of action.

  She yanked the scarlet cape off the back of the command chair, whisking it over the scarab cricket in one motion. She wrapped up the gargoyle’s buzzing fury (or was that fear?), and pushed the whole bundle—scarlet yardage, cricket, all—into a Marine guard’s arms. “Shove that out an air lock.”