Strength and Honor

by R. M. Meluch

  Numa Pompeii’s warship Gladiator and the legion carrier Horatius had been members of Commodore Farragut’s Attack Group One. His comrades in arms were suddenly enemy combatants.

  General Numa Pompeii had been a powerful man during the reign of Caesar Magnus. Caesar Romulus had sent Numa to the Deep to get him out of sight and out of popular mind.

  Marcus Asinius, astrarch of the Horatius, was cousin to the late Legion Commander Herius Asinius, whose teeth were interred down below on the planet Telecore. Legion Draconis was not a favorite of Caesar Romulus either.

  Neither Numa Pompeii nor Marcus Asinius were fervent Romulus supporters, but they were staunch Romans. Marcus would not question authority, like it or not. But Farragut would not put it past Numa to play Lucifer and storm the gates of Roman heaven.

  Numa was a cagey political animal, arrogant, popular. Farragut could not guess what Numa’s plans were.

  Farragut ordered, “Gypsy, contact Fort Ike. Make sure the Fort’s on Condition Watch Two. Advise them to be on the alert for Gladiator and Horatius. And let them know there is a rogue patterner armed with a Striker out here who could take the left antenna off a mayfly from five light-minutes away.”

  Kit Kittering lifted a finger to insert a comment. “Captain, I kinda doubt Augustus’ shooting is gonna be that good. That old Striker was built for someone else and it’s sixty years old. Strikers are custom jobs. He’s just not gonna run as well in someone else’s custom shoes. Patterners don’t just pilot Strikers. They kind of wear them.”

  Kit had crawled through both Strikers. She knew each machine as well as she knew Merrimack.

  “It’s not gonna to be like our last fight with a patterner.” Kit’s hand found its way to her midriff as if she could still feel the hole.

  A patterner named Septimus, piloting his own Striker, had fired a shot straight through Merrimack, through her force field, through Kit Kittering, and out the stern.

  “Can you calculate the best speed of this Striker to make it across the Abyss?” Farragut asked his engineer.

  The Abyss was two thousand parsecs of relative dark that separated galactic arms of the Milky Way. The Abyss lay between the Deep End and Near Space.

  “Seventy standard days.” Kit said with a head tilt to either side to indicate some give or take. “He might even get there sooner if he pushes it, but then he would arrive dead. Or vegetablized. Can we suggest it to him?”

  “He may not live to see the other side of the Abyss anyway,” said Farragut. “He shouldn’t be alive now.”

  Life expectancy of a patterner was limited. When Caesar Magnus gave Augustus to Captain Farragut, Augustus had already outlived his expiration date. He had not been expected to live long enough to become the loose cannon he was now.

  “Something else to consider,” Colonel Z said. “That Striker Augustus took belonged to Secundus.” Secundus had been the second patterner ever assembled.

  “Kit already went through that,” said Farragut.

  “Mister Kittering was talking about engines and weapons,” said Colonel Z. “I’m talking about data. Augustus has Secundus’ data bank. Secundus identified the Hive harmonics using that database. When that Striker hits Near Space, Rome will have the secret of how to identify a single harmonic out of infinite possibilities.”

  “If Augustus has that information, then we have it,” said Farragut. “Don’t we have a copy of Secundus’ database on Merrimack!”

  “We do,” said Colonel Z. “The secret of isolating harmonics per se is not in the database. Neither is Secundus’ methodology. Secundus didn’t make notes. But some combination of facts in the database together with a patterner’s ability to synthesize data adds up to deep sewage for the United States of America. When Augustus shares that secret with his masters, we have a severe tactical disadvantage.”

  “I know. I’m the one who brought the bastard aboard,” said Farragut. “We couldn’t have exterminated the old Hive without Augustus. We needed him.”

  “Now we need him dead,” said Colonel Z. Insinuation there. Someone had not done his job.

  Kit came to Farragut’s defense, “Augustus won’t give Romulus skat. And if Augustus doesn’t recognize Romulus as Caesar, then who gives a rat’s ass? To hell with him.”

  Farragut gave Kit’s shoulder a squeeze as his pacing took him past her, appreciating the loyalty. “Can’t afford to get quite that comfortable, Kit,” Farragut said. “Augustus is still Roman. When it comes down to Us versus Them, he is definitely a Them.” And to the misgivings he saw in his officers’ faces, he answered, “And don’t anyone think that if I get a shot, I won’t take it.”

  3

  MY CRATE!”

  That was Kerry circling her Swift in the flight hangar. The Swift’s cockpit was charred.

  She lifted her arms up in the air, her fingers curled into claws calling witness to her beloved Alpha’s carnage. “Shit! Oh crap. Oh fugger.”

  She glared up at a severed air hose flapping every which way twenty-five feet up in the overhead and she yowled, “Will someone shut that thing off!”

  Up went an erk to the catwalk to clamp off the hose.

  Kerry Blue was an ordinary sort of unretouched rough-pretty. Her race was purebred mutt. The melting pot had melted right here. Kerry Blue stood on the tall side, slim, loose jointed, with just enough padding on the bow and the stern to know you had a woman under those coveralls. Her easy loose walk really let you know.

  She was battle seasoned but never hardened. She rolled with every hit and just got back up. Kerry Blue had a natural ability to ignore anything that didn’t matter at the moment. She was not a deep thinker, which meant she never thought herself into a hole. She was going to be a lifer, and would probably still be a flight sergeant when they pulled her wings off.

  Her wings were everywhere at the moment. Pieces of Alpha Six lay scattered all across the flight hangar.

  Her Swift’s magnetic antimatter containment field had held fast anyway, the only thing that had. But that thing was real important.

  Flight Sergeant Cole Darby was down on the deck, wedged underneath Cain Salvador’s Swift with Cain Salvador, trying to pry pieces of Alpha Six out of Alpha Three’s undercarriage.

  Came the roar. It was loud and it echoed round in the hangar: “What’d you do to your spacecraft, Marine?”

  The Old Man. TR Steele.

  Colonel Steele stopped in the hatchway, fists on his hips, eyes glowering ice blue fire. Darb sniggered. Someone else cackled. Colonel Steele was always roaring at Kerry Blue. But her Swift’s mess on the deck was so clearly not Kerry Blue’s fault that this roar had to be TR Steele impersonating himself.

  Doing a good job too. Because if he’d been serious, Kerry Blue would be in the brig for kicking him in the butt.

  Cain Salvador whispered aside to Cole Darby, lying on the creeper next to his underneath Cain’s Swift. “Did I just see Kerry Blue kick the Old Man in the butt?”

  “Nope.” Darb kept his eyes on his work. “Didn’t happen. You saw nothing. Gimme the torch.”

  “Colonel’s here,” Cain whispered. “Do we stand up?”

  “Keep welding.”

  It had taken Kerry Blue over two years to see what Darb had noticed in his first months on board Merrimack. Colonel Steele was always an ogre to Kerry Blue, always yelling at her. She noticed that part. The colonel did everything he could to keep her out of his sight, like he couldn’t stand the sight of her.

  Well, he really really couldn’t stand the sight of her.

  Blue never figured that part out until Darb hit her in the head with it: He can’t stand to be near you. That had woken her up. She’d been wide awake ever since. Steele came stalking around the husk of Kerry’s Swift, his eyes hard as arctic ice, as if looking for something to criticize in the heap.

  Darb cringed in hiding under Cain’s Swift. It felt like the whole hangar could just go up in flames right now.

  A small movement broke up the Old Man’s frown, lik
e a flicker in an image that quickly repairs itself. There was some kind of strong current in here. A sparking. Something was going to ignite. Smelled like someone’s career.

  Darb heard Kerry Blue talking too fast, too loud: “Look what he did! Augustus torched my crate! Why mine? I was nice to that son of a bitch!”

  Kerry Blue had been nice to men beyond count.

  Steele’s face turned blood red.

  Kerry railed on, “Why couldn’t he torch your crate instead?” Steele said, “He knew the way to get at me.” Darb tried to reel his legs in all the way under the Swift, cringing.

  Kerry brought her voice way down quiet for just Steele—and the two guys trying to disappear under Alpha Three—to hear. “Yeah?”

  Darb tried to will his ears shut.

  I’m not hearing this. I am not hearing this. Anyone asks, I got no idea. La la la la la—

  And praise the Lord, Steele growled at Kerry, “Clean up this mess.” He stalked away. Kerry Blue’s voice sailed after him, too cheery: “Aye, aye, sir.”

  Colonel TR Steele turned his back on Kerry Blue and retreated to his side of that vast chasm that separated officer from enlisted man. Man, for Kerry Blue was a man by military definition. A she-man instead of a he-man, but a man as far as the Navy was concerned.

  Except that was all bullskat to Colonel Steele, and Kerry Blue was all woman and what the hell was she doing on his battleship? Enlisted!

  He could not have her. He could not breathe without her. He got all tongue-tied and stupid around her. He could not afford to mess this up.

  What this? He caught himself thinking. There was no this. This could not happen. There could be no this! Steele prowled across the hangar to Flight Leader Ranza Espinoza, a big woman, with broad shoulders, boy hips, and fine gray eyes. Her fat shock of coarse, light brown hair was tied back into a ponytail as thick as Steele’s fist.

  Ranza was a tough soldier, but she was not terrific with details. Unfortunately, the Divorce Protocol was nothing but details.

  Steele looked over Ranza’s rounded shoulder at the instructions which she kept reading and rereading. “Got it in hand, Flight Leader?”

  “No, sir,” said Ranza. “This has got me by the short hairs. And I thought I knew everything there was to know about divorce too.”

  Ranza had three children with three different last names, all back home on Earth with their maternal grandmother. “You have a brain, Flight Leader,” said Colonel Steele.

  “Use it.” Ranza anguished over the instructions that may as well have been written in Turkish. “Sir, Fm tryin’—” Steele snatched the instructions from her. “Cole Darby!”

  “Sir!” Darb’s voice sounded along with a clunk. That was Flight Sergeant Cole Darby bumping his head on the belly of Cain Salvador’s crate.

  Cole Darby was an overeducated white suburban boy, who enlisted in the Fleet Marine looking for purpose in his life.

  The Darb wanted a purpose? Colonel Steele would give him a foxtrotting purpose. He jammed the instructions for the Divorce Protocol into Cole Darby’s hands. “Make this happen.” Find your meaning in that.

  “Aye, sir,” said Cole Darby.

  Steele had expected Darb to bail a long time ago. But the Darb had hung in, fit in. Not that the Darb wasn’t still an odd duck in this company. Steele didn’t know if Cole Darby had found whatever he was looking for, but he was still here and he was useful most of the time.

  Steele watched Cole Darby read the Protocol. Darb’s eyes did not glass over. You could see the cylinders turning and the tumblers falling into position.

  Steele returned to Ranza, gestured back with a jerk of his thick thumb. “There.”

  “Oh,” said Ranza on an arcing note, everything becoming clear. “That brain.”

  “Allocate your resources, Flight Leader,” Steele tapped her shoulder with the bottom of his fist. Ranza smiled a gap-toothed smile. “Got it, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  Steele surveyed the hangar. His gaze fell on a pair of booted feet, sticking out from under the Swift next to Kerry Blue’s.

  Steele advanced. Let his shadow fall across the boots. “You got a girlfriend under there, Salvador?” Clunk. Head on the belly. Cain Salvador scrabbled to vertical. “No, sir.”

  Flight Sergeant Cain Salvador looked like a Marine. Cain was sleek and powerful as a seal. Could have been a real afthole but he respected authority and stood before Steele at stiff attention.

  “As you were.” Cain Salvador rubbed his head and crawled back under his Swift, Alpha Three.

  Tromping across the deck grates and making a lot of noise operating a maintenance bot to suck the debris and soot from Kerry Blue’s exploding crate was Dak Shepard, Alpha Two. Hard not to like Dak Shepard. All heart, guts, brawn, and dick. No brain. Dak was solid.

  Flight Sergeant Twitch Fuentes was changing out the canopy of his Swift, Alpha Five. Steele did not ask Twitch Fuentes anything. Steele really didn’t want to know how much English Twitch didn’t know. Twitch was a good fighter, always ready.

  Carly Delgado regularly flew Alpha Four. She had pried up a deck grate and was summoning Dak over to help her with the soggy mess underneath it with a wave of her stick-thin arm. All bone and whip muscle. Carly was a hard soldier. Her small pyramidal breasts looked hard too. Mean. Too lean. She was looking particularly skinny right now. Steele ordered her, “Bulk up, Delgado.”

  “I feel better when I’m hungry,” Carly answered back. Steele told her, “I don’t care if you eat or not, I want to see more Delgado.” Dak whispered, “Carly! Take your shirt off!”

  “Shut up, Dak.” This mess was all Augustus’ fault as far as Steele could see. The Roman man-machine was just plain easy to hate.

  The war had gone hot and Merrimack was stuck in the Deep, snarled up in the Divorce Protocol, tripping over minutia and that was Augustus’ fault too. The boffins were afraid Augustus had left rogue nanites.

  Merrimack segregated all her systems. Took them down one by one, searched for signs of tampering and scoured for nanites. The crew ran test scenarios designed by the cryptotech and validated by the systems’ normal users and their maintenance personnel.

  All programs were reencrypted and reseeded.

  Chief Engineer Kit Kittering took down each of the fornicating ship’s six fornicating engines one at a time, exiling the fornicating antimatter into space, while she purged the fornicating system, rehoused the fornicating components, recoded the fornicating containment field, recaptured the antimatter (really fornicating on the way back in) and restarted the damned engine.

  Codes needed changing on all spacecraft Merrimack carried, starting with the Swifts, their force fields, their engine containment shields. Same with the long-range shuttles and the space patrol torpedo boats.

  All personnel reported to the hospital in rotation for full nano scans. That included the ship’s dogs.

  Also to be scanned were the houseplants, the livestock, the hydroponic gardens. Innocuous systems—air, light, emergency light, the lifts—were all refitted with virgin programs. Decks were evacuated and sealed off one by one, opened to vacuum and sanitized.

  Scrubbing for nanoparticles, you got to know how really big the Mack was.

  She measured four hundred feet red light to green light, eighty-four feet of that across the beam. She was four hundred feet topsail tip to bottom sail tip; five hundred and seventy feet nose to engines, then add another ninety feet onto that for the engines.

  “What’s that in nanometers?”

  “Shut up, Dak.”

  Steele began to wonder if those instruments couldn’t read his thoughts. Absolutely nothing else was private. Steele thanked God he’d never stashed away any images of Kerry Blue in his quarters. Nothing was left unscrutinized down to the nano level.

  Harvard educated xenolinguist Patrick Hamilton apparently wasn’t smart enough to purge his stash before the searchers hit his quarters. Something turned up in his quarters not meant for wifely eyes. Whatever it was, it didn
’t cause the security team any concern, but Doctor Pat’s wife was the Hamster, third in command of the space battleship Merrimack. Those were her quarters too. If Patrick Hamilton didn’t think a find like that wouldn’t get back to her there must have been a stupid contest running.

  Made Steele feel like a fog trucking genius.

  Captain Farragut took a walkabout of his giant ship. Not that he could see nanoparticles, but if anything were out of place on his Merrimack he could sense it.

  The tap tap tap of a basketball drew him to the maintenance hangar. He recognized the cadence of the dribble. The ball’s bounces had a feminine sound. The footsteps following the ball were barely audible above the other ship sounds.

  As Farragut entered the cavernous compartment, the lone player circled under the basket with a light tread. She jumped. Landed lightly and corralled the ball that bounced off the rim.

  She was five foot one and light boned.

  Hamster was just plain light.

  She played one-on-herself in the maintenance hangar. John Farragut would have joined her, but it was probably not a good idea for him to play one-on-one of any game with Mrs. Hamilton.

  Glenn Hamilton wore her auburn hair pulled back in a ponytail. She dribbled the basketball, jumped, and shot. And missed again. Caught the rebound.

  “You know there is something ridiculous about you with a basketball.” Hamster glared toward the hatch. Saw John Farragut leaning in the entranceway. “Shut up,” she said. “Sir.”

  Farragut strode in. He beckoned for the ball. She passed it to him, rather strongly.

  He bounced the ball twice, took a shot. Missed.

  Hamster collected the rebound, jumped and made the shot. “Gypsy wasn’t on deck when you called me to the command deck, was she?” said Farragut.

  Hamster had to think back to the declaration of war. It seemed like a year ago since the balloon went up, even though it was scarcely enough time to count in days. More like hours.

  She remembered the words she’d used to summon Farragut to the command deck in the middle of ship’s night without mentioning war.