by R. M. Meluch
Nearly two decades earlier, during peacetime, Calli had attended the prestigious Imperial Military Institute on Palatine. Numa Pompeii had been One of her instructors—a belittling, scornful bastard of a non-instructive instructor.
Calli had since used Pompeii’s overweening pride and disdain against him. She had embarrassed the Triumphalis more than once in battle.
Another of her instructors at the Imperial Military Institute had been Gaius Bruccius Eleutherius Americanus. Gaius was not a native Roman. He had been born on Earth, christened Dante Porter, an impoverished, ill-educated U.S. citizen. He had attended a school system that passed students out like bilge water. It had scandalized and mortified the U.S. when an American citizen renounced his citizenship to sell himself into slavery in the Roman Empire just to get an education.
“Property rights” on Palatine often referred to rights of the property. Dante the slave had the right to food, shelter, and a Roman education. Roman education was uniformly excellent. Dante earned his education, his freedom, and his Roman citizenship.
Renamed Gaius by the Bruccius family who adopted him, he rose from the bottom of society’s birdcage to become a Senator, Consul, and right hand to Caesar Magnus.
Gaius Americanus had been young Calli’s mentor at the Institute. He had seen in her a sharp intellect and a fellow outsider. He had been willing to help someone driven to learn.
Calli never stopped adoring him.
She wished like hell she could just lose this message. She would have, except she had been entrusted by John Farragut to deliver it. Farragut’s trust had a nearly magical force that made people risk anything not to disappoint him.
She could only pray that Gaius would refuse Numa Pompeii’s invitation.
Gaius Americanus had not come to Fort Eisenhower for his own safety. Gaius came to the Deep to keep his family out of reach of Romulus’ long knives.
Gaius knew that a man who would kill his own father would not hesitate to do the same to the wife and children of his chief rival if it served him.
Coming out here had been a political mistake. But Gaius valued his family above all else. If he had to do it over again, his decision would be the same.
He recognized immediately—even before Magnus was declared dead—that Romulus had been ready and waiting to seize control out of the chaos. Romulus had anticipated the chaos.
Gaius immediately knew he was the next target, and he moved his family out of Romulus’ range. He tried to keep in mind the words of Philip II, upon a retreat: I fall back like the ram, to charge again harder. But this ram was finding the footing too slippery to mount any kind of charge.
It did not help that Romulus was an effective leader. Gaius had been asked, “If he’s a good leader, why would you want to overthrow him?” The question amazed him. How could a patricide be a good leader? Foul was foul. Was Hitler a good leader except for the Holocaust? He had also been told, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” To which he tried to explain, “It’s broke.”
No one wanted to hear that. The expedience of evil allowed decent citizens to turn blind and deaf when it served them.
“What does it make you when you allow a man without morals, without ethics, to lead you?” Gaius said.
“Roman.” That was the American answer.
The report of Augustus’ death came as a blow to Gaius’ efforts to assemble a power base. Without Magnus, without Augustus, Gaius was the sole witness that Magnus named a successor in his last testament. That Gaius was the named successor made him an unconvincing witness.
Then came the invitation to leave the shelter of the U.S. fortress to go out and talk with Numa Pompeii.
The Triumphalis had never been Gaius’ political ally. Numa Pompeii was a hawk, a grandiose, bread-andcircuses sort of Roman. A charismatic politician, an opportunist. A bully. But Numa Pompeii was loyal to the empire—his own vision of the empire—but still his loyalty lay with Rome.
Trust him, Gaius did not. Gaius could not risk his family. But he could risk his own life. He accepted Numa Pompeii’s invitation to come out and talk.
Even before the declaration of war, big ships never docked directly with the main station of Fort Eisenhower. And displacement in or out of the station had never been permitted. Jammers made sure it never happened.
Fort Eisenhower encompassed an assemblage of space stations in a volume of space roughly the size of a small planet. Lights refracted off the exhaust gases from ships and stations, turning the fortress into a manmade nebula, colorful and shining.
At the heart of it, heavily protected, sat one terminus of the Shotgun. Either end of the Fort Roosevelt/Fort Eisenhower Shotgun was a prime target in wartime.
Smuggling Gaius out of Fort Ike required a balance between secrecy and the need not to be mistaken for a bogey by the trigger-happy fortress defenses.
The plan called for a small craft to ferry Gaius Americanus from the main station out of Fort Eisenhower to Calli’s heavily armed ship, Wolfhound. Wolfhound would then carry him to the meeting site.
Calli Carmel came into the main station in person to collect Gaius. Calli was one of few people permitted to carry a sidearm here. She escorted the Roman Senator to the dock.
She wanted to tell Gaius that Augustus lived. But giving information to the enemy was the act of a traitor. Gaius was Roman. She was American. They were at war.
Let Numa tell him.
Security had cleared the corridors of all extraneous personnel. No tourists, no workers, no military personnel except those who needed to be there were there. They had cleared the receptacles of all confiscated goods, emptied the trash, chased off the vendors. Military dogs gave the path a good sniff, then security cleared away the dogs.
Calli and Gaius were scanned and analyzed and verified one more time.
They walked through a semirigid tunnel to the hatch of the Space Patrol Torpedo boat—SPT or Spit boat, as it was known in the Navy.
Gaius halted, looked inside the craft, suddenly wary. “Where is the pilot?”
“I’m the pilot,” said Calli. Saw his face. “What? You don’t trust me?”
“They used to call you Crash Carmel.”
“They still do,” said Calli.
“Is there a reason for that?”
“I wrinkled a couple of ships,” Calli admitted. “There was some shooting and fire involved.” Gaius looked hesitant, which was fine with Calli. She offered, hopeful, “You can still call this off.” Gaius stepped through the hatch to board the Spit boat. This was the weakest link of the journey. Calli told him, “If we get hit, it will be here.”
Gaius nodded. He strapped himself into the copilot’s seat beside Calli.
The Spit boat had a rhino hull. Most ships relied on their energy fields rather than their physical hulls to keep the vacuum out. A rhino hull could survive in space even without a distortion shell around it.
“No weaponry?” Gaius noted.
“We’ll be inside a hook for all but a few seconds,” said Calli. “Inside the hook, we wouldn’t be able to launch a torpedo even if we had one.”
Fort Ike was secure, but it hung in the ocean of infinity. Wolfhound waited, as close as she was allowed.
A treacherous gulf stretched between them.
Calli was not even really piloting the boat. The Spit boat would be first pushed by the station hook, then pulled by Wolfhound’s hook.
There would be a precarious instant in which the station gave up its hook and Wolfhound replaced it with its own force field.
Calli heard the controllers exchanging messages over the com. The instruction came from Wolfhound to the station, “Cut hook, Ike.”
The instruction resonated on the proper harmonic. Calli recognized the voice and inflection of her lieutenant, Amina Patel, on Wolfhound.
Fort Eisenhower responded, “Cutting hook, aye. Your boat, Wolfhound”
The Spit boat was now naked to the stars.
In the next instant the boat was surrounded by
a new energy bubble. Wolfhound had thrown out a hook, bringing the Spit boat into her protection.
Wolfhound commenced reeling the craft in. Calli sat back in her seat and exhaled. She cast Gaius a fleeting little smile that was a confession of nervousness just passed. They were both feeling better now.
“That was the naked part,” Calli told Gaius.
Then lights appeared, flashing off Wolfhound. Someone was hitting her with beam fire from the direction of outer space.
Because beams traveled at light speed, you never see them coming until they’re hitting you or passing you through gaseous matter.
Because the attacker was actually hitting a moving target with a light speed weapon, that meant he had to be close.
Calli clicked on the com, “Wolfhound! This is Captain Carmel. Lieutenant Patel, give me a status!”
The reply came from the com tech, with a lot of earnest voices audible in the background, “Unknown attacker, Captain. At indeterminate distance. Possibly retreating.”
Retreating, but still firing. There were a lot of flashes. Wolfhound’s force field sparkled like blown glass.
The aging Wolfhound did not generate as adamant an energy field as Merrimack’s, which allowed Mack to stand closer to a black hole than any solid object had a right to.
Still, the Hound’s field was stout enough to weather this barrage. It was not a convincing attack in Calli’s judgment. The beams were having no effect except to light up the ship’s bow. Some of the shots were going wide, which meant the attacker was taking aim from a distance of over several light-seconds. It was not an efficient attack at all.
Flights of Rattlers, launched from the space fort, streaked out in the direction of the beam weapon. The brute, snub-nosed, bulky gunships of the space cavalry bristled with heavy ordinance, itching for a fight.
Beams continued to light up the Wolfhound.
“Has the look of a diversion,” Calli murmured.
“I concur,” said Gaius.
The two of them might have been back at the Institute discussing an interesting scenario. Except for the sensation of death tightening Calli’s throat. “So where aren’t we supposed to be looking?” Calli said, checking the Tac readouts.
Wolfhound’s defensive systems would automatically arrange her force field to present the thickest part of her field toward the source of the attack.
Wolfhound, like any ship, was most vulnerable through her engine vents in her stern. Calli slammed on the com. “Lieutenant Patel! Never mind the beam fire! Cover the Hound’s ass!”
A projectile rocketed up Wolfriound’s engine vent. The missile did not penetrate but it made the force field grow tenuous. Made the slender energy hook that held the Spit boat flicker.
“Numa, you bastard—/”
In that instant, an incendiary round from somewhere very close and astern pierced the Spit boat.
A flash of fire filled the cabin.
The dialogs. II.
JMdeC: I admit that I find the open-ended, negatively curved model of the universe philosophically disappointing. I wanted to see a positive curve. At the end of the Big Bang, I rather like the idea of the Big Crunch, in which everything compresses back down to an infinite point and bangs anew. It reflects the nature of the universe as I observe it around me—death and rebirth. Plants going to seed, dying, born again in their progeny. Instead of a second bang we seem to be doomed to a whimper. It disappoints my sense of what ought to be—cycles of seasons, cycles of procreation. The negatively curved universe ends in eternal night. The Biblical Outer Darkness, where lost souls go in the end.
A: Well, hell, Don Cordillera.
JMdeC: Yes. Hell. I reject the medieval, sadistically conceived vision of hell. Hell is the absence of God. If you reject God, then you simply die. If you put yourself into the hands of God, you transcend this physical reality to be with God. After everything else is gone, something lives, while the physical universe of attenuated atoms becomes the Outer Darkness.
A: That’s where I’m going. And I have news, so are you.
JMdeC: The corporeal me, yes. The part of me that transcends the physical house, no.
A: And where do you propose to go? JMdeC: Elsewhere.
6
YOU CAN’T DO BATTLE in space with an enemy who won’t stand. Merrimack raced out to the source point of the diversionary fire that had hammered Wolflhound but that shooter was long gone. Captain Farragut tried to hail Gladiator on the old harmonic, but Gladiator was not responding. Anyone listening on the official harmonic had heard Calli’s last words: “Numa, you bastard—” Some doubted her ID of her assailant. But it was not necessarily a reasonable doubt.
Numa Pompeii had not stayed in the area to explain, deny, or take credit for the attack, or to find out if Gaius survived it.
Likely Numa was on his way to Palatine. Numa Pompeii had something to offer Romulus now. He had the death of Gaius Americanus.
Still, there were other Romans in the Deep End who could have hit Wolfhound.
The Roman Legion carrier Horlatius was out here somewhere. Marcus Asinius was in command of the ship if not the Legion.
Marcus Asinius and his Legion Draconis had no love for Romulus. They respected John Farragut, but their loyalty lay absolutely with Rome.
Farragut could not see Marcus Asinius participating in an assassination of a Roman Senator. But Marcus could have hit Wolfhound without knowing there was a target beyond Wolfhound or without knowing the identity of the passenger in the Spit boat.
And Augustus was out there.
“That wasn’t Augustus,” said Farragut, fact.
“Sir?” said Commander Dent, less certain. The Augustus she knew was a first magnitude prick.
“Augustus is still devoted to Magnus. Gaius was Magnus’ chosen heir. If Augustus were anywhere near this neighborhood, Gaius would have made it where he was going.”
Augustus had to be on a spearline to either Palatine or to Caesar’s mobile palace Fortress Aeyrie to kill Romulus.
The U.S. Rattlers of Fort Eisenhower had caught the second shooter immediately, the one who fired the kill shot on the Spit boat—a lone man in a small craft, not a patterner’s Striker. The Rattlers killed him. Killed him a bunch of times. Kept killing him because they could not undo what he did to Captain Carmel.
The burn unit in the main station of Fort Ike smelled like medical gel. “Is Calli—?” Farragut was about to say all right, but he knew she was not all right. “—alive?”
The doctor hesitated, looked thoughtful.
“She’s dead?” Farragut filled in the silence.
“Those are interesting questions,” said the doctor. Too detached for Farragut’s liking. Doctor Emil Embry. Older guy, not some kid who joined the Navy to learn the trade. Cool and steady. Almost callous. “She lost a major organ. We are regrowing one for her.”
“Which organ?”
“Her skin.”
Farragut knew that Calli had been burned. “How bad?”
“One hundred percent BSA,” said Dr. Embry. “I’m used to Naval acronyms, Doc. I don’t know your alphabet clumps.”
“BSA. Body Surface Area. She has no skin. It was all necrotic, so we had to remove it. We are oxygenating her through medical gel.”
“Will she—?”
Live?
Dr. Embry heard the unspoken word. “If I have anything to say about it, Captain Farragut. And, if may I say so, that counts for a hell of a lot.”
Confidence was a good thing in a physician. Farragut felt the muscles in his neck relax a little. He held his head higher. “What about internal damage?”
“The fire damage was mostly on the surface. She did not inhale, which is a blessing. It was a flash fry. It left her muscles in decent shape. Only the outer layer got cooked. Like fried ice cream.”
Farragut muffled a sound of startled disgust that rose in his throat.
“Or baked Alaska.”
“Oh, for Jesus.”
“Her internal o
rgans are getting assistance. So she’s in remarkably good condition—for a woman without skin.” Farragut cast a glance upward. God? Sir? Thank you. And back to the doctor: “What about the Roman Senator, Gaius Americanus?”
“I’m less certain about the prognosis for the Roman. He is a strong man, but he’s working too hard. He won’t come down from the hyperdynamic phase. We’re watching him for acidosis, burn encephalopathy, and renal failure. Mister Carmel’s body is behaving more sensibly.”
“Can I see her?”
“She may not want anyone to see her.”
“Let me see her.”
Dr. Embry admitted the captain to Calli’s chamber in the secure area of the burn unit. Even though the doctor had warned him, John Farragut was not quite ready for the sight.
Removal of her skin left her as a piece of Calli-shaped meat suspended in pink gel in a tank. With her drastically reduced vascular volume, she was kept in a literal blood bath. Medical gel supplied the tissues with oxygen and fluids. There were entubated auxiliary organs working outboard of her body to lessen the stress on her own. Farragut recognized a kidney and a liver.
There was a breathing tube down her throat. They must have blocked her nostrils—wherever those were.
Farragut squinted through the gel from several angles.
“Where’s—? Does she—? Does she have a jaw?”
Dr. Embry spoke very softly, “No. Shattered.”
Farragut had a replacement jaw himself, so he supposed the jawbone was the least of her worries. No jaw. That meant she had taken a blow to the face. “How’s her brain?”
“In good condition,” Dr. Embry answered softly. “That’s a hardheaded woman.”
“I can testify to that, sir,” said Captain Farragut.
Over the speakers Pachelbel’s “Canon in D” played soft joy. It made Farragut feel like he ought to be standing at an altar waiting for a bride.