Strength and Honor

by R. M. Meluch

  The music and Dr. Embry’s abrupt switch from callous jackass to a soft-spoken bedside manner made Farragut wonder, “Can she hear me?”

  “Possibly,” said Dr. Embry. “She’s in an induced coma, but her brain is functioning on the subconscious level and she still has her eardrums. So I thought—” He gave a shrug at the lilting music from the speakers. “Why not?”

  Farragut was a tactile person. He would have held Calli’s hand, but she was entirely inside the antiseptic tank, encased with medical gel. And she had no skin. He put his palm to the transparent barrier.

  He spoke to her. “Well, hell, Crash. You bent another boat. Gaius is alive.” She would need to know that. “And so are you, just in case you’re wondering. They’ve got you in the pink medical slime. And I gotta tell you it’s not your best color.”

  He kept his voice buoyant. Did not want to sound like he was attending her funeral. She looked ghastly. “Gypsy’s coming in to see you after I get back. You know we can’t both leave the boat at the same time.”

  Gypsy Dent had been Calli’s XO on the Wolfhound before Gypsy came to Merrimack. Calli and Gypsy were tight as sisters.

  “They got the guy who flamed you. They’re still picking pieces of him out of the vacuum with a sieve. You know him. I’ll tell you who it was when you get out of there.”

  Hie kill shot on the Spit boat had come from a small Roman sleeper vessel, which had been trolling in the dark outside Fort Eisenhower for a very long time. It housed a single pilot—a disgraced Roman sent to redeem himself with a long, long, lonely vigil, waiting for a suicide task.

  The second shooter’s identity tended to support the idea of Numa Pompeii as the shooter of the diversionary fire.

  Farragut quit the chamber, shaken.

  He clasped Embry’s hand firmly in leaving. “Take care of her, Doc.”

  “I have every faith in Mister Carmel,” said Dr. Embry. “And in me.”

  “That’s what I need to hear.”

  “Captain,” Dr. Embry caught him on an afterthought. “There is a space lawyer who keeps trying to get in here. I find the persistence of lawyers offensive. I don’t need hyenas and jackals in my hospital. He’s Navy and keeps quoting code at me. I confess I know as much law as he knows medicine, so I have no idea if he’s making a valid legal point or not, and I don’t care. Can you arrange a restraining order on him?”

  Farragut was about to agree but hesitated on a second thought. “Is he this tall,” Farragut asked, his hand over his own six-foot-one head, “This big around?” He made a circle with his fingers. “Looks about fifteen years old, and I’m told he’s cute?”

  “That about describes him, yes.”

  “Make sure his DNA checks to Rob Roy Buchanan and let him in. He’s not her lawyer.” He used to be her lawyer, but Calli had fired him a while back. “Oh, and tell him to get a shave.”

  Captain Farragut proceeded from the secure burn unit to the stationmaster’s office.

  General Aniston Weld was long past harried. Long past trying to hold everything together. By now he was just watching the pieces fall and adding another note to his list of things that needed addressing.

  Things that had been Priority One just a day ago were now somewhere around number eighty-four with a twelve-ton sinker.

  The man in putative control of Fort Eisenhower was not even sure what he was dealing with—an act of war or an internal assassination within the Roman Empire. He knew it happened in his fort and it took out a U.S. Navy captain with it. Captain Carmel may have been the real target for all General Weld knew.

  General Weld listened in an odd state of defeated calm as an animated Captain Farragut rattled off rapid fire:

  “The Romans have someone inside Fort Eisenhower. He’s probably inside the main station. Someone had to let the shooters know that Gaius Americanus was leaving the station, when he was leaving, and which ship he was on. The mole is likely communicating to the outside by resonance. Resonance leaves no trace. This is a huge fort here, so instead of screening everyone, we should pull the recordings from the surveillance monitors on the burn unit. The mole will follow up to see if Gaius lives. Identify all visitors or loiterers at the burn unit since the attack. Our mole might be one of them.”

  The stationmaster listened until Farragut came up for a breath, then watched him for another minute like he was observing some energetic alien creature. Weld spoke at last, “You a control addict, Captain Farragut?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Hm.” It was a satisfied hm. The admission was disarming. “I suppose you’ll want all those ‘visitors and loiterers’ smelled too.”

  “Please,” said Farragut. He wanted them all investigated. “Sniff hard.”

  “I suppose that’s reasonable,” General Weld said, riffling through his contact list. “I’ll hand it over to my Intelligence unit.”

  “How’s your intelligence here?”

  “Not as good as I thought, now, is it?” Weld said dryly. He paged his Chief Intelligence officer and gave him the burn unit surveillance assignment.

  General Weld clicked off the com, returned to Farragut. “Interesting that you bring up the burn unit visitors. There has already been one suspicious character in and out of the burn unit. He hasn’t been able to get in, but I’ve been told—repeatedly—that he’s persistent. Space lawyer, name—” He snapped his fingers, couldn’t place it, leafed through his handwritten notes for something way down below eighty-fourth on the priority list.

  “Rob Roy Buchanan,” said Farragut.

  “That’s the one. Your man?”

  “No. But I’d bet my eyeteeth he’s clean. Go ahead and check him anyway. We can’t overlook anything.”

  “Oh we can” Weld sighed. “We just mustn’t.”

  John Farragut strode through the station to the shuttle dock for his return to Merrimack. Security was tight on all shuttles now. There used to be dozens of them launching any given minute throughout the space fort. Now interstation traffic was a backlogged mess.

  Someone is pulling off my wings. Farragut was not thinking about the shuttles.

  Thinking of Calli in the bloody tank.

  Missing Jose Maria, his father figure. The kind and wise way his father had never been. Jose Maria was gone, homeward bound on a space yacht named Mercedes. And Augustus. Missing—of all people to miss— Augustus. And that thought almost made him laugh.

  Alarms sounded. Hatches shut. Red lights flashed. A lot of sounds rose from the travelers—gasps, murmurs, shouts, demands, cries, questions.

  A soothing female voice over the loud com announced that the dock was under lockdown and thanked the travelers, some of them shrieking now, for their patience.

  The bells sounded an unfamiliar alarm sequence. Farragut knew all of Ike’s codes, and he had never heard this particular one.

  It had never happened.

  Fort Ike was under attack.

  Roman attack craft winked in, on all sides of the space fortress, as they dropped from FTL. One of them was the Legion carrier Horatius.

  Perimeter sentinels had detected the unauthorized approach to the fortress. Barriers went up, energized grids meshed and locked tight, enclosing all the stations of the fortress in a planetary-sized energy shell. No ships, no ordnance could pass in or out without the controller creating an opening.

  Nothing was getting through right now.

  Roman fire, Roman drones, a Roman destroyer, all caromed off the adamant barrier.

  You could see the Roman barrage visually from here, through the wide viewports—flash after flash against their solid sky.

  People rushed around Farragut, who stood at the dock with a finger in one ear to block out the noise as he shouted into his wrist com: “Gypsy, I’m not getting out of here. She’s your boat.” And to let Gypsy get on with her job, he said, “Let me talk to Hamster.”

  Lieutenant Hamilton took over com contact with the captain. “Hamilton, aye.”

  “Where are y’all? In
or out?”

  “We’re inside the grid,” Hamster answered.

  That was more bad than good. Good that Merrimack was safe, but very much not good that she could not fire on the attackers unless the controller made a window in the titanic energy shell—or if the attackers breached the perimeter.

  The grid defenses heaved out energy bolts, space javelins, chaser rounds, and beams, to put on a dizzying show. John Farragut could not tell from here if they were having any effect.

  “Number and nature of hostiles?” he asked Hamster. “Horatius for one. Those will be your boarders if they can get close to a station to throw a corvus.”

  “Won’t happen. They have to get through the grid first. Then a station field.”

  “Eight cruisers and eleven destroyers are their pounders,” Hamster continued. “No Gladiator. No Striker.”

  The attackers banged at the joints in the grid. Auto-gunnery sprayed beams at them. Missile silos hurled out hard ordnance.

  “These ships are new designs,” said Hamster. “We don’t have their specs in our data bank. How can there be this many Roman ships?”

  “It means Romulus started executing this attack at least three months before he declared war,” said Farragut.

  It took three months to cross the Abyss. This attack force launched from Roman territory a while ago.

  “There are drones everywhere,” Hamster reported. “Can’t give you a good count. We think we’ve been double and triple counting them. They jump to FTL and come back.” Then as if she had just been passed a note, “We have IDs on some of these ships. She read off the ship names and their commanders. Gens names like Trogus, Quirinius, Umbrius—”

  “This reads like a list of everyone Romulus wants dead,” said Hamster.

  “The psychotic bastard isn’t stupid,” said Farragut.

  Romulus had sent his political opponents to a very hard target to field-test the new weaponry.

  “This is nobody I want to kill,” said Hamster.

  Romulus no doubt sent them out with standard Spartan orders: With your shield or on it. Victorious or dead. Romulus could not lose either way.

  The legion carrier Horatius charged at the grid and immediately glanced off the energy barrier as if making too steep an approach to a planet’s atmosphere. The big ship spun out to space, winked out, gone FTL.

  A pack of U.S. Rattlers that were outside the grid jumped past the light barrier to give chase. It was nearly impossible to chase an FTL target, but Rattlers had high threshold velocities and were probably hoping that Horatius had winked out because she was wounded.

  As soon as the lockdown lifted from the dock to let the trapped travelers retreat back into the station, Farragut ran to the stationmaster’s office.

  General Weld was not there. A cadre of Marines told him where the general had gone. Two of the Marines escorted him to the Fort Ike command center. They ushered him through a crush of reporters who were camped outside the command center hatch.

  The reporters reacted with a horrified frenzy to see Captain John Farragut here, away from mighty Merrimack, in this time of crisis. Recorders followed him. He heard his name reported in voices of alarm and doom, talking about him like Samson without hair. Merrimack without her Captain Farragut. A mortal blow to station defenses. They transmitted their apocalyptic reports to Earth under huge banners: UNDER SIEGE!

  Farragut made it through the hatch into the command center, where all the voices were low, quick, clear, and efficient.

  General Weld was organizing his forces, taking in tactical reports. He glanced up. Double-took. Eyed Farragut up and down. Much calmer than the reporters, he said, “Well, this is unsettling.”

  General Weld had the most formidable battleship in the United States on hand—except that its head was cut off. Figured.

  “Commander Dent doesn’t play in the farm league, sir,” Captain Farragut defended his exec.

  Weld returned to his com, demanding of someone: “Where’s the Striker? Anyone pick up the Striker yet?” It was a tired sort of demand.

  Weld clicked off and gave his attention to Farragut. “If you have any suggestions, I’ll listen to them.”

  Farragut jumped at the invitation. “You’ve got Rattlers outside searching for Horatius. Don’t let them get suckered into a chase. Marcus will just draw them out, turn around and eat them. If your boys and girls want to shoot at Horatius, don’t worry, he’ll come back. He’s not going to stay out there with nothing to shoot at. He has orders to take the fort or die trying.”

  “Horatius” Weld echoed. “That was one of yours.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Horatius had been a member of Commodore Farragut’s Attack Group One.

  Weld issued the recall to the pursuing Rattlers.

  Farragut heard someone else in the command center signaling Fort Ted. “Fort Roosevelt. This is Fort Eisenhower. Are you under attack?”

  The answer came back negative. There had been no attack on the Near Space terminus of the Shotgun. Damaging one end was all it took to disable the Shotgun. With one end out, the other was useless.

  Tactical reported: “Roman drones inside the containment zone.” Weld put off any exclamation of shock and impossibility that came to mind. He told the controller to put Merrimack on the interior drones.

  The controller complied. “Merrimack. Merrimack. Merrimack. This is Fort Eisenhower Control. I have trade for you. Seek and destroy enemy hostiles within the containment zone.”

  Only then did Weld say to one of his officers, “How in bloody hell did they get inside the grid? Locate the breach.”

  “Grid holding solid, sir,” Tactical advised. “Nothing came through the containment field.”

  Closer flashes appeared now, clearer without the distortion barrier in between. The new lights would be Merrimack annihilating Roman rovers inside the fortress’ energy sphere.

  Farragut turned his com to the Marine harmonic so he could listen to the Swift pilots’ excited chatter, shooting skeet.

  “Mine mine mine mine— Oh, you hog!”

  “Don’t polish that cannonball, Darb! Take the foxtrotting shot!”

  “Ho! Shitska! Didja see that!” That was the voice of Alpha Six, Kerry Blue.

  “See what?”

  The station controller evidently saw what Alpha Six saw. Reported: “Drones appear to be getting inside the containment zone by displacement.”

  “How?” Weld demanded. “Are they jamming our jammers?”

  “No, sir. We don’t have any jammers outside the stations. The station jammers are all functioning. We just never put jammers in the empty space between the stations.”

  “We have a fifth column,” Weld concluded. “Who planted displacement receivers in space?”

  It had been known to happen before—the placement of Roman landing disks (LDs) in space. No bigger than dinner plates, LDs looked like space debris. This attack had been three months in the approach. The local mole had three months to figure out how to sneak LDs out there between the many stations of the space fort.

  “Merrimack. Merrimack. Merrimack. This is Fort Eisenhower Control. Seek and destroy displacement equipment in the vacuum.”

  “Fort Eisenhower. This is Merrimack. Already on it. Aye.”

  The voices coming over the Marine channel sounded like kids on a coin hunt, calling out their victories.

  One Swift fired on a displacement disk at the precise instant that a Drone flashed into existence on the disk. Vaporized both of them. “Yahtzee!”

  “Didja see that! Didja see that!”

  A boom tremored the deck of the command center. The sound came from a com, not from an explosion within the station, but so loud they all felt it. Six more explosions in chain reaction followed.

  “Not encouraging,” said Weld. “What was that?”

  A missile silo on the perimeter had taken a shot up the nose. And its magazine had an insufficient firewall to contain the eruption of its contents.

  Because of t
he distortion shroud, the command center was having trouble assessing the damage.

  Tactical reported: “Horatius back in range.”

  Weld’s graying brows gave a little lift, marking Farragut’s successful prediction. The command center was receiving feeds from various U.S. media transmitting from Near Space. One featured interviews with anxious families at Fort Ted waiting for their loved ones stranded in the Deep End. The reports lamented in dire tones the inability of the U.S. to send reinforcements to the besieged Fort Eisenhower while the Shotgun was shut down. They forecast what destruction of the Shotgun could mean to the U.S., its people, its economy.

  President Marissa Johnson made an appearance, decrying the attack. Her staff had immediately figured out that this attack began before the declaration of war. She called on the League of Earth Nations to break its neutrality and take a stand against the belligerent Roman Empire.

  General Weld glanced up at one of the monitors. Saw the Near Space media feed cut over to visuals of the missile silo at the perimeter exploding. “Are we on broadcast?” Weld asked, then answered himself, wearily, “Of course we’re on broadcast.”

  The perimeter explosions were out there for the whole galaxy to see.Then rerun, because they were spectacular— the initial blast, six more explosions, the anxious voice of the reporter with background screams inside the station.

  “That’s it,” said Farragut.

  Fire ships clustered round the Shotgun, spewing blue fire suppressant onto the piers. The sensor stations were coated with the stuff. Tire displacement equipment belched enormous plumes of smoke into space. The dirty clouds spread, curled inward at the energy grid. Bottled inside the energy barrier, the thick clouds made Fort Eisenhower look like a gargantuan murky crystal ball portending an ominous future.

  The media picked up the images, sent them across the known galaxy in an instant on resonant feed with the news:

  FORT EISENHOWER SHOTGUN DESTROYED

  The dialogs. III.

  A: There is no elsewhere. This is the universe.

  JMdeC: If there is no “elsewhere,” then whence the original Bang? It is terribly parochial to think that this is the only everything there is. The Greek word cosmos meant universe. It also meant world. Because the world was their entire universe at the time the word was coined. But there is more to the universe than planet Earth. Can we assume this cosmos, the one that we can observe now, is the only one? You must admit the possibility of universes other than this putative everything. Admit that something beyond our conception and perception could exist.