The Myriad: Tour of the Merrimack #1 (20 page)

Damn you, Colonel. Damn you.

But she found her anger slippery. Couldn’t hold it. He’d come to her like a dam breaking. A big, blundering, wounded moose. Love like a train wreck. That kind of passion was a force of its own. An endearing need one must love in return.

Reg’s whisper from below made her jump. “Do you think the colonel is cute?”

Kerry clutched her pillow, holding in panic. Why was Reg asking her that? Did she know?

No. This was slumber-party chat. Just talking. Kerry dodged the question, “You know blonds aren’t my first choice.”

A yawn. Sound of stretching. A sigh. “You don’t think he’s cute?”

Overwhelming. Magnificent. Breathtaking.
Cute?
“No!”

From the other side of the partition: “I’m cute.”

“Shut up, Dak.”

Steele put a foot on the first ladder rung, felt the vibration of someone climbing up. He looked down, primed to challenge some space swabbie for right of way. Instead his jaw clenched as he recognized the close-cropped, tight, dark curls on the top of the ascending head. He stepped aside to give way to Colonel Augustus. Hated getting close to him. Could never get past him without comment.

This time it was an arch smile. “Ah. Flattop. Here.” Augustus offered him a record bubble.

Steele eyed it suspiciously. He did not want anything Augustus had to offer. Still, the undercurrent of smug, malicious glee put him on guard. “What is it?”

“There are no copies, so you can erase it if you want.” Augustus was blithe. “But I wouldn’t. It’s really impressive.”

A horrible prickle stung Steele’s mouth at the sound of Augustus’ diabolical chuckle. And in case there was any doubt:

“The part where you told her this is not being recorded was not accurate.”

White-blonds could not contain a blush. Steele knew he was flaming red. Ears on fire. “You are spying on me!”

Augustus was serene, almost congenial. “You knew I had a rover on Flight Sergeant Blue.”

The color drained right out. He had known. He forgot. Or just assumed the recorder had been removed after Kerry’s rescue from the poison gas.

Augustus held the bubble in the flat of his palm. “You owe me.”

Steele snatched the recording. “You are such a dick.”

“You’re welcome.”

Middle watch took forever coming round again. Kerry waited for the corridors to clear, then furtively scampered up the ladder to the officers’ deck, let herself into Steele’s cabin, heart in her throat. Never felt like this. Afraid she was in love with the moose.

Came in as he was dragging on a shirt, his back toward her. Brawny shoulders flexed, great power in the motion. Her mouth opened, but words clogged, choked. She blurted, “Your name better be Thomas.”

He turned, a smile on his lips. Then his brow furled and he stalked the two steps toward her, scowling darkly. He took her face in his hands, tilted her face this way and that to study her side bars.

Satisfied the recorders were gone, he relaxed. The smile returned. “It is. Why?”

“Oh, thank God. I was sure it was Theodore. Is it Tom or Thomas?”

“My friends call me TR.”

“I’m not your friends. And when it gets down to the short strokes, ‘Oh, TR! Oh, TR!’ ain’t gonna fly. And ‘Oh, Colonel!’ is just too queer.”

“Thomas, then. No one who ever mattered ever called me Tom. And you better be whispering.” He rapped a big fist against the paper-thin bulk.

“That’s gonna be tough. I’m a natural screamer.”

“I know,” he said, grim. Had heard many a name cried in ecstasy from the lower deck, like a stab in the gut.

“Thomas,” she tried out the sound. Whispering. “I’m just Kerry.”

“I know, Marine.”

“Oh.” Disappointed. “You’re one of those guys who never calls a girl by name so you don’t call the old girlfriend’s name by mistake?”

“So I don’t call
yours
by mistake, unless you mean to quit the Corps, which I wouldn’t mind. But that’s your choice.”

“Oh.” Very considerate. She wasn’t used to consideration. “You’re the oldest man I’ve ever been with.”

“Screw you.”

Why had she said that? You’re an idiot, Blue. But he knows that. “Any time. What I meant was, you know how they say men are horniest when they’re seventeen? I mean, how come you didn’t
kill
someone when you were seventeen?”

“Did I hurt you?”

There was that consideration thing again. Not an acquired taste. She liked it immediately. “No. But you gots to know I’m not Snow White.”

“That was to make you forget everyone who knows you’re not Snow White.”

“You’re jealous.”

“Shit.” That was a yes.

“So, um, where do we go from here? I mean, is there . . . ?” This meant too much and she was getting scared to finish the question. Afraid to assume. She’d assumed a lot with Cowboy. What in hell had she ever seen in that
boy?
“Are we going somewhere? I mean, if that was it, that’s okay, but—”

“That was
not
IT.”

She could see through his snarls now. Felt a big smile sprawl all over her face. “So where does that . . . go?”

“Hell, Marine. I am so far out of bounds I can’t
see
the bounds. I have no authority in this situation. You got an idea, I’ll listen to it.”

Steele never ever asked for suggestions. But they were in never ever land, so why not. “When can I see you again?”

“That’s my girl. All tactical. No strategy.”

“I’m waiting for you to kiss me. Now works for me.”

She was not used to his smiles. Looked kind of sappy, kind of boyish on his face. Made her twinge inside. Felt the heat between them as he took her face in his hands again.

The hatch lock at her back scraped with a soft, experimental turn. She whirled, grabbed the handle, and fought the bar’s stealthy turn. Steele’s tree limb of an arm reached over her shoulder to add his strength to hers. She craned around to look up at him wide-eyed, mouthed the words: Who is that?

His head shook, unknowing.

The intruder fought the stiffness, gave the handle a yank, then knocked. “Sir?” Young voice. Male.

“What?”
Steele roared.

“You awake, sir?”

“I am now. What is it?”

“Mr. Carmel’s compliments, sir.”

Kerry muttered. “I can take her. I’ll take that beauty queen right out.”

The voice went on, “Captain’s on the bridge, sir.”

“Thank you. Beat it.”

“Sir.”

Footsteps retreated.

Steele’s arms enclosed Kerry, kissed her neck.

And let her go. When she turned around, he had turned back into the granite man she had long known, that dour battle mask engraved into his face. She demanded, “What? What happened?”

He reached for his combat uniform. “Hit the rack, Marine. Sleep in your acid fatigues.”

Acid-resistant fatigues were for fighting the Hive.

Gorgons.

But the telltales were still. She didn’t understand. “What’s happening?”

He said only: “Farragut.”

Captain Farragut made an unexpected appearance on the command deck. One of his quieter entrances, in part because he was barefoot, and in part in consequence of the cup of coffee from the muscular end of the pot he nursed. He was supposed to be asleep, and part of him still was. Still in the olive drab T-shirt and sweatpants that he customarily wore to bed.

And Hamster, accustomed to having the bridge to herself in middle watch, inhaled to announce him, but his open hand signaled her to ignore him.

The lieutenant settled guardedly back into the captain’s chair. Farragut prowled to the sensor monitors. Ran a hand through his tousled hair. Sharp smell from the cup in his other hand burned the air in his wake.

Hamster sat rigid, as if at attention. She sent a discreet message to the XO’s quarters. “Captain’s on the bridge.” And in no time, Calli Carmel appeared, in uniform. Her long hair, tied back, was still wet from an interrupted shower.

The whole ship quietly stirred.

Hands clasped behind her, Calli stood at the captain’s side. “What’ve you got, John?”

“We’re close.”

Calli sniffed his cup, wrinkled her nose. “Are you sure you’re not smelling
that?
”

“They’re out here,” he murmured. Lifted his cup to his lips. Made the mistake of looking into it. Looked like a melted burr. He lowered the cup.

Augustus was next on the bridge. Roman chemical-resistant fatigues were black, not the fetching mustard yellow of U.S. issue. Someone must have told him what it meant when John Farragut went sleepwalking to the bridge in middle watch. All of
Merrimack
tiptoed around him.

Augustus placed no credence in prescience in the mystic sense; and the expectancy, which Augustus would pass off in another man, in John Farragut was something else. He trusted it as an elemental perception. Perception of exactly what, he could not name. Chaos, perhaps. John Farragut had a fine sense of chaos. Like the dog that barks before the earthquake, howling at he knows not what. A natural creature-sense for something not yet measured. John Farragut was on the bridge.

So Augustus was not the least surprised to hear the lookout chime: “Occultation at thirty-five by nine on a ninety-degree line.”

Hamster: “Stationary or moving?”

“Boogying, sir. Two hundred c.”

“Dog it.” Hamster’s last command as she surrendered command.

“Kill the running lights and fall in behind the bogey,” Calli relayed the order as John Farragut slid into his chair.

The captain seemed to increase in stature. The man could probably look commanding bare-ass naked, but he ordered anyway, “Somebody bring me some pants. And a sword.”

10

A
UGUSTUS TOOK UP A POSITION at the captain’s shoulder. “Hell, you’re a patterner, John Farragut.”

Blue eyes glanced up. “You think?”

Lord of illogic. He was pulling a pattern out of the ether. Augustus muttered. “I wish I could get inside your head and see what you’re taking your cues from.”

“You can’t,” Farragut said, confident that a patterner was not a mind reader. Then, less sure, “Can you?”

“If I could, I would not be wishing.”

“Not big on asking permission, are you?”

“From you? Pfff.” A derisive breath sounded through his lips.

Farragut consulted his monitors. “What are the telltales saying?”

“Silent, sir.”

“Tell me about our bogey.”

“Maintaining constant velocity,” said the tactical monitor. “No energy output. It’s coasting.”

“It’s not an asteroid.” An obvious comment.

“Not at two hundred and fifty times the speed of light. No, sir.”

“What’s our time of intercept?”

“We can head it off in three minutes.”

“No. Don’t get in front of it. Close the gunports. Shut us up tight.”

Merrimack
’s guns leaked air and heat where they projected through the force field’s shell.

“Bring us in easy on the flank.”

“Aye, sir.”

“We could plant a bomb in its path, sir,” Colonel Steele suggested.

“Not without a positive ID.” He might take out an innocent ETI. And a frontal attack on an intact swarm was seldom effective anyway. Though a man could easily chop the legs off an individual burr, a united swarm was nearly invincible from the front. No one knew how they did it, but a solid swarm generated a cowcatcher much like
Merrimack
’s.

Closer in, the tac monitor reported, “Getting a reading. It’s an infrared source. Leaving a heat trail. If you can call one hundred fifty degrees Kelvin heat. Profile is—” Paused in dread. Made certain. “It’s round, sir.”

An intake of breath chorused the command deck.

“Sphere?” Farragut asked.

“Yes, sir.”

Farragut spilled his coffee into the trash. “Wake up the boat.”

Alarms blared, with Calli calling battle stations.

Little of
Merrimack
was, in fact, left asleep. Most personnel had shuffled to battle stations and dozed in their gear by their guns, or sat up polishing their face shields.

From here they knew the drill; they ran it once a week. Disconnected all implants—their personal gunsights, their language modules, anything vulnerable to Hive interference. They isolated and detached all electronic detonators, detached power packs from computerized hovercarts, pulled the cables off the lifts. You never realized how much of the ship was computer driven until you prepared to meet a swarm. But
Merrimack
ran cleaner than most ships, so this was not a major operation.

“You clear your things out of the torpedo bay, Augustus?” Farragut asked.

“I had assistance.”

Farragut could picture his Marines dumping all of Augustus’ things into that gold-threaded Roman carpet, rolling it up and hauling it to the Striker. “They break anything?”

“Probably. Didn’t look.”

The captain’s pants and the rest of his uniform arrived on the command platform. He dragged on his boots, eyes on the monitors.

Merrimack
closed to within passive sensor range. There was no “seeing” while you were running faster than light. But the sensor interpreters could conjure up a visual image on a monitor. They showed a solid ball of ice, a kilometer in diameter, of preternatural roundness.

A dead swarm, it was called, though the company and crew knew by now these were seldom dead, except for the outer layer. This ball would have been traveling for years, maybe centuries. Even as voracious as they were, it was damned hard to starve a gorgon.

The round shape offered the smallest surface area for its volume, for the conservation of heat. Not that you could freeze a gorgon either.

Calli ordered the ship cautiously nearer. A ship the size of
Merrimack
produced a gravitational effect—infinitesimal in astronomical terms or even in macroscopic terms, but there was no telling the sensitivity of a swarm. If
Merrimack
put a perceptible drag on the ball, it could wake up.

The officers on deck stared at the inert frozen sphere. Nothing crawling but the hair up the backs of their necks.

Calli turned to Farragut, “How do you
do
that?”

He shook his head. He could not say how he found his enemy. Even the telltales were quiet.

“Uh-oh.” From a tech.

“Talk to me, Uh-oh,” Farragut demanded evenly, belting his hanger.

“Uh, sir. Sorry. I just plotted the swarm’s trajectory.”

Augustus was already ahead of him: “It’s headed to Palatine.”

“Yes, sir. It’ll be there in one hundred years.”

“Oh, no, it won’t.” Farragut.

Hamster squinted at the bleak, ice-encrusted image. “Is it dead?”

“It will be,” said Farragut. Turned to his Roman. “Well, Augustus. Here’s what you came for.”

“You do not disappoint.”

Augustus gazed upon his nemesis. At matched speed, the swarm sphere hung in the center of the screen in ugly dead menace.

“Are you
sure
it’s not dead?” the tech asked.

“There’s a trickle charge in there,” said Farragut. To Augustus. “Here’s my problem. Every time you cross a gorgon, you teach the Hive.”

Augustus nodded. “Like playing chess with a computer.”

“Just so. And the Hive would be very predictable if we only knew who else was teaching it. Unfortunately, space is vast and who knows who else it’s been chewing on. What I
don’t
want happening here is it getting
any
new knowledge before it dies. I want to kill this swarm in its sleep. One shot. Lights out. I don’t want them to even know they’re dying. I don’t want the Hive Overmind to know we’re here, only that it lost a swarm here.”

Augustus nodded to all that. “I like it.”

Hamster offered, “Do you think there’s a chance it knows we’re here, and the gorgons are having this same conversation in there?”

“Trap? Never known ’em to lie doggo. Anyway, if they were talking, the telltales would show it.”

Hive resonance either irritated or frightened insect life. Made bugs a good, cheap early warning of Hive presence. Only dormant gorgons did not resonate.

“That’s the other thing,” Farragut told Augustus. “As soon as they wake up, they split into hundreds of quick, hungry targets.”

“Can you estimate the number in this swarm?”

“Not really. Depends on type. If those are burrs, there’s a couple hundred thousand in there. Soldiers are bigger, so there would be less of them, but soldier balls are usually huge. This is a small ball. And gluies—I’ve never seen dormant gluies, doesn’t mean this isn’t a glue ball. And we can’t tell how deep the dead layer is without an active scan. You scan, you wake ’em up. And round we go. I want to take ’em all out without exploding any of the individuals clear. Can we implode that?”

“That would require ramming a charge inside the mass before detonation.”

“That would wake them up.”

“Has that effect, yes. And without knowing the internal architecture, it may not work.”

“Damn.”

“I seem to recall you had mixed results with molten magnesium. There’s a certain symmetry in using a weapon that eats.”

“Works great on burrs, but it takes too long to eat a soldier. And if they get through your force field, you’ve got flaming guts stuck to your hull.”

“Then I would suggest nukes are still your best bet for a flash fry. Impact trigger. Passive sighting. No guidance system.”

The technicians nodded at their stations despite their loathing for the source of the suggestion. A nuclear projectile was the only option.

Energy weapons were useless at FTL for everything except a shot straight backward. If
Merrimack
moved into the swarm’s path to line up such a shot, the swarm would detect her heat trail and wake up.

Sighting on passive input was no one’s first choice, but a tag would wake the swarm. Anyway, with matched speed, both moving in a straight line, it should be easy enough to calculate the angle off to dispatch a dumb missile.

Using no tracking system would leave nothing for the Hive to skew or bounce back to its source. An impact trigger offered nothing the Hive could deactivate “Mr. Carmel?” Farragut looked to his XO.

“That would be my choice, sir,” Calli confirmed.

The techs were already at work calculating and recalculating the angle off. At two hundred times the speed of light, it was spitting into the wind.

“Do it. Three warheads.”

As Calli called for three torpedoes, Augustus frowned ever so slightly. “Overkill, don’t you think?”

“I like overkill,” said Farragut. “Redundancy is good. Redundancy is good.” And while he was being redundant, he ordered the Marine Battery to stand by the guns, but do
not
open the ports.

“Loads, sir?” Steele requested.

“Keep it simple. Exploding shells. No use showing them our whole bag of tricks if it comes to that.”

Calli Carmel assumed a mechanical, square-shouldered calm. Might have been an android speaking orders:

“Match speed and vector. Keep us rock steady, Chief.”

“Speed and vector, one hundred percent, aye.”

“Fire Control.”

“Fire Control, aye.”

“Acquire target.”

“Target acquired. Aye.”

“Firing solution.”

“Solution acquired and loaded, aye. We have tone.”

“Captain?” Calli waited.

“Kill them all.”

“Open torpedo bays and fire.”

“Shit!” That was Fire Control.

“Fire Control, report!”

The tone changed pitch. And now a shivering sound rattled throughout the ship. Cicada songs.

The telltales had awakened.

“Hive sign!”

“Oh, for Jesus.”

“Command. Fire Control. We lost tone.”

“Then what’s that sound?”

“Res pulse on our harmonic!” Communications cried. The tone had
not
changed pitch. It had
stopped
immediately as the resonance started. “Somebody pinged us!”

Farragut pointed to the resonance sounder. “Turn that thing off. Where’d the swarm go?”

“All stop,” Calli ordered, then answered the captain, “It didn’t go anywhere, sir. We did. It stopped. We overshot.”

A united swarm could do things with physics a battleship could not dream of.

“Get us back, Mr. Carmel.”

“Aye, aye, sir.” Already doing so. Could feel the engines buck and whine.

With nothing on the screen but stars, Calli prodded, “Chief, why aren’t we there?”

“You want me to answer that, Mr. Carmel?”

At two hundred times the speed of light,
Merrimack
had overshot big. The ship kicked in sudden reverse. Engines rumbled in the race to reacquire the target.

A sensor technician reported with professional calm. “Target sighted. Ball’s gone hairy.”

He restored the gruesome image to the screen. The giant sphere’s surface pitted and cracked, the ice pocked. Legs, flailing like cilia, breached the crust, legs by the hundred, the thousand—gorgons eating their way out through a layer of their own dead.

“Fire those missiles.”

“Command. Fire Control. We’ve lost our lock. Gorgons have put up a wobble.”

The target was rapidly disintegrating, opening to a writhing mass of maggoty tentacles, the crawling, flailing nightmare, peeling off in clotted mats, and breaking into individuals like baby spiders.

“Burrs. We have burrs.”

Clear of the dead layer, some ate each other, still wiggling. Drifting out of the solidity of the swarm, they ballooned in the vacuum, wriggling, astonishingly fluid in the cold, colder than hell. A mystery how they did that. One of the things that made them come to you in night-mares.

“Get a lock. Light ’em up! We are out of time, gentlemen.”

And the target exploded on its own, like a pustule bursting, dispersing gorgons all directions. Thousands of small creatures, bloating in the vacuum swell, flocked toward
Merrimack
.

Fire Control cursed. Apologized.

“Mr. Carmel, drop our bricks.”

Merrimack
carried solid oxygen along with her, outboard, in the deep freeze of space. Before entering any firefight, it was customary to jettison the oxygen bricks and retrieve them later. Not being edible, the Hive ignored them.

“Mark and drop. Bricks away.”

“Open the gunports. Mr. Steele, at your discretion. Fire Control, fire at will. Blast ’em to kingdom come,” Farragut barked his own orders. Then turned to his tactical monitors. “What dickhead pinged us?”

“Palatine.” That was a guess, but Steele was sure of it.

All eyes on the bridge turned to the Roman who said, “Not I.”

And the com tech confirmed, not Palatine. “It’s a LEN signature. It’s an SOS.”

The ship’s guns boomed. Her decks shuddered underfoot.

The ship hummed and lurched with the deep repetitive clunk of manual loads firing from the big guns. The engines changed tone in charging up the beam guns and changing phase to avoid takeover by the closing Hive mind. Shouts of Marines echoed through the corridors on all decks. Every monitor, each showing a different angle from
Merrimack
, clouded over with black round bodies flexing their legs, each leg terminating in a mouth.

“Come on, greta! You hungry, ain’t ya? Come and get it! Eat
this!
” Dak Shepard pulled the firing lever in gun bay twenty-four. Alpha Flight, serving as gun crew, ducked from the sparks and noise of the great barrel’s heave and recoil. Sonic filters dampened the thunder in their ears.

Outside, the shell fragmented into a million shards, cutting the legs off gorgons. Still the gorgons came in limitless hordes.

Immediately, the gun crew straightened to cap and retract the barrel, slide open the breech, and ratchet in another shell.

“Adjust range,” Flight Leader Hazard Sewell ordered. “They’re getting closer.”