The Myriad: Tour of the Merrimack #1 (22 page)

Dak turned his face up at the sprinklers, letting the soothing solution pour over his face. When he blinked his eyes clear, he screwed up his face at Reg. “ ‘Suck my steel, space squid?’ ”

The rookie stood in the pool of brown slime. “Is—is it dead?”

“Does it
look
dead?” Carly said, hands under the sprinklers.

Kerry Blue rubbed stinging brown slime off the back of her hand to reach her caller. “Commander Carmel. Gun crew twenty-four. We got the singer. Waxed it.”

The XO acknowledged.

“Lab, are we quiet?”

The telltale cicadas had stopped their shivering.

“Ants are going back into the sand. Looks like we’re clear, sir.”

Farragut nodded. “Let’s go pick up the LEN’s rocket.” And, under his breath, “Dumb shits.”

“Their message was spectacularly ill-advised,” Jose Maria Cordillera rephrased.

Hazard Sewell asked Team Alpha, “How’d the new guy do?”

“Who? The frozen pizza?” Carly shot back, daubing Dak’s facial burns with salve.

“Oh, no,” Hazard moaned. “The new guy froze?”

“He . . .” Twitch had a tough time saying anything bad about anybody. Had a tough time saying anything. “Did a fine job of staying out of the way.”

“Oh,” said Hazard.

Said Kerry Blue: “He’s no Cowboy.”

The day’s journey to intercept the message rocket gave Augustus time to sleep off the ordeal of plugging in to patterner mode. By that time John Farragut had worked up a fine anger at the LEN.

“They thought that just sending a courier rocket out of the Myriad would keep the Hive from tracing that res pulse’s origin back to Arra? The LEN have badly underestimated our vermin!”

Intercept and retrieval landed two messages from the LEN. One message, for John Farragut, ordered the immediate return of
Merrimack
to the Myriad.

“Can they do that?” Calli asked doubtfully. She knew the LEN had jurisdiction over Earth business in the Myriad, but she did not think their arms were long enough to haul
Merrimack
back on just their say so.

“They think so,” said Farragut.

The second message was for
Don
Jose Maria Cordillera. It contained a lot of data quite outside Cordillera’s fields of expertise. He passed it on to the appropriate xenos.

The xenos were not long in formulating a report.

“So where’s the fire?” Farragut asked the xenos, assembled in one of the labs. The looks on the scientists’ faces did seem to indicate a genuine emergency.

Dr. Linley, head of the astrogation team, stammered a bit. “The
kzachin
—the wormholes. They’re multiplying.”

“And?” Farragut prompted.

Dr. Linley stammered himself into incoherence.

“And the Myriad is shrinking,” Augustus answered for Linley.

“And it’s bloody shrinking!” The xeno gripped a console to stop his hands from shaking.

The laws of physics said the globular cluster must degenerate, grow diffuse, torn apart by tidal forces. Instead, the Myriad was contracting, minutely, definitely. At an accelerating rate.

The astrogator lit up the image brought by the courier. It was of the Myriad. Then he overlaid the image with glowing lines that mapped all the connections between the
kzachin
inside the Myraid. Collectively, the lines curved toward the center, making the cluster look like a string bag. One need only pull a string to close the whole thing.

And according to Linley’s calculations, the aberration must have started nearly ninety years ago—coinciding with the arrival of the first colonists from Origin to the Myriad. It was then that the globular cluster’s natural expansion began to slow, then stop, then slowly, minutely, eventually reverse into contraction.

“The Myriad is not fixing to collapse in our lifetime at that rate,” said Farragut. “This was worth betraying
Merrimack
’s position to the Hive?”

“It’s the acceleration, sir,” the xeno’s voice shook. “It’s geometric.”

In geometric progressions, minuscule effects could get rapidly out of hand.

Farragut glanced across all his xenos’ frantic faces. “What’s causing it?”

“No idea. No idea with any hard science behind it. Except everyone on the team hypothesizes it ties in with the
kzachin
—because of the curvature of the connections.” Linley fluttered a quaking hand at the string bag image. “And because it began when the Myriadians started using the
kzachin
.”

Of all the
kzachin,
only the
kzachin
through which Alpha Flight took its journey had no connecting point. That wormhole, the one everyone now called the Rim gate, showed as a solitary dot at the outer perimeter of the cluster.

“Well, hell, there it is,” said Augustus.

“There is what?” said Farragut.

Augustus pointed at the dot. “I’ve found Origin.”

“You mean the gateway to Origin,” said Farragut. “We already suspected that.”

“No,” said Augustus. “I found Origin.”

“Where is it?” Farragut saw only an empty point in space.

“It’s ten billion years away.”

“
Ten billion light-years?
”

“John Farragut, I speaka ze English better than that. I said years, not light-years.”

Farragut was still lost. “Something you chose not to communicate earlier, Colonel?”

“I said nothing, because I didn’t believe it. Still don’t. As Arthur Conan Doyle said via Sherlock Holmes: when you eliminate the impossible, what’s left, however improbable, must be the truth. So I reconsidered. But there’s nothing left except the impossible. So I reconsidered again. Dismissing any idea as obviously impossible is certainly bad science.”

A buzzing, shiver, and chirp inside the lab made all the xenos inhale.

A dropped glass crashed, shattered.

One of the xenos sobbed.

The flutter of moths, the scrape of cicada wings. The desperate plop of insect bodies beating against glass confines.

Farragut turned slowly to one of the lab’s terraria.

Ants poured from their tunnels.

Hive sign.

“Augustus, I’m going to make you explain whatever it is you just said—
Hold
that thought,” said Farragut, and into his caller: “Calli. We have Hive sign.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Find it. Get it off.”

“It’s not a gorgon hanging on this time. The last one must have ratted us out. Long-range res scan shows two swarms converging on us.”

“Anything headed toward Arra?”

“Negative. They seem intent on the
Mack
.”

“Good. Got a type on those swarms?”

“They’re soldiers.”

“Soldier” was the old name for the Hive type which the xenos now called “antibodies.” The crew of
Merrimack
still called them soldiers, tanks, or can openers.

“Hive’s sending a hit squad?”

“I think so, John.”

“Size?”

“Magnitude five and six.”

“What in blazes is a six?”

The Navy’s scale of swarm strengths had no upper limit. Magnitude five was the biggest anyone had ever seen.

Calli came back, wry: “Bigger than a five, sir.”

Farragut guessed he had that one coming.

“They’re getting bigger, John. Did you notice that? The closer we get to the Hub.”

“Let’s run ’em, Cal. Launch wild geese.”

“Wild geese, aye.”

Two Naval Space Patrol Torpedo boats, SPT boats—“Spit boats” to the crew—readied on the hangar deck to lead off the voracious swarms. Marine Swifts were too short-winded to give a convincing chase. Wild geese had to fly for days.

Calli sent the SPT boats out, resonating on an off harmonic, with orders to rendezvous at the planet Arra after they had lost the swarms.

“Don’t lose them too soon,” Farragut added last orders. “If the Hive finds out they overlooked three whole edible planets in this neighborhood, I don’t want to see what kind of sleeping dogs wake up.”

The wild geese took off, honking.

Farragut watched them go till their running lights vanished into the star field. He turned off his screen and summoned Augustus into a wardroom. “Talk to me.”

“Origin is ten billion years distant,” said Augustus.

“You been withholding information or you just figured this out?”

“Based on new information. When I hooked into
Merrimack
’s system during the Hive battle, I found the flight recordings from Alpha Flight’s sortie in the ship’s database. The missing pieces were there.” Augustus pulled a projector from his pocket, and filled the wardroom with stars. Not the Myriad this time. This was darker space. Bluer, whiter stars. “This is where Alpha Flight went.”

“The xenos say Alpha Flight’s readings match Kerry Blue’s recording,” said Farragut. “You already had these pictures.”

“Oh, but Alpha’s recordings are far and away more sophisticated and informative than Kerry’s. Alpha’s recordings picked up the background radio noise. Kerry’s picture didn’t. And that’s the smoking gun.”

“The xenos said the neighborhood was hot,” Farragut recalled. “Is that significant?”

“A background residual temperature way over three degrees Kelvin is significant.”

“So it means there’s a big event in the region that put out a lot of energy.”

“It does. And so there is. There’s a quasar in Origin’s backyard.”

“What are you calling the backyard?”

“Five hundred million light-years.”

“Close as I ever want to get to a quasar. If Origin is that close to a quasar, that means Origin is at the very edge of the universe.”

“It means no such thing, John Farragut. You are assuming that because all the quasars we can see are three billion light-years away or better, that all quasars are far away.”

Farragut had so assumed. “It doesn’t mean that?”

“Did you pass astrophysics, John Farragut?”

“I thought I did.”

“The fact that we can see the light from no quasar younger than three billion years means that all the quasars are gone. Long gone. What we see is three-billion-year-old light from an entity that no longer exists. Yet here in Alpha Flight’s recordings is a quasar billions of years younger than any quasar has a right to be. And then there is the redshift of all the stars in this recording. These stars are moving at astonishing speeds.”

“The recording is fubared?” Farragut suggested. “GIGO. This is full of G?”

“Too internally consistent. Too patterned. This redshift is real. These stars were recently—astronomically speaking—shot out of a cannon. The Big one.”

“Big Bang.”

Augustus nodded. “These recordings have all the markings of a very, very, very young picture of the universe. This is a young galaxy with a young irregular shape, young quasars nearby, young stellar spectra, young speed, young background temperature, and a youthful dearth of heavy elements.”

“If this galaxy is that young and that far away, then it’s younger than it is distant,” said Farragut. “Its light is not here yet and we can’t see it at all.”

“No, John Farragut. We are looking right at it. This galaxy isn’t far, far away. It’s long, long ago. This is the Milky Way.”

And to John Farragut’s silence Augustus added, “Which is why Alpha Flight’s res pulse did not reach us, though resonance exists everywhere at once. It was not that Alpha Flight was nowhere to be found; it was no
when
.”

“No. Wait,” Farragut could not accept this. “If this mess of stars is the Milky Way, why didn’t you recognize it before? You’re a patterner.”

“No one can predict with any precision what an irregular galaxy will grow up to look like. I could give you possibilities, but there are too many dynamics, too many variables, too much data that I don’t have to make an accurate prediction. I can, however, look at the beginning point and the end point and tell you if they connect. And these do. This is our galaxy.”

Farragut stared disbelievingly at the projection of Origin’s stellar neighborhood. “Where is Earth in this picture?”

“It’s not born yet. Neither is Palatine. Sol’s formation is still five or six billion years off. But you know this place.” He pointed at the bright blot of a globular cluster. “The oldest extant features in any mature galaxy are its globular clusters. This is the Myriad.”

“This is a much brighter, denser cluster than the Myriad,” Farragut argued. “Look at all these blue stars.”

Augustus was condescending. “Of course it is. This is the baby picture.”

“Where’s Arra in here?”

“Arra’s star is not a cluster star. It’s a population I star that got stuck in here. It’s not born yet either at the time of this recording.”

Farragut turned to the star burning large and orange in the foreground of Alpha Flight’s recording. Origin’s star. “Does this star still exist?” he asked, throat gone dry.

“Origin? Thought you’d never ask. Yes, it does. Orange stars are slow burners. They last damn near forever.”

Farragut sucked in a breath, trying to inhale patience. Augustus was making him ask for every single thing he needed to know. “Do you know where this star is now?” He stuck his finger on the large orange image.

Augustus nodded.

“What star is this? Does it have a name in any of our catalogs?”

“Oh, John Farragut, can’t you connect the dots yet?” said Augustus. “It’s Xi.”

11

“O
H, FOR JESUS,” John Farragut murmured.

Disorienting, the concept that the impossibly distant Arran home world, Origin, could be the same planet as a local, long-known, long-dead world, on which no trace of life or civilization remained beyond a lump of lead.

Augustus explained his own delayed recognition. “You see, I uffed the logic gates. It is not that Donner’s thorium-lined reliquary failed to reach Origin and landed on Xi instead. It reached Origin
and
landed on Xi. The two are not mutually exclusive. Donner’s thorium did not age billions of years in the time distortion of the wormhole. It aged all those billions of years in real time. And
that
is how you get a twenty-billion-year-old hunk of spent thorium in a fifteen-billion-year-old universe. The Xi tablet did the last ten twice.”

“You said that with a perfectly straight face.”

“When you have eliminated the possible, whatever is left, even if it’s
im
possible, means you failed to grasp the situation. The Myriad is sitting on a paradox.”

“Does this have anything to do with the cluster’s shrinking?”

“How could I know? I can’t find patterns if cause and effect can play
backward
. We’re not just down the rabbit hole, Alice. This is the wrong side of the looking glass.”

Farragut recited what everyone knew and never questioned: “The arrow of time flies in one direction and one direction only.”

Augustus nodded. “And if nature abhors a vacuum, nature loathes, abominates, and despises a paradox, and I haven’t much stomach for them myself. Paradoxes are self-healing.”

“We should stop the Myriadians from sending anything more through the
kzachin,
” said Farragut. “Now.”

“Yesterday,” said Augustus.

Dak Shepard started it. The rest of Team Alpha picked it up right away and soon all of Red Squadron was calling him Peetz, and the infection spread to Blue Squadron.

Afraid to ask anyone in the company, because it seemed to be something a dog soldier ought to know, the rookie Cole Darby furtively approached one of the less snottified spacers.

“Uhm . . .”

The Naval com specialist waited in quizzical irony while Cole Darby struggled to properly couch his question. The com spec’s open fresh face showed a near smirk now. Might have underestimated this navy bean’s snottifaction. No turning back now. Cole Darby forced the question out. “Um, is, uh, what’s
peetz
? Is that like
putz?
”

“No.” The com spec grinned. Didn’t look so friendly now. Looked predatory. “So you’re a peetz, hm.” The navvy’s red brows bobbed up and down.

“No! No. No. Not me. It’s, uh, someone else. I was curious is all. My squadron calls this guy Peetz. But his name isn’t Peter.”

“Don’t bulsh me, Peetz,” the com spec said easily. “You’re the only toad in Red Squadron.”

First peetz, now toad? Worse and worse. “What the hell is a toad?” Cole Darby cried.

“The green guy! Who else is going to turn into a frozen pizza in a furball? The rest of your squadron is blooded and gutted. It has to be you.”

“I—” Cole started, realized he had nothing to follow that.

The spacer clapped him on the shoulder, gave him a jostle, friendly-like. “Work it off next furball, Peetz. It’s easy: you get scared, you just figure out who you’d rather have eat you alive—the Hive or your squadron.”

Captain Farragut prowled side to side of the control room, goaded by the urgency of the LEN’s message, maddened by his inability to answer it.

Merrimack
could not go near the Myriad so long as the Hive Overmind knew where the battleship was.
Merrimack
had been biding its time in pointless circles, waiting for the wild geese to lead off the two huge swarms and silence the infernal buzzing and humming that was Hive sign. Once it stopped,
Merrimack
would be clear to travel.

Only it wasn’t stopping.

“Calli. Are you
sure
we don’t have a clinger on us?”

Burrs could hook onto the ship’s force field and drag a full klick behind her.

“I’m sure, Captain. And that’s not coming from a singer. It’s a sounding. Those two soldier swarms are pinging us.”

“Shut down our res chamber.”

“Already done.”

The lookout sang abruptly, “Wild geese coming in hot and light.” Hot and light meant fast with all ammo spent. “Requesting permission to dock.”

John Farragut grabbed up the caller, hailed the wild goose leader. “Shooey! What are you doing to me?”

“Captain! Sir! Sorry, sir. They’re not buying it.”

“Get in here and talk to me.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Captain Farragut met the wild geese on the hangar deck. Lieutenant Schumacher—Shooey—sweating like a fevered pig, pulled his helmet, dripping, from his head, dragged a sleeve across his wet, plump face, squinted. “Sorry, Cap’n. They wouldn’t chase.”

Farragut cocked his head in surprise. “This is new.” He found Jose Maria Cordillera on the deck with him. Asked, “Is this new? Why didn’t they take the bait?”

Jose Maria Cordillera shook his head. “I have never seen this behavior. It may have to do with cell specialization. The kind of swarm members which we call ‘gorgons’ exist to eat. What we call ‘soldiers’ tend to pursue hard targets. These two swarms may be purposely sent to destroy
Merrimack
. This is all guesswork, based on a statistical field of one.”

Jose Maria followed Farragut, who paced a slow circuit around the Swifts in the hangar. The captain touched the empty hardpoints. Shooey answered the motion, “We shot the whole load, sir.”

Farragut brushed off his fingers. “What were you packing?”

“Frags and nukes. All ordnance found the target, sir.”

That stopped Farragut’s pacing. “Did they
eat
the nukes?”

“A chunk of the soldiers detached from the main swarm and snagged our field. We spaced them. After our nukes were spent, the main swarm came at us. We kept ahead of it for a while. Then it broke pursuit and resumed its original course.”

Captain Farragut glanced to Jose Maria Cordillera. “They don’t do that. Gorgons never walk away from food.”

“If they have no hope of catching it, apparently they can,” Jose Maria observed. “We may have taught the Hive the real meaning of a wild goose chase.”

“Not good. Shooey, what then?”

“We poked ’em. Achieved no critical damage. When the burrs are all balled together big like that, their field is too tight. It’s a
big
swarm. They just ate their dead and stayed on course. We got ahead of them and veered away. They didn’t pursue us. They didn’t even wobble. We shot everything we had.” Shooey shrugged empty, soaked arms.

“They’re looking for our base.” Farragut spoke that as a certainty. “Planets can’t run.”

Once the Hive located an edible planet, combat was no longer a battle. It was a siege. And Earth’s defenses were already stretched too thin to assist out here on the distant frontier.

The Hive must not locate Arra.

John Farragut was better suited to an offensive fight. He was not about to add another fixed target to
his
war.

He summoned his senior lieutenant.

“Hamster. See to the Spit boats. Refuel, restock, rearm. Then pick a team. I have an urgent message to go to the Myriad. Invite Jose Maria to go with you. Take both boats. Depart within the hour.”

Upon the captain’s return to the control room, Calli rose, clasped her hands behind her back. Assumed, “We’re going to lead off the swarms with the
Mack
?”

“I’ll take care of them,” said Captain Farragut.

Jose Maria Cordillera stood at the wide viewport, watching the SPT boats launch. There was a brute elegance in the snub, blocky vehicles. They wore their armament outboard on racks.

The civilian, Jose Maria, was always a striking figure, trim and elegant against the siege of years. His home on Terra Rica was not a democracy, and Jose Maria did not dress like a democrat. His bolero jacket and gray trousers were of expensive cloth. He stood like a brooding stallion.

The voice intruded at his shoulder. “Not joining the rats,
Don
Cordillera?”

Jose Maria Cordillera turned to the Roman, Augustus. “Rats? I do not understand ‘rats.’ ”

Augustus’ gaze remained fixed, over Cordillera’s head, on the departing vessels. “
Rata
. The ones leaving the ship.”

Lieutenant Glenn Hamilton’s SPT boats cleared
Merrimack
’s field, arced away, and vanished on a quick line to the star cluster Myriad.

“That would imply that
Merrimack
is sinking,” said Jose Maria Cordillera.

“And are we not going to our deaths?”

Cordillera hesitated, dropped his voice quite low, lest someone overhear this conversation. “Why would you say so?”

“And you the expert on things Hive,” Augustus chided. “Level-five and -six soldier swarms. Biggest swarm ever seen and one bigger still? We are overmatched.”

Cordillera turned away from the viewport.

Augustus prodded his silence. “I thought suicide was against your religion. You are traditional Catholic?”

Catholics did not call themselves “Roman Catholics” anymore. Not since the exodus.

Jose Maria would only say, “You have cold statistics, Colonel Augustus. I have hope and faith.”

“Your God takes a laissez-faire approach to human emergency. In your battle against human disease and misery, Doctor, you must have noticed the innocent and faithful die as quickly and needlessly as the rest of us.”

“I have to believe not.”

And on second consideration, Augustus noted the doctor had not specified his hope and faith in
whom
.

“Even the god of
Merrimack
has lost hope in this one,” said Augustus. “Our gallant captain is sending the pretty Mrs. Hamilton out of harm’s way and offered you a place in her lifeboat. I know your Captain Farragut. He’s not taking
Merrimack
to lead off the swarms. We’re going into battle. Hopeless battle. Please don’t pretend you don’t see that pattern.”

“Very well,” said Jose Maria. “We are overmatched. We are going to die. Why are
you
still aboard, Colonel?”

“This is what I came for. Living or dying has little or nothing to do with it. I didn’t come for anything involving me. I came to fight the Hive. And live. Or die. I have to be there.”

“And so,” said Jose Maria Cordillera, “have I.”

The crew and company of the
Merrimack
prepped for battle, cleaning and loading weapons, polishing face shields to perfect slickness. Deck crews locked down the Marine Swifts in their hangar bays. Computerized controls were disconnected and stowed.

Jose Maria’s long glossy black hair was braided and bound up tight so that he looked for all the world like a matador. Though Jose Maria only ever killed to save lives.

The Naval engineers reconfigured the containment fields around the ship’s six engines. Not that the Hive could interfere with such a basic reaction as matter/antimatter annihilation, but the mix controls to the containment fields themselves could be vulnerable.

Merrimack
’s six engines functioned within six discrete containment fields, protected by the most complex phase-shifting security codes on board, constantly changing at quick, random intervals, which prevented the Hive mind from deactivating the force field.

It did not stop the cells from physically insinuating themselves through the field.

Should a Hive cell breach an engine’s containment field,
Merrimack
’s own power plant would become a bomb in enemy hands; and Hive cells did not fear suicide.

Augustus presented himself on the bridge in his flight suit, helmet under arm. “Permission to launch Striker.”

“Denied,” Farragut dismissed him.

Augustus quirked a small smile. “You don’t trust me, John?”

“We don’t launch small ships around a level-five soldier swarm. The swarms emit a hell of an interference field. All they have to do is fox your IFF and then I’m explaining to your emperor why I shot you. My Swifts don’t go; you don’t go.”

“You’re telling me the Hive swarm doesn’t fox
your
systems?”

“They can. But Rome was always partial to sending false signals to our equipment, so we got lots of fail-safes.”

“I know,” said Augustus. “What about
your
systems?”

“Mine? I don’t understand.”

Augustus pointed between Farragut’s eyes. “That’s an electrical system in there.”

“Bioelectrics are tougher for them.”

“But not impervious.”

“No. These big swarms can muddle your concentration, make you sleepy, make you think you can’t breathe. So far they haven’t shut us down.”

Oh, great. Colonel Steele popped an inspection right here at battle stations. If one of those leering MP side-kicks of his flicked honey on your face shield, it damn well better slide right off. Kerry Blue didn’t fancy licking honey off the deck. Fancied less not being able to see through a smear of burr guts. Her face shield passed inspection.

Then came the weapons inspection. If you got caught with a sanctioned weapon—like something that could shoot through bulkheads—it was a blot on your whole team. This part of the inspection was a waste of time, big bore. As if anyone one would be stupid enough to smuggle a secured weapon from the armory and take it to station.

“Peetz!” Reg cried in anger, as an MP discovered an armor-piercing projectile launcher holstered in the rookie’s boot.

Carly cried: “Frogging hell!” Looked like she was about to knife Cole Darby.

You could hear Hazard Sewell’s teeth grind as he accepted the blot on Team Alpha.

The inspectors moved on without Colonel Steele once looking at Kerry Blue. She understood the icy snub now. Had to smile.

Small woofing noises escaped from the peetz, Cole Darby, as elbows accidentally connected with his rib cage. Hard.

A last briefing came over the loud com, explaining the game plan. It was simple: take the swarms out one at a time.
Merrimack
was running out at a fast intercept with the closer of the swarms before the two could combine forces or wake up more reinforcements.