by R. M. Meluch
“Get me to Arra, now.”
“Silent, sir?” Calli asked.
“Lordy, no. Light us up like the Jupiter Monument.”
Swinging into orbit around the white-veiled, tourmaline world Arra, Merrimack was greeted with a salvo of missiles from the planet’s surface.
The XO, Calli Carmel, issued orders for evasion.
Arran fighter spacecraft were scrambling aloft with ridiculous slowness.
Farragut arrived in the control room. “What are they bringing to bear?”
“Sublight missiles, sir. Unknown loads.”
“Speed?”
Calli’s mouth pulled wryly toward one cheek. “Oh, hell, John, I want to get out and help them push.”
“Maybe I should spot them twelve runs and give them a pitcher,” said Farragut. But not to fall victim to overconfidence, he checked, “Tac, do we have anyone sneaking up on us?”
“Negative,” the tac specialist responded. “The only traffic from the planet is moving sublight and that’s all running away.”
“What about the fighters?”
“Arran fighter craft haven’t even cleared the planetary atmosphere.”
“How long till they clear?
“Not for three minutes yet.”
“Three—! I could die and be reincarnated twice in three minutes. Current disposition of the missiles?”
“Distance from Merrimack two hundred klicks. Velocity nine kps,” tac responded, then quickly updated, “Distance two hundred and ten klicks.” Merrimack was moving faster than the missiles.
“All right. Turn the missiles around.”
“Sir?” his XO questioned.
“Flip ’em, Cal. Return to sender.”
Before Calli could express horror, the captain added, “But detonate the warheads before they reenter atmosphere.”
Calli dropped her voice, but the control room was not built for privacy. “That’s not easy to do, Captain.”
“I didn’t ask if it was easy.”
Commander Carmel still hesitated. “The captain is aware we could just keep walkin’ away from these missiles.”
“I am so aware. The order, XO.”
“I don’t want to miss one. If I fail to detonate one, I send a nuke into the Arran atmosphere.”
“Then hit ’em before they reach atmosphere. We have enough guns.”
“Requires precision shooting. We will be shooting toward the planet. If I miss—”
“Don’t miss.”
“Aye, sir.” And from there, Calli issued orders in frosty efficiency to targeting and fire control, her voice sharp with obedient anger.
A reverse tractor pulse gently nudged the missiles about, sending them arcing back down for reentry. Targeting tracked them. Fire control stood by for detonation.
While anyone monitoring the situation from the planet had a view of the business end of their own weapons.
Captain Farragut let the Arrans suffer a minute of blind terror—watching their own monstrous weapons fall back toward their atmosphere—then issued the order for the passover.
“Calli. Be precise.”
“Targeting, do we have a lock?”
“Lock achieved, aye.”
“Fire control. Detonate Arran warheads.”
“Detonating Arran warheads, aye.”
Nuclear fire high above the atmosphere would be visible from the ground.
“Missiles secured,” Calli reported without expression.
The tactical specialist reported the Arran fighter craft turning around and heading back toward base.
“Mr. Carmel, your ship,” Farragut gave way to Calli. “I’m fixin’ to go ashore. All departments, let me know everything I need to know. And somebody, figure out how to say: ‘Take me to your leader.’ ”
Colonel Steele followed the captain from the control room. He had to hurry; John Farragut moved fast. Steele, commander of the ship’s two Marine companies, offered privately, “I think we’re looking too far away for these aliens’ mother world.”
Farragut stopped, turning in the narrow passageway. “Your patrols found something, TR? You know where Origin is?”
But Steele suggested flatly, “Ask the guy who speaks their language.”
“You mean Augustus?”
“He cracked an alien language in five hours?” Steele asked in heavy suspicion. “Sure he did. These colonies are Roman plants, just like him.”
“Wishful thinking, TR?”
So startled, Steele could say nothing more eloquent than, “Huh?”
“You want to shoot him,” Farragut said.
A protest rose, died. Steele confessed, “I do.”
Farragut smiled, clapped the lieutenant colonel on his broad shoulder. “ ’s okay, TR. I talked to Jose Maria. He says the translation feat is well within a Roman patterner’s range. He also agrees that those boys downstairs are from way out of town. This is not a Roman plant.”
Not well educated for his rank, Steele still did not swallow everything the multidegreed civilian experts on board pronounced as truth, trusting instead to his own instincts. But Nobel Laureate Jose Maria Cordillera was not an ordinary xeno. Known on board, reverently, as Don Cordillera, the Terra Rican aristocrat was a sophisticated, gentlemanly, Renaissance man. Don Cordillera knew everything. Smartest man God ever invented. Even TR Steele would not doubt Don Cordillera.
But Steele also knew that nothing good could come from a Roman.
The captain was an idiot.
That stupid, bright smile brightened the hatchway to Augustus’ billet among the torpedoes. “Come down to the planet with me?” Farragut invited.
Augustus hesitated. “In person or VR?”
“In the flesh.”
Augustus rolled his eyes, as if speaking to Heaven. “Why did I even have to ask? And me a patterner.”
“You’re not a patterner when you’re not plugged in,” said Farragut. “I found out you really did forget most of the Myriadian language right after you worked the translation. You wanted me to think you were just being stubborn. But you operate a lot like a computer. Once you unplug, most of the random access memory falls right out of your head.” He waited for comment, idiotically proud of his discovery.
Augustus offered nothing in return. He had not been asked a question, and did not feel like being chatty with idiots.
Augustus’ enigmatic stare could not deflate that bright-eyed buoyancy. The captain retained that doggy look—eager and full of infinite, idiotic goodwill, unasked for and unwanted.
Augustus noticed that Farragut had put no surveillance on him. No watchers. Augustus had scoured his own tracks for shadows, but the incredible truth was that there were none. Trusting to a fault, Farragut took in his enemy and turned around so fast it left nowhere to stab him but in the back.
And backstabbing was beneath Augustus. He wanted Farragut to get it looking him straight in the eyes.
Augustus supposed he was meant to appreciate this grand display of trust, and to resolve not to let his captain down. But Augustus disliked personality cults, and John Farragut led by force of personality. In a culture as deconstructed as that of the U.S., without a Roman sense of duty, their people were lost. Like ducklings, they imprinted on the first strong influence they met. And here they were, all of them quacking after confident, dynamic John Farragut.
“What did you think of my introduction to the Arrans?”
“You mean your stupid, grandstanding stunt with the Arran missiles?”
That only paused him for a moment. Farragut hadn’t thought the stunt stupid. “I thought it would communicate our overwhelming superior force without launching our own weapons against them. I showed them we could destroy them, but that was not why we came. It worked. Monitors say the Arrans are coming out of their shelters to point at the light when we orbit over.”
“They might just as easily have concluded that we like toying with our prey before we eat it. You assume the universe thinks like John Farragut, and I know
for a fact that it doesn’t. You are bold, forthright, cheerful—qualities you count on to bluff and charm your way through strange waters—but those qualities are not universally admired, I assure you. A stranger is as likely to see you as loud, undignified, vulgar, ignorant, inappropriately childish, and neglectful of my customs.”
“Your customs? Was that a Freudian slip?”
“No slip. Quite on purpose.”
“Did I do something to offend Rome?”
“Do? You did not do. You are. Your people obey you because they respect—not to mention adore—you.”
“And you have a problem with that?”
“Romans lead by force of law. It doesn’t matter if a Roman loathes his CO. He follows him to hell anyway. A Roman XO does not suggest a better way to deal with the incoming missiles when issued an order.”
Augustus had been monitoring the control room during the encounter.
“Calli asked for clarification,” Farragut excused his XO’s balk.
“Callista Carmel was schooled on Palatine. Mr. Carmel knows that under a Roman captain, she would be in the brig right now. But she also knows she can get away with that yellow snow under John Farragut.”
“You think Calli’s question was a thinly veiled challenge to my authority?”
“Thinly veiled? It was damn near naked.”
“Had more clothes on than your challenges, Augustus.”
“And yet I am not in the brig. Why?”
“Because you want so badly to be there. Well, I’m sorry but it’s going to take something very un-Roman and dishonorable like direct violation of orders for you to get there.”
Augustus fell silent as a stone. Stared. Had not expected that kind of insight from this man. Was surprised to be surprised.
Very well. The captain was a shrewd idiot.
Farragut’s smile returned. “So why are you so jolly eager to get into my brig, Augustus?”
“Frankly?”
“I’m pretty sure you can’t do anything else. Yes, frankly.”
“I believe Earth and Palatine to be natural enemies. Which is to say the U.S. and Palatine are natural enemies, given that the United States is the only military power worth mentioning on Earth. I am sworn to give my life to Rome. And Rome has seen fit to put its neck under the U.S. heel for the duration of the Hive threat. So here I am. I serve. I don’t like it. I don’t pretend to. I don’t question a direct order in your own command center.”
“And that grudge is not getting heavy, Augustus?”
“Can you shut off a hundred and fifty years of hostility as quickly as turning out a light?” Augustus countered.
“Oh, much faster than that,” John said brightly.
Palatine was founded in the late twenty-third century by a private consortium on a planet two hundred light-years away from Earth in the constellation of the Southern Crown under a U.S. flag.
Once Palatine’s infrastructure was in place, its land partially terraformed, the planet self-sufficient, and the government subsidy exhausted, the model colony declared its independence. Palatine, which also called itself Rome, summoned all true Romans from Earth.
And they answered. By the millions. Doctors, lawyers, judges, legislators, philosophers, historians, Catholic clergy, all manner of highly educated people for whom most Earth dwellers assumed the knowledge of Latin was merely a professional necessity or historical interest. Millions left Earth, forswore citizenship in their various nations and pledged allegiance to Eternal Rome.
The Roman Empire had never fallen. It had lived on in secret societies for more than two millennia. The very idea had been a laughable conspiracy theory for those two millennia. Until the Romans of Palatine erected their eagles over the capital of their dictatorial republic and the Senate installed a Caesar for life.
The United States, which had to date never tried to keep a colony by force, declared war on Palatine. The two worlds had remained at war, on and off, for the last one hundred fifty years.
Even during hostilities, Rome/Palatine spread its territory, founding other planetary colonies in its own name. Palatine was not signatory to the League of Earth Nations Convention and did not restrict its colonization only to those planets without sapient natives. Alien civilizations were absorbed into the empire, some even willingly, attracted by Roman order, might, and technology.
Palatine excelled in mechanization and automation, thanks largely to a genius of his age, one Constantine Siculus, whose innovations were so devastating to the balance of power, that the U.S. Central Intelligence considered kidnapping him. Rome killed him first, after he set himself up as King Constantine of one of Palatine’s own colonies. Rome cloned him, of course, but Constantine’s clones hadn’t his inventive genius. The cloners neglected to consider the impact personal experience had on the formation of the human brain; and the clones were simply not the same person.
Still Palatine grew from renegade colony into a rival, then a menace. Roman Legions, both human and robotic, swept across the galactic south of Near space and headed across the Orion Starbridge toward the galaxy’s Sagittarian arm, a territory called the Deep. When Rome claimed the whole of the Sagittarian constellation as a Roman province, to the farthest end of the galaxy, no one could dispute them, even though no human had ever been to the far side of the Milky Way, much less to its far Rim. Just traversing the two thousand parsecs to the Deep took the fastest ship three months.
Then, in AD 2389, the U.S. stunned all the nations of Earth and all the known worlds with the unveiling of a colossal displacement conduit, the Fort Roosevelt/Fort Eisenhower Shotgun. Displacement was known technology; the Shotgun was just bigger. Instead of displacing people and goods from orbiting ships to planet surfaces, the Shotgun displaced whole carriers—U.S. battle carriers—instantaneously from Fort Roosevelt in Near space to Fort Eisenhower in the Deep, deeper than the Romans had ever gone.
And planted American flags in Sagittarius.
Human territory still only comprised a fraction of the galaxy. The unknown was far greater.
In early 2436, Romans ran into something horrible. They did not know it at first. At first they knew only that they had lost a ship, the Sulla, in the Deep.
Searcher after searcher disappeared. Even when Rome found the monsters behind the path of destruction, the Empire kept silent. Deep end colonies were eaten alive. Hive impulses caused a million Roman killer bots to self-destruct, and Rome maintained its swaggering mask of invincibility.
It was not until Captain John Farragut and the space battleship Merrimack met a Hive swarm and lived to tell about it that Rome sued for peace and asked for help.
The U.S.S. Merrimack was the only ship ever to survive a Hive swarm once engaged.
The U.S. agreed to assist, but only on the condition that Rome put its military command under U.S. control. It was a measure of the disaster that Caesar Magnus agreed.
So, in 2443, Rome and the U.S. became locked in an unhappy, unholy alliance, united only in their quest to exterminate the monsters at the edge of the map.
And John Farragut and Augustus became the least likely pair of officers ever to serve aboard the same space battleship.
“During the hostilities I was ordered to suicide before letting myself fall into Earth hands,” said Augustus. “Now here I am ordered to serve a U.S. commander. Not just a U.S. commander, but John Alexander Farragut.” The words said John Alexander Farragut, but the tone clearly said John the flaming idiot Farragut.
John Farragut had dealt Rome one of its few defeats in a battle for ownership of a planet.
“You’re ready to fall on your sword?” Farragut asked lightly. “Take cyanide?”
“That’s a big joke to you, isn’t it?” Augustus pulled the cap off a back tooth, produced a tiny vial. “There’s your joke.” He replaced the vial and the cap.
Farragut’s brows twisted, one perplexedly higher than the other. “Ever hear the line, ‘No son of a bitch ever won a war by dying for his country?’ ”
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Augustus replied in irony, “Of course. That’s why there are monuments to the dead at Thermopylae, Masada, the Alamo, and Corindahlor.”
“You don’t suppose the Romans at Corindahlor Bridge would rather have lived?”
Augustus bridled in personal ownership. “Don’t ever presume you know what was in the minds of the Romans at Corindahlor.”
Corindahlor was before Farragut’s time. “And you do?”
“No. Honestly, I don’t.” Augustus sat back, murmured to himself, “What could they have been thinking?”
“You would rather commit suicide than take orders from me? I’d have thought orders to live and serve rather than die and serve would be a relief.”
“Shows your own self-serving priorities. I was assigned to you because John Farragut is where the Hive is. In wide-open space, it’s John Farragut who gets into the furballs. How do you do that?”
Farragut laughed. “I have no idea!”
“I believe that,” Augustus said dryly. The man was clueless. “They gave me to you the sooner to eliminate the Hive. Doesn’t make us lovers.”
“Doesn’t it even make us friends? Civil acquaintances?”
“Earth is next in line if the Hive eats its way past Palatine, so I don’t overestimate Earth’s compassion. And you would be well advised not to overestimate Rome’s gratitude.”
3
MARINES SNAPPED TO ATTENTION at Colonel Steele’s barking entrance into the fighter craft maintenance bay, which doubled as the Marines’ parade deck. “Hallahan!”
“Sir!”
“Jaxon!”
“Sir!”
“Li!”
“Yo! Sir!”
“Blue!”
Kerry Blue straightened, tried to look keen, shocked to be called. “Sir!”
Steele’s pale blue eyes narrowed at her. “You all here, Blue?”
“Yes, sir!” Kerry shouted, spirits rising. She was done crying over that lying, cheating, gorgeous bastard Cowboy. A tear stole down Kerry’s face. She dashed it away. Well, almost done.
The colonel ignored it. Turned away, barking more names.
Nothing like a mission—a big one—to drag you out of yourself. Colonel Steele was taking Kerry Blue down with the captain to meet the aliens. Kerry refrained from gushing thanks.
