The Myriad: Tour of the Merrimack #1

by R. M. Meluch

  The LEN inquisitors made no move to play back the bubble. She heard it rolling loose on the desk. The low female voice pronounced: “That conclusion is not just wrong, it’s ridiculous.”

  “This is just like the U.S. military.” The Eyebrow again. “To piss mines everywhere. And when we are in danger of tripping them, do you clean them up? No. You tell us: Don’t go there. I don’t know what sort of smoke and mirrors you are using to create this apparent time anomaly on these traps of yours—these wormholes—but the constriction of this system is real. Your interference with the stellar environment threatens the orbital stability of three fragile worlds—”

  “We did not make the kzachin and don’t call them wormholes. Wormholes collapse under the energy of using them.”

  “Precisely how we know the traps are not naturally occurring phenomena! You tell us to stay out of your traps? No! I tell you: You take them away!”

  Glenn Hamilton foundered, at a loss for a response. An adult one, anyway. Knew this would never happen to John Farragut.

  Okay, so what would John Farragut do?

  Could almost hear him: Choose your battleground, kid.

  Lieutenant Glenn Hamilton snugged her officer’s cap on her head, turned briskly as on a parade ground, and walked out.

  The balance of power shifted again, right there in the hatchway with their shouts at her back to get back in here. And she would have smiled were she not so angry, were the situation not so perilous. But their impotent outrage had a nice burn to it like strong liquor going down.

  She took her warning straight to the Archon.

  Donner was not happy about it. He showed her his maned back as he pronounced imperiously, “Lieutenant Commander Glenn Hamilton, I do not deal with subordinates. I do not give audiences to thirds-in-command. I do not speak to stand-ins. And I do not come when summoned. I do, however, answer females who ask for help.” That last explained this private audience, without guards or servants or cameras. “Though you are not what we think of as female.”

  At five foot one, Glenn Hamilton must look quite mannish to the Myriadian.

  Donner turned to face her as he continued, “I am quit of your LEN. You may tell them so. They are unctuous, overly curious, and wholly useless. They ask questions; they answer nothing. And they seem physically incapable of using the word no, when all those roundabout words they stuff in its place mean no. Your language has such a word as no. Captain Farragut figured out how to say it.”

  “The LEN fear offending you,” Glenn Hamilton explained. “I can say no.”

  “You do not fear offending me?” He used the you-subordinate.

  Glenn answered with the I-subordinate. “I fear it, but I will do it if I have to.”

  “Yet the LEN offend me and you do not. If they fear offending me, why do they not give me what I want?”

  “The LEN is a league of democracies,” Glenn tried to explain. “They cannot make major decisions quickly even if they want to.”

  “Ah.” Understanding and disapproval in the Ah.

  She could see him trying to cut through their layers and layers of red tape, when he had scant experience with red tape, and probably no word for it. It was nothing dictators ever had to deal with. Donner reacted with dictatorial impatience.

  The Archon had got a glimpse of Earth’s incredible technological wealth and immediately wanted it. Nothing could be more natural. Glenn Hamilton understood that.

  The LEN understood that, too, which was one reason they were so furious at Farragut for giving Donner the glimpse.

  We show Donner the candy box, then the LEN comes along and slams the lid.

  Donner thinks I have candy to give.

  The floor tremored under Glenn’s feet. So accustomed she was to the deck’s burbles that she didn’t think to take alarm right away. Then she did. Earthquake.

  Briskly, but without fear, Donner took her arm and guided her to a structural archway between stout marble pillars, still talking, explaining his unhappiness with the LEN representatives. A groan rose from the ground. The chamber shook. Plaster clattered to the jeweled floor.

  Donner glanced up to the ceiling as the tremors subsided, white holes showing in the elaborate mural. He gave an inward sigh. “I liked that picture.” And to Glenn, “I do not like your LEN.”

  “Archon, you are going to like me even less.”

  “You offend me,” he warned.

  “A soldier does what a soldier must.”

  “Speak, then. If you must.”

  He listened without interruption as she told him that Origin had been found.

  That it was here, in the Milky Way Galaxy.

  That it was dead, an airless, waterless rock with no remains of civilization except the twenty billion-year-old back of the reliquary with Donner’s name on it.

  That Donner’s only means of interstellar transportation, the kzachin, defied the laws of physics.

  That the kzachin distorted time. That use of the kzachin most likely was causing the constriction of the Myriad.

  That the threat of paradox was real.

  That Donner’s ships should stay off the kzachin and especially not go to Origin, so as not to spread the threat of paradox.

  When Donner broke the hideous silence that stretched long after Glenn had finished, it was to ask, “Where did my people go?”

  The question startled her. What should be the uppermost thing on the dictator’s mind. Not his transportation system, not his immediate danger, not the erosion of his power. “Sir?” She fell in love with him on the spot.

  Donner’s voice trembled like the ground. “Origin is a world of one billion people.”

  Glenn Hamilton’s answer burned her mouth. She felt like the LEN, spewing poisoned gentleness. “That place you know is ten billion years in the past. Those people are dead now, of course.”

  The side step did not get past him. Might as well have called him stupid. Donner answered brittlely, “I know that.” And he called her stupid back: “Where are their descendants?”

  One billion beings breed billions of offspring. And over billions of years, trillions of billions.

  Where were they?

  Hamster contrived the nicest guess she could. “They may have migrated before your planet lost its angular momentum and drifted out of the habitable zone. Your people had time to see it coming. Stellar decay takes millions of years.”

  Donner’s voice smoldered. “Origin has not the elements for that kind of migration. And if heavy elements could be found or created, where did my people go?”

  “Anywhere. Ten billion years blurs a trail.”

  “Ten billion ‘years’ balloons a population, if it lives at all. Someone should be left somewhere. Someone ten billion ‘years’ more advanced than you!”

  “They could be so advanced they don’t recognize you as kin anymore.”

  “They died.” Donner answered his own question, since she would not speak it. “Simple answers are often the true ones.”

  Glenn Hamilton caught herself about to lie to spare his feelings. Said instead: “True.”

  “Then I shall bring my people here. I must have done so. This is the only place they could have gone.”

  “But I thought you didn’t want them here,” she countered. “The sentinel buoy, the minefield Merrimack tripped at the Rim gate at the edge of the Myriad—that was set for them!” Realization came even as she said it. “The mines were a border guard! You set that minefield by the kzachin to keep the people of Origin from coming here!”

  “I did not want them here,” Donner confessed. Past tense. She caught that. “I do not want them to die out even to their children’s children.”

  Difficult to argue with someone you’ve fallen in love with, when he had every right to his stand. She tried. “In theory bringing people forward in time is not dangerous. But going back is terribly dangerous. Even if it’s just the knowledge of this time. Prescience can be catastrophic.”

  “In theory,” Donner qua
lified.

  “Can we at least proceed carefully?” she begged. “Please don’t launch a ship to Origin telling them what you know now. Not without a plan for containment. You could erase us all.”

  “I do not give promises.”

  He’s going to bring them here. Fast as he can. She knew it. He had seen the past and found it unacceptable. The people of his home world were all dead, and this must not be. Donner forbade it.

  The wrong ship formed around Glenn Hamilton as she displaced shipboard from the planet. Disoriented, she knew at once that this was not her SPT 1. This had to be the LEN vessel Woodland Serenity.

  Doubly disturbing, in that she had requested retrieval to her own vessel, and she really did not trust the LEN’s French-built displacement chambers to transport snot.

  To the first face she met, Lieutenant Commander Hamilton demanded, “Why am I here? Is my boat all right?”

  The Eyebrow stormed into the displacement bay, a swarthy man wearing green fatigues as if he were military personnel. Deep brown eyes glowered from under that single bushy brow. “Mrs. Hamilton. Mrs. Hamilton,” he scolded her with her name. “This is criminal.”

  “Yes, this is kidnapping. You had no right to intercept me.” She gingerly jumped off the displacement disk lest they opt to send her elsewhere in that frogified death trap. “You will dock with my SPT boat and restore me to my intended destination immediately.”

  “This way, Mrs. Hamilton.”

  “We are docked with my SPT boat?” she asked, somewhat mollified.

  “This way, please.”

  She strode briskly after the Eyebrow, her heels clicking a light angry cadence. Her thoughts raced and tumbled. She had made a mess of this. She had not succeeded in warning Donner off the kzachin. No, in fact, she was pretty sure she had just spurred him in quite the opposite direction.

  Damage control, then. How to contain the consequences? Minimize the damage. Needed to devise a course of action.

  Her escort stepped aside, gentlemanly, making way for her to proceed ahead of him through a hatchway to a long corridor. “Mrs. Hamilton.”

  She tried not to wince. Not that she did not love Dr. Patrick Hamilton, she did. But first thing she did once this was all over was going to be changing her name back to Glenn Hull.

  She marched briskly ahead—

  Toe hit. Not enough warning to put on the brakes. She slammed full face into a bulk. Nose, brow, chin.

  The holographic corridor vanished around her. Now she saw the bulk through teary eyes. Nose swelled.

  Language unbecoming an officer.

  She spun to face the hatch as it slammed shut, caging her in this small compartment. She announced with level authority, using her command voice: “This is piracy.”

  She received no response. She paced—carefully—the cell’s true dimensions that were visible now. Two meters by two meters by two and a half meters. Slow fear threatened to close in on her. She pushed it away. It was not useful.

  Neither was self-blame, though she had a great stockpile of that to face later. She had let herself—and probably her two SPT boats—fall into unauthorized hands. She could not sit here and await rescue. John Farragut would go extragalactic if he saw this.

  She did not know how far Captain Farragut intended to run those two swarms, but she could not let him return to this. He would take a baseball bat to the Eyebrow.

  Entertaining as that might be, it would not advance her career.

  She was shaking. She had lost control of her independent command.

  She steeled herself, forced the quaking down. She would just have to regain control.

  And when the Merrimack returned, she would crack the Eyebrow with John’s baseball bat.

  Her eyes roamed the blank walls. This would never happen to John Farragut.

  John, where are you?

  Merrimack hurtled onward, shrouded in weird quiet. No scritching. No off-tune hum of insinuation. Everything touching Merrimack’s field was dead.

  The normal wobble and pitch of the deck was gone. The ship ran rock steady. You could not know from within her that she even moved. The ship felt still as the grave.

  With a sudden muffled explosion, the ship lurched severely. Captain Farragut lost his footing. In catching himself, his hand mashed into a control board. Calli fell into him. A technician pitched forward, nose into the console. Came up with a bloody mouth.

  Shouts erupted from below. A rumbling shuddered underfoot. Acrid smell of burning plastic laced the air.

  “That was inside,” said Calli. She crawled to the central com and demanded a report.

  The answer came: “We have fire, mid-deck, gun bay twenty.”

  As Calli received the report, Farragut consulted a systems technician, “Did we take the fire-fighting system off-line?”

  They had taken most systems off line in preparation to meet the swarm.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Put it back on-line, please.” Farragut tended to sound casual in a disaster.

  The report from mid-deck was unclear. They thought the gun crew had tried to fire an exploding projectile from bay twenty. Best guess was the shell had not made it clear of the barrel. The barrel ruptured on board, leaving a holy holocaust down below.

  Smoke roiled too thick for anyone to withstand. They could not extinguish the blaze by isolating the section and opening it to the deep airless freeze of space. They could not even vent the smoke. The ship was buried deep in a solidity of compressed gorgons. There was no way out.

  Calli commanded over the loud com, “Battery, hold your fire! No one fire! All units, do not fire. Triage to gun bay twenty. Fire containment crew report to mid-deck.” She turned off the com to murmur, “God almighty.”

  “Why don’t I hear the engines?” Farragut asked.

  “The engines shut themselves down to nominal,” Systems reported. “All vents are blocked. We are overheating.”

  The engines cooled by cycling coolant past the near zero of surrounding space.

  Farragut turned to Tactical: “Are we moving?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How fast and which way?”

  “Sublight. The collision dropped us out of FTL. We are on the same vector as before contact. The swarm came with us.”

  “They learn quick.”

  The navigation specialist with the bloody lip muttered at his console, “Sublight. At least someone will be able to find our dead hull.”

  “Belay that. Can we steer?”

  “We can steer, sir. But we’ll lose speed.”

  To which Systems added, “We can’t accelerate without cooking ourselves.

  Farragut looked to Calli. His XO concluded, “The battleground is right here.”

  “We aren’t the only ones hurt,” said Farragut. “Get me a sounding. How bad off are they?”

  At the very least Merrimack had incinerated a thick layer around her force field and left at a minimum a fifty-meter-diameter path of destruction directly behind her.

  “They are dead to a thickness of nine meters all sides except to the stern, which is dead straight back to the surface.”

  That gave Merrimack a few moments in which to think while the enemy ate its way through its dead. But, “We’re going to burn up if we don’t get some of them off us quick.”

  “Take the force field down to nominal until the live ones close in,” Farragut ordered. The force field was the single biggest draw on the engines. “Are any of the guns functional?”

  “Not the projectiles, sir. The pressure on the force field is off the scale. We’re buried alive. The dead mass has pushed in through the gun barrels.”

  “Can we displace anything into the mass?”

  “Negative!” Systems was quick with the answer. “The displacement unit is tricky at the best of times. It uffs itself without Hive help. If we turn on the chamber, the Hive’s likely to displace gorgons aboard.”

  Farragut nodded. “If the Hive learns how to displace, this war is over.”
He took in a breath, chest tight. Exhaled hard to expel excess carbon dioxide. Could not seem to get enough air. “Status atmospherics.”

  “All green,” said Calli. She had already checked atmospherics. Twice. “I feel it, too.”

  “Swarm,” Farragut murmured. Uffing their senses.

  “Yes, sir,” Systems confirmed. “We’re not really suffocating. Yet.”

  “Belay that.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Stand by to bring the beam cannons back on-line.”

  “They’ll expect that,” said Calli.

  “No, Mr. Carmel. You expect that. We haven’t used beams against the Hive in a long, long time.”

  “Because the Hive always overloads the controls.”

  “And for all they know, we have learned our lesson and quit using beams.”

  “You don’t think they’re waiting for this move?”

  “No. I don’t think they have it in them to anticipate our moves in a new situation. They learn by precedent, like computers. Computers count patterns back through the most recent choices. We haven’t used beams in a long time. They won’t expect us to restart now. To react, they’ll have to see the threat, evaluate the threat, then neutralize the threat. And I have to hope the time between steps one, two, and three takes more time than it does us to drill a vent to the surface.” He turned to Augustus for comment. “That’s Plan A.”

  “I like it,” said the intelligence officer. “Given that I don’t see a Plan B. Be quick.”

  “Fire Control, how long will it take to burn through to the surface?”

  The weapons specialist pulled his lips tight across his teeth. “More time than we’ll have. These are can openers out there. Not soft bodies. They’re armored and they’re dense.”

  “How about shooting through the dead?”

  “Why would we shoot the dead?”

  “I need vents for the engines. Everything behind us is dead. We came in that way. It’s got to be pretty soft back there. Can we cut a tunnel back out the back?”