by R. M. Meluch
The normal method was to open a vein in a tub of warm water and fade away. There were no tubs on Merrimack .
Calli stammered, “Did he—Did Matty—succeed?”
Farragut muscled a spanner round. “Oh, yeah.” Paused to wipe moisture off his upper lip with the back of his wrist. He sat back on his heels. “I should have known. I should have done something.”
Calli’s long legs folded into a crouch by the pit, so she could speak softly. “Your brain doesn’t work that way, John.”
“It should have. God bless it, it should have! I’m the only one who could have talked him down.” He gave the ratchet another snarling turn. Let it dangle. “Hell, Cal.” He sat back again on thick haunches, gave a graveyard grin up from the pit. “We got ourselves another fine mess.”
Calli was still too incensed to smile. “They took us down, they kicked us, they pissed on us, and, oh, Lord, they know everything there is to know about the Mack.”
“They will.” Farragut tugged on the spanner. “As soon as they finish dissecting Monitor, you bet they will.”
Calli took off her own jacket, climbed down into the pit to help pull. “John?” she said. Grunted.
“Yeah, Cal?” Grunted back.
Calli let go the spanner. Pushed a long stray hair out of her face. “This is all defensive.”
John Farragut was an aggressive fighter. “Them’s fightin’ words, woman.”
She nodded. Asked, speculative, “Where is the Monitor ?”
Farragut saw wheels turning behind Calli’s brown eyes. And he was desperate for wheels. He dared a guarded smile. “What’s on your mind?”
“You said the Romans will know everything about Monitor. You’re right. They will. But they probably don’t yet. They’ll need more time to take Monitor apart and analyze her.”
“And?”
“Let’s grab her back before they learn any more.”
Farragut let the spanner drop altogether. He propped his elbows back on the edge of the pit. “Oh, yeah. Grab her back. Just grab her back.” He tried out the preposterous sound of it. Allowed, “It does have improbability in its favor. What else does it have to say for itself?”
“I’m serious, John. Just do it. Quick. Dirty. Before they can think.”
“Before we can think.”
“While they are still defending a captive ship about which we know everything! We will never be in a stronger position.”
“That’s a scary thought right there.”
“Why are we even thinking defensively? We are afraid they’ll use Monitor against Merrimack. So let’s use Merrimack against Monitor. We’re sitting here figuring out every possible thing they could do to us with what they learn from Monitor. Let’s do it first. While we know the field and they’re still reading the playbook.”
“I like the attitude, Cal.”
A reedy voice intruded from above: “She learned that on Palatine.”
The disheveled captain and exec looked up at the intelligence officer standing at the edge of the pit, her little hands neatly folded.
Lu Oh was always neat. She was such a tiny figure that Calli and Farragut had never looked up at her before. From this angle, Lu Oh’s narrow nostrils, her slitted, slanted eyes, and her heart-shaped face made her look like a predatory insect.
“Mr. Oh, I could get real tired of that tone,” said Farragut. And to Calli, “Mr. Carmel, let’s go talk to Brighty.”
Commander Bright was not a useful source of information. On questions of where Monitor had been operating, on what mission, and the battleship’s last known location, he was peculiarly uncooperative.
Farragut was losing his very long patience, when the intelligence officer intervened, “He can’t answer you, Captain Farragut. You are asking for classified information.”
Farragut felt his eyes grow huge. They had to look like blue-yoked eggs. “He can’t tell me?”
“Given the nature of what you intend, absolutely not.”
“Oh, bullskat. Brighty!” Farragut implored.
Brighty maintained a sullen silence.
“We don’t need him, John,” said Calli. “We can back figure a rough window of when Monitor was captured. It can’t have been long, or the JC would have red-balled us by now. Since the Romans dropped Matty, Brighty, and Jorge in the Deep End not too long ago, Monitor had to have been captured in the Deep End.
“In the time since Monitor was taken, the Romans did enough analysis to get our harmonic and our IFF sequence and our location. That takes more sophisticated equipment than ships carry on board. Monitor can’t land, so they have to be dissecting her at a space dock.
“Palatine has a limited number of space docks big enough to accommodate a battleship with the right technical resources to do what they had to do. And only one of them is in striking distance of the Deep End. That’s Daedalus Station on the galactic Via Romana.”
Napoleon Bright registered mute surprise. He would neither confirm nor deny her conclusion, but his expression told it all.
John Farragut considered Calli’s line of reasoning. Said at last, “So, tell me, why do I need an IO at all if I have you?”
“Because I work for the United States,” said Lu Oh. Implied that Calli Carmel didn’t.
Farragut ignored Lu, still talking to Calli. “You know this idea is still half-cocked.”
“Half-cocked is better than dickless,” said Calli.
“The situation could fast become thoroughly cocked,” said Lu Oh.
Calli put it to the captain: “Go? No go?”
John Farragut had a dangerous gleam in his eyes. “Go.”
Napoleon Bright broke his silence. “What? What are you planning to do here?”
“Get Monitor.”
“Get—? You are actually considering doing this?”
“No, I’m past considering and well into planning it now.”
“Sir. Reconsider. I have recently acquired a real respect for Roman cunning and resourcefulness.”
“Calli’s had that respect for a long time,” Farragut assured him.
“No one is questioning Mr. Carmel’s respect for Rome,” said Colonel Oh. “Can you be absolutely certain Mr. Carmel is not delivering to Rome the complete matched set of Monitor class battleships?”
Calli countered, “Brighty, can you be absolutely certain your ship fell to Roman cunning and not to the blundering of an intelligence officer? Talk to us. Brighty, this is me.”
Lu Oh pressed, “Captain Farragut. Roman Imperialists hid underground like a festering boil for two millennia. And when they surfaced in the year 2290, there were millions of them. Millions, and no one ever suspected. It is probable to a certainty that there are still Roman moles among us, highly situated.”
“If there are, you couldn’t find them if they were wearing name tags,” said Calli.
Farragut tried to make peace. “I can’t go around suspecting all my own people, Lu.”
“Not all of them, Captain. But as far as I’m concerned, anyone who speaks Latin is suspect.”
“I speak Latin,” said Farragut.
Lu’s voice dropped, witheringly, “Captain Farragut. You don’t speak Latin.”
To which Calli added in a near mumble, “You don’t, John.”
“Et tu, Calli?”
Calli’s eyebrows canted up at the center, apologetic. “You’re really bad at it.”
And Lu Oh announced abruptly that she wanted out.
Out? John Farragut withheld a smile and asked amiably, “You want to walk, Mr. Oh?”
“I am taking the LRS and our Roman prisoners back to Earth.”
Farragut blinked in surprise, unused to people challenging his command.They might question him, but never bypass him. John Farragut was as easily ignored as a freight train.
To Lu’s self assignment, he said simply, “No, you’re not.”
Lu Oh rose from her chair. “Sir, I am.”
“Colonel Steele, detain Mr. Oh.”
Steele nodded
to his MPs posted at the hatchway. They advanced with unholstered sidearms.
“You have no authority over me,” Lu Oh declared. As if standing within a force field. “CIA.”
So now she runs up her true colors. Farragut had known for quite some time. “Mr. Oh, you are on my ship, wearing the uniform of a Navy Intelligence Colonel. No one of authority has told me you are anything else. As a Naval officer, you are either delusional or mutinous. This is my ship. That’s my insignia on your sleeve. You are destined for my brig.” He nodded the go ahead to his Marines. “Mr. Steele.”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
“Less enthusiasm, if you please, TR.”
“Sir.”
The great squared white-blond boulder that was TR Steele could have picked up the stick figure that was Lu Oh and broken all her little bones. Not entirely without intelligence, Lu Oh offered no physical struggle.
6
THE BOUNDARY BETWEEN U.S.-controlled space and Imperial space was a spongy thing, especially in the Deep End. No one guards a vacuum. And no one recognizes a claim you have not tread on or flagged. The present war had begun when Palatine drew a line in the stars and the U.S. crossed it.
Still Daedalus Station lay in undisputed Roman territory in the Orion Starbridge.
Fortunately, space was unimaginably wide. No one really ever ran into anyone else by accident out here.
Getting to Daedalus Station was not the problem. Getting at Daedalus Station could be suicide. There would be guard ships around Daedalus, and a garrison within.
Lieutenant Commander Jorge Medina, only slightly more cooperative than Napoleon Bright, did manage a nod to that. There were many guards and a garrison at Daedalus. Approach would be impossible.
Calli proposed pulling the numbers off of Merrimack and hauling her in under apparent control of the Valerius and the Strigs. If detected, she would either look like the Monitor in tow, or the newly captured Merrimack .
“Well and good,” said Farragut. “Unless they know that my Mack blew the blue peaches out of Valerius. I’ve got to believe Decurion Silva got off a ‘We’re going down’ message before he surrendered.”
“He probably tried, but it didn’t go,” said Calli. “Kit says Valerius’ res chamber boiled down at our first strike. There are no such messages in the communication logs of any of the other captive ships. Which makes sense, because it’s Valerius’ place to send that call.”
Jorge Medina offered cautiously, “Don’t Romans often have—what do they call them—spotter craft? They hang back and watch and run home to give reports. There could have been one at your battle with Valerius . Rome will know everything.”
Calli conceded, “There’s a chance there was a spotter craft we missed, but without confirmation from Valerius that signal will be suspect.”
Farragut considered this gravely. “I don’t like that chance, Cal.”
Calli would not be turned, “In the Empire, no one is going to pass on news like that until it’s confirmed. Assume the worst case scenario—there was a spotter. He sent the message. To whom? Not to Daedalus Station. Daedalus is a maintenance site, not a battle platform. Especially in Rome, dishonor is not news quickly shared. And not with the techs, it’s not.”
Farragut rephrased what she had just told him, dubious, “We are gambling that the wrong people don’t know the outcome of our encounter with Valerius. What are the odds of that?”
“Good, actually. Roman security is constructed like a chambered nautilus, just like its ships. Everything is compartmentalized, encased in fire walls. Keeps them from the kind of informational hemorrhage we’re suffering now because Merrimack and Monitor are in sync. Also keeps their left hand from knowing what their right hand is doing.” She had graduated from the Imperial Military Institute. No one knew Romans better than Calli Carmel. “It’s a good shot, John.”
Jorge Medina was shaking his head, his mouth pressed tight shut, looking frightened.
Farragut said, “It’s thin, Cal. If they see Valerius at Daedalus Station, we won’t be the ones doing the grabbing back. I wish I could try it. I think I want it too much. I’m sorry, I can’t run this nag.”
Throughout the narrow corridors and tight compartments of John Farragut’s battleship, technicians reworked control circuits, codes, and frequencies. Captain Farragut arrived at his command platform, glanced to the signals board where the normal IFF indicator was benignly blinking. He ordered, “Turn that off.”
“IFF off, aye.”
In a moment, Farragut asked the signals tech, “Mr. Remi, why are we still chirping?”
“I—I don’t know, sir. It’s off. We are not generating this signal.”
Farragut bounded down to the signals station to see for himself as Mr. Remi explained, “It’s our IFF code, but we’re not generating it. It’s being relayed through our res chamber from an outside source.”
Farragut could not remember ever feeling more shocked. What he had been dreading was already happening.
“Monitor.”
He stared at the sounder, seeing now the trap he had not stepped in. The near miss. A sensation like a bullet singeing his eyelashes.
During battle, when he had realized that the Roman ships were deflecting Merrimack’s ordnance by sending Merrimack’s own IFF code, the logical countermove on Farragut’s part would have been to shut off Merrimack ’s IFF.
Rome would have expected that.
And because Merrimack’s captain was known as an aggressive fighter, Rome might also have expected Farragut to launch ordnance targeting Merrimack’s IFF code at the very moment he shut his ships’ IFF down.
The Roman answer to that ploy was here flashing on Mr. Remi’s signal board. By remote control from Monitor, Rome prevented Merrimack shutting off her own IFF.
If this had happened during the battle, Farragut would have shot his own fighters.
But we never cut IFF, so that is not how it happened.
He wondered aloud, “Do they know we know?”
“They’ll know that we just now tried to cut our IFF,” said Remi. “They are monitoring us, so to say.”
Monitor was on Merrimack’s resonant harmonic.
They think we’re killing ourselves right now.
“Okay, let’s die.”
“Sir?”
“Disable the res chamber. Take it apart.” And he sent an order to the maintenance hangars to pull all of the Swifts’ res chambers as well.
An invisible link severed. The IFF sounder went silent.
A sudden sense of deep isolation closed in. Space seemed vast and dark. Merrimack was utterly alone.
For several moments no one spoke. As if mourning their own death.
“Hamster, tell my XO we’re going to Daedalus Station.”
Merrimack moved toward the Orion Starbridge without meeting any resistance. The war had a wide front, and neither side had enough resources to defend all its strategic points.
Napoleon Bright showed up on John Farragut’s command platform like a ghost without a castle. “Captain Farragut, I cannot take part in this operation.”
“No, Brighty, you can’t,” said Farragut. “Neither can I. Someone would recognize us.”
“And they won’t recognize Mr. Carmel?” said Brighty.
“She’s not as famous as you or me. I just hope Cal doesn’t run into anyone from her school days.”
Calli was arranging the insignia on her Roman uniform. She said, “We are going to the armpit of the Empire. Graduates from my school don’t end up at Daedalus.”
“You sound pretty proud of the Imperial Military Institute,” said Brighty, a touch of suspicion in that. More than a touch.
“It was very useful,” said Calli. “Know your enemy. You should at least try to learn Latin, Brighty.”
“I refuse.”
Jorge Medina seconded the refusal.
“Jorge!” Calli said in surprise. “You don’t speak Latin?”
“I speak Spanish, and I’ll thank you not
to call that a Latin tongue. I am an American. Here. For your disguise.” He produced a Roman campaign badge. “I took it from one of our guests. It looks very impressive. It goes here.”
“Latin should be easy for you, Jorge,” said Calli, as Jorge pinned the campaign badge under her left pocket. “It’s something educated people know.”
“No. It’s something the bad guys know.”
“Romans aren’t all bad,” said Calli.
“No. Yes. Yes, they are,” said Jorge. “They are bad. They were born bad. They are bad. That is why we have to shoot all of them we can before someone can call another truce.”
“Amen,” said Brighty.
“That’s a Latin word,” said Calli. And to John Farragut, “How do I look?”
“Screechin’,” said Farragut. She looked head to toe a Roman decurion.
A black jumpsuit from Valerius had been altered to fit Calli’s very slender form. She had liberated a set of Silva’s commodore’s eagles for her collar. She fastened her hair back with a decorative set of bronze Aldebaran scarab cricket pins borrowed from a deceased Roman crewwoman.
“Those fancy bug pins regulation?” Farragut nodded to the hair ornaments.
“No,” said Calli. She knew which rules to bend and which to obey.
“I should like to go with you,” said Lieutenant Commander Medina. “I know the ship. They won’t recognize me. I will keep my mouth shut.”
“I know the ship,” said Calli. Monitor was Merrimack ’s older twin. “You won’t know when someone is talking to you, Jorge, and you don’t know this is a campaign badge from the Aliquidor siege.” She unpinned the badge Jorge had given her. “I was in kindergarten during Aliquidor.” She handed the flashy badge back to him. “Thanks anyway, Jorge. Don’t worry. I’ll get your ship back.”
Her handpicked attendants reported to the hangar deck, honor guard sharp, worthy of Arlington duty, only they wore Roman black and marched to a Roman cadence.
“Oh, Gawd,” said Farragut with a horrified laugh, impressed. The men looked authentic as hell. “Get out of here before I brig the lot of you.”
Calli lifted an Imperial fist to her chest in salute. “Domni.” Sir.
