by R. M. Meluch
The ship’s outside lights illuminated—and were visible through the lined-up holes.
“Oh, yeah.” The tac specialist Marcander Vincent crouched before the pea hole in a one-eyed squint. “We blew it out our arse.”
Something had ripped the ship stem to stern. Clean. Without casualties. Fortunately it was not the hull that kept the vacuum out. It was the force field that kept the ship intact, and kept everything outside out.
Kept out everything except whatever this was.
“Engines?”
“Missed all six.”
Merrimack’s huge power plants occupied most of her stern, so a miss of that proportion was an amazing bit of luck. Or not luck at all.
“All stop.”
Acting exec Lieutenant Glenn Hamilton relayed the orders that dropped the battleship out of FTL.
“What was our speed when we took the hit?” Farragut requested.
“Twelve thousand c,” Glenn Hamilton answered. “You don’t think that was the problem?”
“No. But it can’t be helping. Systems! Farragut. What’s going on with my cowcatcher!”
“Systems are A-OK. Nothing aberrant with the force field. Integrity one hundred percent.”
“We took a bullet, gentlemen. Somebody want to tell me how?”
“Would love to, sir! As soon as we have a bloody clue!” Senior Engineer Kit Kittering had come up to the command platform. She was a well-engineered, wide-shouldered, boy-shaped young woman with a two-dimensional waist and large doll eyes, her hair in an angular wedge cut. She touched a finger to the foremost hole. “It had to be traveling well over threshold velocity. And it cannot be particulate.”
“That’s not possible, Kit.”
“I know that, Captain.” And she gave a small woof as another bang and zing ripped through the ship.
Kit looked down, blood flowing from the pea-sized hole in her uniform. “Oh, my.” Kit parted her shirt to inspect her abdomen. “Oh, my.” Her doll eyes rolled back and she crumpled to the deck.
Farragut ordered the MO to bag his ass to the command deck. Called for battle stations.
Only after Lieutenant Hamilton complied did she question the order in a whisper, “Battle stations, Captain?”
“This isn’t natural. Somebody is out there. Move this boat! Somebody is shooting at us!”
Glenn Hamilton obeyed. Didn’t believe him, but obeyed.
Then Marcander Vincent at tactical reported, “Occultation. We have company.”
“I know that.” By instinct, John Farragut had known that. “Loc?”
“Just about everywhere, sir. Barrel orbit around the Mack. Pacing us move for move.”
“Evasion course,” Farragut ordered.
“Can’t evade any wilder than we are, sir. Inertials are maxed.”
Any more velocity, any more severe turns, the forces would overwhelm the dampers and throw everyone through the bulkhead.
“Somebody get that gall-blessed CIA spook up here.”
The hostile took another shot. A perfectly straight shot without Coriolis curve or any angle that should have accompanied Merrimack’s wild maneuvers. The bullet’s impact to the ship’s nose and the ship’s tail was effectively simultaneous.
“How do we defend against this?” Glenn murmured.
“Defend?” said Farragut. “Shoot the bastard!”
Merrimack ran out all guns. “Where is he?”
“Right there,” Marcander Vincent said, amazed, staring straight ahead.
On the forward display had appeared a small Roman Striker, in black-and-gold eagles, holding its relative position before Merrimack’s bow.
Black and gold. Even John Farragut knew that one. Didn’t need Calli Carmel here to tell him this was gens kiss-my-ring God’s-gift-to-the-Empire Julian.
Once upon an ancient time, a Roman’s gens was his family. These days, the gentes were more like ideological or political factions.
The current Caesar was a Julian.
“Fire,” Farragut ordered. “Fire everything.”
From Fire Control: “Interrupt! We are not firing.”
“A balk?”
“No, sir. We’re getting an interrupt signal from somewhere.”
Somewhere would be from the Roman Striker. How?
“He’s inside our fire control system!” Fire Control called up.
“How is he getting through our force field?” Systems snarled into his console.
“Close the gunports!” Farragut ordered.
The battleship’s field was most tenuous within its gunports. The force field offered only minimal resistance within cannon barrels and torpedo tubes.
Even as he obeyed, the fire control officer warned, “We close ports, we can’t shoot him.”
“We can’t shoot him now.”
“Yes, sir.”
The inertial field pulled in to a tight seal. They all felt it in their ears.
Fire Control reported, “That did it! Fire controls are responsive. But now we’re limited to energy weapons.”
Meant that Merrimack could not fire forward.
Dwarfed between two MPs, Colonel Lu Oh arrived on deck. Farragut roared, “Lu! What is shooting at us!”
“That is a patterner, Captain.”
“Oh, for Jesus.”
Farragut had met one of these once before. Should have recognized the unreal accuracy of the shooting. This was not the same man. That one had been in Flavian colors.
This one would not be in any mood to be gallant.
“Lu, how is he shooting through our field?”
“If he knows our phase pulse programs—and he does—he can predict the pulses through all levels and weave a shot through,” said Colonel Oh.
“Even a computer can’t do that.”
“An altered human mind interfaced with a computer can. Patterners are programmed to detect patterns. They predict things. And they can send their reactions to properly interfaced control systems.”
The image of the Striker hung before the battleship’s bow in black-and-gold arrogance.
“Is this Kali?” Farragut asked.
Kali, the ultrasecret Roman project with the ominous code name of the destroyer Kali.
But Lu said, “No.”
“Then what is Kali?”
“Calli is the name of the mole to whom you gave command of the Monitor,” Lu Oh said dryly.
“Kali? Calli? Not likely,” said Glenn Hamilton. “A little obvious.”
“Of course. That would be arrogant, wouldn’t it?” Oh said, sarcasm overthick.
“What is Kali?” Farragut asked again
“I don’t know.” And to his dubious glare, Lu Oh said, “Captain, I don’t. I do know we are in grave danger here. I must not be allowed to be taken.”
“Com. Hail the Striker. Ask him what he wants. If it’s Lu, he can have her.”
The com tech relayed the question.
A machine voice answered with the Roman’s demand, “Surrender. Abandon your vessel.”
Farragut almost laughed. That itty bitty boat was going to take the Mack? He jumped down to the com station, leaned over the tech’s console, and answered for himself: “You expect me to unload an intact battleship?”
“That condition can be amended.”
Another shot ripped through the Merrimack, hit an engine compartment this time. Missed the engine itself with no margin to spare.
“We were lucky,” Systems reported.
“I don’t think so,” said Lu Oh.
“Okay,” Farragut sent over the com. “What happens to my people in their life pods?”
“They will be picked up,” the mechanical voice returned.
“By who? When? There’s no one out here. My people will die.”
Captain Farragut was stalling, of course. He had no earthly intention of abandoning ship. He just wanted the Roman to tell him if there were any other Roman ships in the region.
A patterner could probably figure out what Farragut was tryin
g to do.
The Roman response came as a whistle across the top of John Farragut’s head. Singed his hair and made him duck. “Hel-lo!”
Rising from his crouch, Farragut gingerly touched the top of his head. A few burned brittle strands of dark-blond hair fell away.
He wondered if that had been a miss.
The Roman sent: “Next, I will take out an engine.”
Farragut turned off the com. “Ram him. Redline.”
Merrimack sprang at the patterner’s little Striker at full acceleration—daring him to explode an engine he was about to wear.
The Striker dodged deftly to the side, but by then the momentum of Merrimack’s large mass carried her megaklicks into the Deep.
The charge forced the Striker to come full about, which meant dropping out of FTL and reaccelerating in the opposite direction from its previous travel.
“Evasive maneuvers, Captain?”
“No.” Course deviation became impossible near threshold velocity. “Run us up to the gate.”
The contained detonations in all six engines roared, muted through the dampers. Still they shook the ship. Gauges climbed into red zones on all the consoles, and the ship grew warm even with the heaters turned off.
“Where’s our friend? Is he doing his electron act?” Farragut drew orbits in the air with his forefinger.
“No, Captain,” said Tactical. “He’s behind us. Nine hundred thousand klicks. Closing slowly.”
Farragut said nothing, seemed to be listening. And all other voices on the command platform stopped. Listened, too. Waiting on the shot.
That did not come.
At last Lieutenant Glenn Hamilton spoke for all of them, “Why isn’t he shooting?”
“He can’t,” said Farragut. “He has to be in front to shoot.”
“Now how did you know that?” Lu Oh cried.
“I didn’t. I found that out when we blew past him. He didn’t fire a flanking shot. Everything he’s sent through us has been straight front to back. All we have to do is keep in front of him for the rest of our lives.”
“Or six days, which is when he will overtake us at his current rate of acceleration,” Tactical reported.
Farragut nodded. He would think of something before then. Because he had to. In the meantime, “Where are we headed?”
“Galactic north northwest.”
In other words, nowhere. Fast.
11
THE WELCOMING LIGHTS of Fort Ike shone at a great distance.
The voyage had been long and dark. The destination, now in sight, lay just out of reach.
Where were the trace ships come to run Monitor in? John Farragut should have got here first. He was meant to come out and meet her.
It could not be that he could not see her. Dark as Monitor and the LRS were, Farragut knew exactly where to look. They had planned for this.
He was not here. Meant that Monitor had beat Merrimack to Fort Ike. That could not be good.
Calli ordered all stop, and opened visual ports. All hands gazed at the lights, their long journey almost done.
Question was how to take the last step without an escort. There had to be a Roman ambush waiting out here in the dark for Monitor to announce her presence.
But if she did not announce her approach, the perimeter guards of Fort Ike would start shooting as soon as they detected her.
Fortress guards could be fairly twitchy about battleships of questionable loyalty closing on the Shotgun.
The Fort Eisenhower/Fort Roosevelt Shotgun was nothing less than a set of long-distance, titanic-scale displacement chambers.
Displacement quickly became impracticable over distance. Synchronization became error bound. And with any displacement, verification necessitated three points of information—the receiver, the sender, and the thing in transit. Time distortion over distances greater than fractions of a light-second limited the use of displacement collars and landing disks for moving people.
For displacing ships, the enormity of the endeavor was beyond all but the most ambitious of imaginations. The imaginations that had conceived this.
The colossal scale still amazed. The Shotgun used resonant verification for synchronization. Two eight-cubic-kilometer regions of perfect vacuum served as its sending and receiving chambers.
The stations lay on either side of the Abyss, Fort Theodore Roosevelt on the Orion Starbridge in Near space, and Fort Eisenhower in the Sagittarian arm—the Deep End—a separation of two full klarcs.
Using the Shotgun, Earth ships jumped clean past the whole of the Roman Empire without ever spending an instant in it, besting the fastest courier missile by ninety-four days.
So it followed that Fort Ike and Fort Ted were the most heavily fortified outposts in the known galaxy.
How to approach it when you looked like a hostile?
In the end, Calli was more afraid of the guns of Fort Ike than she was of any Roman lurkers. She decided to betray her existence.
You come into Fort Ike lit or you come in dead.
The code she used to announce herself would probably send up the red flag all by itself: “Fort Ike. Fort Ike. Fort Ike. Commander Callista Carmel with LRS seven eight four and recently liberated United States battleship Monitor in possible company of unseen hostiles. Request heavy escort immediately.”
The space cav came charging out, bristling. Their Rattlers were brute, brassy, Yankee-designed craft: swift, snub-nosed, and angry. They were beautiful—even if many of their heavy guns were trained on Monitor . They were not shooting. Yet.
The voice that answered Calli was terse, suspicious. “Stay on the bubble, Monitor. Do not deviate.”
The laser path appeared for her to follow. “Thank you, Sergeant. We do know the drill.”
“Adjust your speed to ten K klips.”
“Ten thousand klicks per tick on your vector, aye.”
Monitor followed the line. Like flying into a jewel box.
Gases and particulates from all the ships coming and going had strewn the emptiness with a tenuous veil of smog that glowed in exotic, delicate colors, and haloed all the inhabited globes and stations that made up Fort Eisenhower.
The Shotgun itself was a perfect black void, lasered to an immaculate emptiness. But that made it perfectly transparent. You never saw it. You saw particles blaze on annihilation as they drifted into the Shotgun’s perimeter field. On days of heavy pollution the annihilations described a glittering cell of a honeycomb.
Riding the beam in, Calli wondered why she was picking up no chatter on the secure channel of patrols searching for the Roman lurkers she had reported. Then she realized they had changed the code, and those conversations were now closed to her.
Good. Unsettling, but good.
Monitor’s approach shut down traffic in the crowded space lanes for the best part of an hour. Calli could hear the ferrymen complaining on the open channels.
In the absence of any explanation for the delay, the rumors germinated, bouncing about the local channels, that Spacecraft One was headed through the Shotgun.
So Calli approached the fort to the tune of “Hail to the Chief ” on the Marine channel.
On Calli’s advice, the Monitor was led under bomb squad escort to quarantine in a heavily armed sector of the Fortress, far away from the civilian spheres and the Shotgun itself.
Calli and her crew were taken to debriefing under heavy guard, where she established her identity, told her tale, and ordered Commander Bright delivered to the military infirmary.
Hours later, Calli was sitting in a bar at Station Ibex, unwinding with some old comrades from her Inca days (who still called her Crash Carmel) when the MPs came to collect her with sidearms drawn, safeties off.
“Hell, Crash, what’d you do?” said Vittorio Ricci.
“Brighty’s awake,” Calli concluded. Tossed back her shot, rapped her glass on the bar. Took her leave from her mates, “Gents.”
Serious now, her friends made to stand with her, demanding t
o know the bullshit charge, but Calli motioned them down. “This won’t take long.” She signaled to the barkeep that the last round was on her, and she went quietly with the MPs. Tolerated the nudge in her back with the gun barrel.
She was thrown into detention and held under the kind of stark and brightly lit security they used for dangerous and suicidal terrorists.
She marveled a bit at the overkill. Brighty had unloaded quite a heavy shovelful to win her this treatment.
Still, the conclusion of the matter seemed obvious and inescapable, so she hadn’t the sense yet to be frightened.
She waived legal representation, against strong ad visement.
“No need,” she said for the ninth time, this time in an interview with the stationmaster, General Paxton S. Pike of the U.S. Fleet Marine Corps. “I don’t want to blow this thing out of proportion.”
“You have an astonishing sense of proportion, Commander,” said General Pike. The man’s small eyes crowded the bridge of his nose, leaving too much face on either side of them. “I’ve heard megalomaniacs do.”
Woke her up. Coming from a military judge.
This interview was not an investigation. General Pike had already sided with Brighty.
But there was no sense painting the man into a corner. The stronger the general declared his position, the harder it would be for him to back out of it when he realized that Brighty had taken him for an idiot.
Calli spoke evenly, “I prefer to keep this as informal as possible.”
“Informality is not possible at all. Not with a charge of mutiny and treason.”
“Treason? What hat did Brighty pull that from?”
“You wish to lay countercharges?”
“No, sir.”
“According to your statement in debriefing, Commander Bright made a bid for command, which you assert you rightfully held. What would that be, if not mutiny?”
“That would be a mistake—which I excused on medical grounds.”
“How generous of you.”
“I don’t think it was generous. It was reasonable.”
“You think?” Small eyes gleamed as if Pike were about to play a trump card. Which he did with a folding of hands and leaning across the table, “Commander Bright passed the detox screening.”
