by R. M. Meluch
“Oh.” Came out with genuine surprise and dismay. And anger. “Well that is unfortunate.” It was going to be blessedly difficult for Brighty to get a medical out without a medical excuse. They had taken away his emergency hatch. Damn them. What were they thinking? “Still, at the time, he was under a great deal of mental stress. He’d been captured by the Romans. He’d lost his ship.”
“He lost his ship, Mr. Carmel?” The little eyes were positively ablaze, animated. Paxton Pike was on his feet. One more exchange like this, and he would be across the table. “His ship is here. Where is yours?”
This line of questioning was getting certifiably ugly.
Calli did not answer immediately. Sat back in her chair to reassess the man.
Rather homely, rather toadish. In an age when anyone of means could look any way he wished, Paxton Pike was defiantly homely. The sort that resented the kind of incredible beauty that never looked his way. He had walked in hating her. No use even talking to him.
“Everything is in my debriefing statement, sir. I would like to know Mr. Bright’s version, if I may.”
General Pike smiled. Politeness never got an impala out of a hyena’s jaws either. “Just what do you think Commander Bright’s version is?”
“I cannot guess.”
“Of course you needn’t guess. You were there. You gave the Monitor class codes to Palatine, which allowed them to capture Monitor. You gave them time to dissect Monitor, then made a big show of rescuing it. That was a daring raid, wasn’t it? It was dangerous. It was impossible. Wasn’t it? Not if you just walk in to Daedalus Station, say hello to your old compadres, and waltz out with the signature ship of the greatest class of United States battleship ever built. Then you arranged for Merrimack to fall into Roman hands while you bring this Roman-infested Monitor here as a Trojan horse.”
“Oh,” said Calli. Then, cheerily, absurd, “I needn’t have worried. That takes Mr. Bright completely clear of a mutiny charge. He’s gone completely crackers.”
“Did you or did you not propose a toast to Numa Pompeii. ‘Couldn’t have done it without him?’ ”
Afraid she flinched at that one. Had Brighty pressed an ear to the partition when she’d said that to John Farragut? Maybe he even had a recording, edited to her disadvantage. “To Numa Pompous Ass. Yes, I did. If Numa Pompeii weren’t such an arrogant ass, I could not have retrieved Monitor.”
“Yes, yes, you retrieved Monitor. Do you have anything to corroborate your weird and self-aggrandizing tale of derring-do?”
None of the men she had with her now had been on the mission to retrieve Monitor. “Lieutenant Commander Medina can counter certain of Mr. Bright’s claims.”
“A codefendant?” General Pike dismissed that suggestion.
“That does make for twice as many people telling my story as Mr. Bright’s.”
“Someone else?”
“No one here.”
“How convenient. Especially if Merrimack doesn’t show up.”
“Jolly inconvenient, I’d say,” said Calli.
Even Monitor herself was no witness. Calli had kept the ship dark and powerless. The battleship had been retrieved by remote control by means of resonant commands. Monitor had nothing to say for herself.
“Where is Monitor’s black box?” Pike demanded, following the same line of thought.
Calli let some annoyance slip. The box was there. It was a big red empty. “Given that the first thing you do when you capture an enemy vessel is pull its flight recorder, I feel confident in saying the recorder is in Roman hands.”
“I’m confident of that as well,” said Pike. “And since the first thing one does with a captured vessel is pull the flight recorder, where might be the black boxes of those eight—was it eight?—Roman ships you claim to have captured?”
“On Merrimack.”
“Of course they are.”
“My entire crew and Marine squadron can attest to the capture of the battleship Valerius, two Strigidae, and five Accipitridae.”
Little eyes flickered at the proper Latin plurals. A red-blooded American would have said two Strixes (or Strigs) and five Accipiters. “Which you let go.”
“We did not let them go,” said Calli. “We programmed them to come here. It’s in my report.”
“Any of those programmers here? Besides you?”
She might have sighed. “No.”
General Pike looked like a horse with its nostrils full of snake stench. She recognized the type. Hard-corps Marine. Conservative. Nationalistic. Loathed all things Roman and all traits associated with Rome—intellectu alism, elitism. Calli’s education made her one of Them.
“So, Commander Carmel, you programmed the captured ships to come here. They’re not here. Where are they?”
“I don’t know. The course is computer random.”
“Where is Merrimack?”
“I don’t know. Merrimack’s course will be John Farragut random.”
“We pinged the Mack.”
Calli started up straight in her chair. “You—!” Stopped. Settled. On first arrival she had told the debriefing officers—emphatically—do not NOT ping the Merrimack.
So it made sense that the first thing this baboon went and did was ping the Merrimack. And received no echo.
General Pike went on to report in tones of dire triumph, “We received no return echo on Merrimack’s harmonic.” An Ah ha! in his voice. “If Merrimack is still in U.S. control, why is there no echo?”
He meant that to be an unanswerable question. Calli answered, “Because she’s running dark.” You dick.
He heard the you dick though she did not actually speak it.
Calli continued, “You have, however, successfully assured the Romans—who are monitoring Mack’s old harmonic—that Merrimack has not arrived safely at Fort Ike. You just told the Roman searchers that they were still in the hunt. They will appreciate your service.”
“You are speaking for Rome?”
“On that, yes,” said Calli, standing up to await dismissal. This interview could not get any worse. “I can assure you of that one.”
All kinds of civilian traffic came through Fort Ike, from every nation of Earth and from many of the individual League nations’ seven hundred and two colonial worlds, and several of the spacefaring alien civilizations within the LEN protectorate zone. All kinds of traffic. Except Roman.
No Roman ships were allowed near the Shotgun, much less through it. The U.S. Navy would fire upon any Roman ship detected within the LEN protectorate, and would impound any Roman trade ship in LEN space, liberate its cargo, and usually return its crew after questioning them as spies. Roman trade was not welcome at Fort Ike.
Which did not mean that Roman goods did not come through the Shotgun, as many League nations still traded with Rome.
The Marines who had accompanied Monitor, except for Flight Leader Hazard Sewell, had not been confined upon arrival at Fort Ike. But neither were they issued the customary boarding passes that would allow them free passage from station to station at Fort Ike. Fort Ike was an expensive place. Without the military passes, the Marines were beggars with their noses pressed against the glass of wonderland.
All the civilian delights were closed to them. They could only look out the station portholes at the jewels hanging in the sky—small artificial worlds, casinos, brothels, hotels—with the glittering space liners moving majestically in the colored clouds among them.
The U.S. stations within the Fortress were obvious for their flags. Bigger than everyone else’s. No one flew more flags than the Americans. The eighty-two stars and thirteen stripes were everywhere.
You could make out the Australian station immediately—one of the oldest stations in the Space Fortress—the one oriented upside down from the rest. Always a good time at the Station Down-Under-Way-Out-Here. If only the Marines could get there.
The Marines’ obedience to Commander Carmel’s and Flight Leader Hazard Sewell’s illegal orders had been an
error in judgment, said Napoleon Bright. So he let them off with a stern, magnanimous reprimand.
“A rep? A rep and we’re supposed to be grateful? Oh, he can eat—” Carly Delgado dredged her vocabulary for Mr. Bright’s menu.
“Hey! Hey! Hazard don’t like that kind of talk,” Twitch Fuentes backed her off.
“Hazard ain’t in charge here, is he?” Carly snapped. Wrong thing to say and she regretted it on the spot.
A somber silence fell. Then Carly and the other members of Alpha Flight immediately vowed to clean up their language out of respect for their incarcerated flight leader.
They choked on the words that rose up when they saw Brighty running loose, glad-talking with station officers, too jolly, buying tall drinks and telling taller tales.
“Why doesn’t Carmel charge that son of a b—each-ball?”
They couldn’t understand. And could not come to attention for Commander Bright when they crossed paths in a station corridor.
The Navy did not salute indoors, but soldiers of the Fleet Marine normally showed respect to senior Naval officers by coming to attention. Alpha Flight did not.
Brighty’s companions looked silently askance at the Marines’ lack of regard. Mr. Bright could demand their salutes, and they would have to give them. He daggered them with his gaze as they stood in a sullen, silent, glaring knot. He started to speak, then thought better of it. Moved on.
One of his companions hissed, “What the hell was that, Brighty?”
“Merrimack’s Marines. Standing by their mutineer.”
“You’re going to take that?”
“They are only ignorant,” said Brighty. “Loyalty is a good quality in Marines and dogs, don’t you think? They are a small concern.”
The Marines heard that. Cowboy turned around to start after him. “Small! Why that—” Cowboy grabbed his own dick. “I’ll show him small!”
His flight mates wrestled him back.
“Put it away, Cowboy. You don’t got anywhere to put it,” Kerry said.
Cowboy hollered down the corridor. “Talk big while you can, squidass!” Turned away, muttering, “He won’t talk that way when the Merrimack gets here!”
Reg Monroe, the nearest thing Alpha Flight had to an intellectual (she had taken a couple of engineering courses) shook her head, troubled. “Doesn’t it bother anyone that Brighty’s not afraid of that?”
“What’s that supposed to mean, Reg?”
Reg held her arms crossed tightly under her breasts. “Mack was supposed to be here. Supposed to be here a fine while ago.”
“Yeah. So Mack’s overdue.” They shrugged. “And?”
“You mean nobody else gots the idea that Brighty expects the Mack to stay overdue for something like ever?”
12
“HERETHEHELLAREWE?”
“Somewhere in that vicinity, Captain.” Navigation gave the unfamiliar coordinates. They didn’t sound real.
Running. Merrimack had been running for days. The Roman Striker edging closer by the day.
Running out of days.
Apparently the only shot the Striker had with his force-field-piercing bullets was in Merrimack’s line of travel.
Merrimack could not afford to let the Striker get in front.
It was down to a footrace now. A race Merrimack would lose.
The Striker’s smaller mass gave him a minutely higher threshold velocity. So he had been closing at a steady creep for days.
Black and gold. The Striker wore the infernal colors of gens Julian.
A Julian was not going to throw a race.
Merrimack needed to pull something out of her hat.
“So let’s shed some mass,” said Farragut.
“Captain, we can’t possibly shed enough mass to make any possible difference.”
“Can if we shed it in his face.” He left the command platform to consult his engineers. He took the ladders. Farragut had no patience for lifts.
“Can we deploy a robotic arm out far enough to drop a limpet net in the Striker’s path?” he proposed to his engineers.
Just dropping a bomb on the Striker would have no effect. Any simple explosive device would deflect upon contacting the nose of the Striker’s force field before it had time to detonate. To counteract this effect, the limpet net had been designed to drape completely around the nose cone of an enemy ship’s force field. The limpets would detonate against the ship’s sides where the force field was maintained at lesser strength than to the fore.
“Captain, we are as good as hurtling down a concrete luge,” his senior engineer answered. Kit was back on her feet, her middle still taped. “We can’t extend the force field a micron, much less stick a pseudopod as far as we would need to get a net in the Striker’s way.”
“I don’t intend to extend the force field at all. Can we stick a bare arm out the side?”
“Unprotected?”
“Why not? We’re not exactly passing through asteroid fields out here.”
The engineers consulted at some length. Ran the numbers. Came back, “Don’t know.”
Earthly instinct made one expect that something hung out the side of a vessel moving very fast would snap off or drag or flap. But this was extragalactic vacuum. There was no air. No drag. What inhibited the Merrimack from exceeding threshold velocity was her inertial field. Naked matter hadn’t the same limitation.
Question was if poking the proposed mechanical arm through the force field was feasible. If so, dropping the net in the Striker’s path should present no problem.
Whether a patterner could avoid the nets or withstand the limpets remained problematic.
“At the end of the day: I don’t think we can destroy him that way, Captain,” said Kit.
“Destroying him would be nice,” Farragut allowed. “But I just need to slow him down. Would it slow him down?”
“If we can get something on him or make him twitch, hell, yeah. But he’ll just make up the lost ground in time.”
“Then we do it again. We can maintain a dead run longer than he can. If I can keep him from passing, we can run all year.”
Calli Carmel had not been desperately surprised to be in confinement at Fort Eisenhower. Her experience on Palatine made her a natural subject of suspicion. But she had been investigated—exhaustively—several times in the past. Her past was an open book.
The U.S. intelligence community did not like the book.
During most of the last peace, Calli had grown up in the U.S. Embassy on Palatine, where her father had been a Marine guard.
When her parents’ marriage was breaking up, Calli’s father was reassigned to a place where he could not care for her, and Calli’s mother—who only had Calli because she used to be in love with Calli’s father—did not want her.
Calli’s best friend, the ambassador’s daughter, begged her parents to let Calli stay with them. She need not have begged because the Aartens dearly loved young Calli, and she was good company for their Martine.
Years later, when Martine Aarten left to study music in Salzburg, back on Earth, Calli stayed behind. Calli had inherited her mother’s maternal drive and her father’s pride in the military. She applied to the very elite Roman Imperial Military Institute on Palatine. She had made acquaintance with many influential Romans by then, and with the ambassador’s sponsorship, she was accepted.
Her classmates included two of Caesar Magnus’ offspring—Claudia and Romulus. Romulus fully expected to be the next emperor of Rome. Calli admired Caesar Magnus, but the nuts had fallen and rolled way out of shouting distance from the tree.
Friends she had many, and lovers a few, but she remained one step outside Roman society. You really weren’t anyone in Rome without a gens. She had two offers of adoption, but that required renouncing her U.S. citizenship and she declined both.
By the time she graduated, the peace was already crumbling. Calli and her friends understood that their kisses good-bye meant that next time they met could very well be in battle.
And understood that neither could expect any hesitation on the guns. Romans understood things like that.
Even some of her old friends thought—hoped—that Calli was a Roman mole. That she was just forbidden to tell them.
They would still have to shoot her if they came against her in battle.
Calli Carmel was pulling chin-ups in her solitary cell in Fort Eisenhower when a guard asked if she would see a visitor.
“As long as it’s not General Pike,” said Calli without breaking rhythm.
A very tall, very young, long-limbed reed of a man with a distinct starboard list, owing to the weighty satchel hanging from his shoulder, entered Calli’s cell. A space lawyer. Good-looking in a scruffy way. Too young.
Calli peered at him from over the bar. “Does your mom know you’re here?”
The young man let his satchel flump to the deck, straightened to full height minus an inch or two for sloppy posture. Said cheerfully, “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
Calli paused on the downstroke to hang from her bar like an ape. “No, I mean it. Are you old enough to drink?”
“I’m actually only a year younger than you are, Commander. I’m your attorney. Rob Roy Buchanan.”
Calli let go the bar to accept his outstretched hand. “You are a drink. Do you know what the court got you into here?”
“The court didn’t appoint me. I volunteered. Campaigned for it is more like it.” His smile was genuine, disarming. “Okay, I begged.” He needed a shave. The face fur didn’t age him any.
“Look, Robby, you’re cute as hell, but you better stay in the shallow end for your first case.”
“I’m not that young, Commander.”
“You said.”
Sweat patched a vee down the front of her gray shirt. Rob Roy’s opaque brown eyes made a quick foray there, then looked away, somewhere—anywhere—else. Dove into his satchel. “I wish you had let me on the case sooner.”
She propped her hands on her hipbones. “There shouldn’t be a case.”
“I could have done something about that if I’d been at the hearing.” Rob Roy glanced up from his excavation of his satchel.
