Wolf Star (Tour of the Merrimack #2)

by R. M. Meluch

  “It wasn’t a hearing. It was a barbecue.”

  “I know. I know. General Pike appointed himself case administrator.” Rob Roy straightened up with a raft of papers. “Pike was Napoleon Bright’s sponsor to VMI.”

  “Good,” said Calli. That solved everything. “Demand he recuse himself.” If the judge was biased, bounce him off the case. Simple.

  “The time for that was before you ran him up the yardarm,” said Rob Roy. “I made the request. He refused.”

  “The holes in Brighty’s ‘case’ are big enough to shove Uranus through. Paxton’s a purblind idiot not to see that.”

  “That attitude is not helping your case, Commander.”

  “It’s not hurting it either, Robby. That man had the verdict in before he met me.”

  “So what’s your strategy?”

  “I don’t have one, Robby. I assumed just because I was right, that rightness would be obvious to a purblind idiot.”

  “It is obvious. To me. But innocence is not enough. It seldom is. The hard—really hard—proof isn’t here. For witnesses you’ve got a codefendant, and a bunch of Marines who didn’t see anything that we need them to have seen, and a brain-dead Monitor.”

  “Get the charges dismissed because they’re based solely on one man’s say-so.”

  Rob Roy winced. “But there is the point of damnation. The one man. Your innocence comes only at the cost of Napoleon Bright’s ruin. You are guilty because, in the eyes of Paxton Pike, you must be guilty. The alternative is unthinkable to him.”

  “Then he has to learn to think harder.”

  Rob Roy brought his hands together before his lips as if praying, thinking. Then countered with a hypothetical, “Commander, if you asked John Farragut to swallow a whale without a shred of evidence to convince him that he should, would he? On your say-so alone?”

  “Don’t mention John Farragut and Paxton Pike in the same breath, Robby.” Of course Farragut would.

  “General Pike is suffering from the selective vision of partisanship. The old school in which you back your boy right or wrong. The wrong is apparent, but he’s your boy and he’s right because he’s your boy.”

  Calli had to accede to his line of logic. She’d seen it before. “That kind of thing is rampant on Palatine.”

  “Well, it’s not unknown here either. Men see what they want to see. What they need to see.”

  “Leaves Pike with a very flimsy story. It’s propped up with spit. It can’t hold up in a court-martial.”

  “Oh, it’s pure argle bargle, but it’ll make haggis of our defense,” said Rob Roy. “We got nothin’.”

  “I’m still innocent until proven guilty.”

  “No, you’re not. Because your innocence means Napoleon Bright’s guilt. When the verdict is in, either you or Napoleon Bright has to be a treacherous monster. The truth is one or the other. I know which side the truth is standing on, but when push comes to shove, you don’t want to be standing by an air lock, Mr. Carmel. As for the other judges, they will come down on either you or Napoleon Bright based on the evidence, however thin.”

  “Thin? There isn’t any.”

  “Bright’s argument is based on missing evidence. He’s making the missingness strategic. It’ll stand because Pike has to make it stand.”

  “He’s case administrator! He shouldn’t be in this at all. You sure this isn’t your first case, Robby?”

  “Arrogance kills. People are arrogant in the Deep End.”

  She was about to say something else, something about General Pike and his arrogance, then did a double take. Realized, “Me.” This child-faced lawyer had just called her arrogant. “You mean me.”

  “Especially you.”

  She sat down. “I am not participating in any more kangaroo proceedings until I subpoena witnesses.”

  He sat down next to her on the spartan cot. Opened a notescreen. “Who do you want?”

  “John Farragut.”

  Rob Roy Buchanan rolled his cute brown eyes. “He’d be my first choice. He’s not here.”

  “I’ll wait for him.”

  “How long?”

  “Till doomsday.”

  “General Pike will let you do that.” He eyed the confines of her cell. The best that could be said for the small, stark, unprivate space was that it was clean.

  Calli rose, jumped up to grab her chin-up bar. “Then you’d better bring me some books, Robby.”

  The Striker gained ground by the hour as Merrimack ’s engineers designed and built the robotic rig by which to hoist the limpet net into the Striker’s path.

  They ran the numbers over and over, calculating what effect pushing the robot arm out through Mack’s inertial field at threshold velocity would do to the ship’s integrity. Attempting to calculate, more like. The physics of threshold were imperfectly understood. Having no hard numbers, the engineers got no hard answer. The proposed procedure had never quite been done before.

  With the contraption installed and ready to deploy came the moment of decision: go/no go.

  Captain Farragut turned it back on the engineers. “I’ll put it to y’all first: Do you want to wait to be executed or do you want to try to escape out a tunnel you dug which might cave in on you?”

  Tunnel. They nodded to each other. Yeah. Definitely. Tunnel was good.

  Kit nodded before the captain. “Tunnel. I like tunnel. I think.”

  “Tunnel’s got my vote.” Farragut winked a bright blue eye, ever cheerful facing a dare. He called it: “It’s a go.”

  Glenn Hamilton summoned the ship to battle stations out of the edgy, monotonous high alert in which they had existed for days. The waiting was over. It was time to live or die.

  The robotic arm pushed a counterphase shaft incrementally outward through the field’s phase layers. Tonal changes in the field had an ill sound. The engines rolled a low, rocky thunder.

  It was in the nature of threshold velocity that it required constant acceleration to maintain it. So the Merrimack ’s six engines were already running at capacity. Had been so for days. A notice over the intercom from the systems techs warned of an engine spike. The engineers acknowledged. Slowed the deployment of the robotic arm.

  The robotic arm with the limpet net approached the outer shell of the force field.

  Came a moment in which no one breathed. The robotic arm, the limpet net, extended through Merrimack ’s inertial field.

  Lights dipped. The deck dropped. Stomachs lifted toward mouths. Ears popped. “Balk!” Systems reported. “We have engine balk! We are on auto shutdown!”

  Shit! “Override!”

  “Too late!”

  The Striker shot past.

  Her engines down, Merrimack hurtled forward on inertia only—which meant she fell off threshold velocity.

  “Striker’s in front!” Tactical reported.

  “Sound blast alarm. Prepare for impact.”

  13

  TIME PASSES SLOWLY FOR those who wait. What seemed like days to the traveler near to light speed could be years to those at home.

  It made no sense for Farragut to travel as slowly as light, for it took extreme energy to do so, but traveling near light speed could be the only reason Merrimack was taking forever to get to Fort Ike. While Calli waited.

  She had been speaking flippantly when she told Rob Roy to bring her books. But he brought them, and she read them. Interesting choices. He checked in on her often. Was good company, intelligent, cheerful, and easy on the eyes.

  On New Year’s Eve, he bundled into her cell, bright-eyed, merry, and smelling strongly of Scotch. “I tried to bring you a drink,” he said, slumped on her cot, pulling an empty plastic glass from the deep pocket of his long trench coat. “They were searching visitors. So I drank yours, too.” He tugged out another empty glass. “Happy New Year.”

  “Happy New Year, Robby.”

  “Don’t call me Robby.”

  She nodded, all right. She licked a drop of Scotch out of one of the glasses. />
  Rob Roy’s eyes widened at the motion of her tongue. He floundered to his feet and blundered toward the door. “I gotta go.” Called for the guard.

  Calli caught his collar before the guard came to let him out. Said low, “Happy New Year, Rob Roy.” Feathered a kiss on his scruffy cheek.

  In the seconds it took to bring the engines back on-line, Farragut had time to wonder why he was not dead. He belayed any proposal of evasive maneuvers. Something was wonderfully wrong with this situation.

  Senior Engineer Kit Kittering, moving carefully, checked the ship’s integrity and cried, “Where’s the net?”

  Half the robotic arm stuck out there, severed, limpet net gone. It should still be attached. It was not.

  “Where did it go?” Kit cried. “It’s not as if it could break off in the wind!”

  “We got him?” Farragut dared suggest, incredulous. “I thought a patterner would have seen that coming. We hung that net out right in front him. Where is he?”

  “Ahead of us,” Marcander Vincent reported from tactical. “Straight-line course. Close parallel to ours. No course deviation. But slower. He’s fallen off threshold.” The specialist turned round from his console to meet the captain’s gaze. “Sir, could he have flamed out, too?”

  Farragut gave a baffled shrug. Ordered, “Hell, if he’s moving slower, get us in front of him!”

  His techs scrambled to obey. Merrimack edged forward, closing the gap, klick by slow, wary klick.

  The Striker gave no signs of aggression, or even of awareness.

  Pulling alongside, a scant twelve meters separating them, the Mack’s sensors captured a clear image of the enemy. The limpet net encased the Striker’s nose, all limpets detonated. But the Striker’s force field remained intact.

  Merrimack deployed a pair of snuffers to fly up the Striker’s exhausts and send its engines into shutdown.

  The missiles met no resistance, and the Roman ship’s force field vanished.

  Merrimack delicately hooked the Striker, without actually bringing it inside her own force field, in case the Striker should be running an auto-destruct routine.

  Farragut suited up to join the boarding party, against his acting XO’s protest. “Captain, you can’t,” Glenn Hamilton said, standing in his path, drawing herself up to her full height—fully a foot shorter than the captain. “This is a trap.”

  “Hamster, you’ve got to be kidding. This wolf is hosed.” And he spoke into the intercom on the back of his hand, “Mo, join us.”

  “Aye, sir,” the medical officer, Mohsen Shah, responded. “I am being there.”

  The techs established soft dock, and forced the Striker’s hatch for the boarding party.

  Inside the Striker’s air lock, all seemed well. The emergency power was on. Atmospherics read normal.

  But sensors did not read the stench. Helmets off, the boarding party knew what the sensors had not told them. The pilot was dead. Dead for a while, from the smell of it. Air scrubbers kept the ammonia levels within tolerances, but it left enough fetor of human waste to wrinkle the nose and the whole face with it. “Oh, for Jesus.”

  They found the pilot at his station, dead, but not entirely. His body draped over the back of his seat, arched backward, sunken eyes turned up in a dried stare. They might have been blue. His mouth had fallen open. Dried blood caked under his nose. He looked like he might have once been as fair-skinned as TR Steele, but his skin was blue now.

  Cables protruded from the back of his neck, his wrists. The cables connected him to the console that was awake and blinking, waiting instruction.

  Mo Shah detected the faint pulse of the comatose, but no brain waves.

  The medical officer’s hands motioned abortive starts round the cables, afraid to unhook the man from the machine. Mo Shah had taken an oath: Do no harm. “I am having no idea how to be helping this man.”

  Farragut read the signs, the blue-black fingernails, asked, “How long do you figure he’s been like this?”

  “I will be guessing seventy-two to ninety-six ship hours,” said Dr. Shah.

  “Four days!” Farragut cried. “I have been running from a fried vegetable for a half a week?” And immediately to the corpselike Roman, with a comradely pat on his emaciated shoulder, “Sorry, Lucius. Nothing personal.” For all Romans were Lucius in the slang of wartime. Then he murmured, “What is your name?” Reeled up the Roman’s dog tags. The chain left a beaded black bruise imprinted on his pasty blue skin. “Septimus. Mo, take Septimus here to sick bay.”

  “What to be doing about . . . ?” Mo Shah trailed off, faced with all the cables. “I could be killing him.”

  Farragut pulled the plugs from the Roman’s neck. “I could be killing him.” He tossed the cable ends away from him. Cleared for the doctor. “Do what you can for him.”

  Back aboard his own Merrimack, as the battleship slowed for turnaround, John Farragut gazed at the perfect blackness of nowhere.

  His acting exec, Lieutenant Hamilton came to his side, spoke faintly the understatement, “We are somewhat behind schedule, sir.”

  Farragut nodded. “Calli’s going to think I stood her up.”

  “That would be a first for her.”

  And Farragut challenged Glenn to a game of squash. It was well past the hour for him to be turning in, but John Farragut never slept after battle.

  They had not played together in a long time. Used to be they played every day. That was before he noticed how pretty she was.

  The score was more even than it would have been had Farragut kept his eye on the ball instead of his opponent. Came down to it, he thought he’d salvaged a win when he hammered a rocket off the front wall, sent it sailing across the length of the court to strike high on the back wall. Then he got to watch little Hamster try to muscle it off the back wall and just hope it had enough to reach the front wall.

  The little green ball sailed weakly the length of the court, losing altitude fast. It was not going to make it.

  At the last moment, the ship’s gravity bobbled. The deck felt like it was sinking. The ball whimpered the last yard to touch the front and drop in a wall-hugging dribble to the deck without giving Farragut the least chance at a return.

  Glenn cried out, shock and glee, a lot of yesses.

  Farragut howled his betrayal, “Merri-Merri-MerriMack! How could you do this to me?” He pressed his hands to a wall, talking to his ship.

  Glenn winked, with a little swagger. “Hey, Mack and me.” She crossed her fingers tight. “Like this.”

  “Are you done?”

  “Oh, no,” Glenn laughed. She jumped up and slapped the front wall. “High five, Mack!”

  “Hamster, you can’t high anything.”

  “Patrick, are you going to let him insult me like that?”

  Farragut turned. Up in the gallery stood her husband. Didn’t know how long he’d been there. Dr. Patrick Hamilton.

  Good-looking in an artistic way. Women said so, as long as he kept his mouth shut. He had great intelligence, which did not include common sense. Patrick Hamilton was the kind of man who, when single, always got a first date but seldom got a second.

  As tall, but half as wide, as the captain, Patrick Hamilton was in no shape to avenge John Farragut’s insults to his wife.

  Patrick Hamilton spoke to his wife, “Did you ask him?”

  Farragut assumed he was “him,” and turned to Glenn to receive the question.

  Glenn looked a little embarrassed. Tried to put Patrick off, “We’ve been playing.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Ask me what?” said Farragut.

  Glenn tried to wave it off. “Later.”

  “Ask me what?”

  Backed into it, Lieutenant Glenn Hamilton drew herself up into as much professional dignity as she could manage in gray sweats, size five sneakers, a damp headband, and frayed ponytail. “Can I keep Calli’s job?”

  “No.”

  Glenn gave a resigned nod. Expected that. Sure wished
she could have chosen her own moment to ask. It might have gone better. Looked up at Patrick. “He said no.”

  Patrick asked, “Why?” An edge of demand in it.

  “Patrick,” Glenn tried to hush him, but Patrick said, “No. I should like to know why.”

  Glenn masked chagrin well but still looked like she could just die. Patrick Hamilton refused to know how things were done or not done in the U.S. Navy.

  Farragut spoke to Glenn, “I’ll recommend you for your own command if you want.”

  Shut Patrick up pretty well. Lieutenants were often given command of their own small ships. The kind of ship that had no use for a xenolinguist.

  “Think about it,” said Farragut. Not sure whether he was hoping she would go or stay.

  He looped a towel round his neck, heading for the showers, when Patrick called down again, not letting go. “She’s done a great job as acting exec. She can do the job. Why not let her stay in it?”

  Farragut turned blue eyes up. Fought the impulse to ask Glenn what the hell she saw in this guy. Fact was, she saw enough in Patrick Hamilton to marry him, and that was a done deed. Had even let him hang his name on her.

  And fact was that Glenn Hamilton hadn’t the service years and she knew it. Could not fault her for asking. Humble just didn’t get the job done.

  Fine officer. Just not ready. She was twenty-six. A strong professional twenty-six, but command of a ship this size wanted a longer perspective and more brutally hard knocks than twenty-six years could give her.

  Farragut answered Patrick, “You do know that I still have an XO? Calli Carmel is still exec of this ship. Lordy, Ham, wait till the body’s cold.”

  The drums wove into Calli’s nightmare. The sound became the death march, drumming in a firing squad. That hideous cadence that had become a staple of horror movies. The sound of impending execution.

  She writhed, swimming toward consciousness. She was asleep; she suddenly knew that. This was not real.

  Still she heard the drums, and that confused her.

  The awful last roll sounded, snapped to silence. She could have sworn she heard the fateful orders. Not the words precisely, but the traditional vocal intonation, distinct and recognizable as the drums: Ready. Aim.