Wolf Star (Tour of the Merrimack #2)

by R. M. Meluch

  The shot. Bolted her up in her cot. That was real!

  She was on her feet instantly, yelling at the monitors: “Get me my lawyer!”

  Rob Roy Buchanan was there too soon. Meant he was already on his way before Calli had started yelling.

  “It’s out of control, Commander.” Rob Roy dropped his overladen satchel. He looked like he’d slept in his coat. “The wheels of justice have fallen off. It’s time to call in markers. Biggest ones you’ve got. Who do you know?”

  “Uh,” she pushed back her long loose hair, gathering sleep-fogged wits. “Ambassador Van Aarten. But I can’t ask him to—”

  “I already called him. He’s on his way. Who else?”

  “My God.” The strangeness, the speed, collided with her nightmare. Left her dizzy. “Rob, they shot someone. I heard a firing squad!”

  He nodded. “You did. ‘Fubar’ doesn’t describe what’s happening here.”

  “Who?” Calli demanded.

  “Who what?” said Rob Roy, not understanding the question.

  “Who did they execute!” Calli shouted at him.

  “Lieutenant Commander Medina.”

  “No,” she said. She believed him. She just did not accept it. “No. It’s insane.”

  “Good description for it.” Rob Roy nodded. “On the side of the angels, they exonerated your Flight Leader Hazard Sewell. He hadn’t the rank to be held criminally liable for following orders of a superior officer.”

  “Mine,” said Calli, hollow. “My orders.”

  Abashed, Rob Roy was forced to confirm, “Yours.”

  A tremor moved her long fingers. She was astonished to see the motion. Astonished at her own terror. “They killed Jorge.” It was unreal. Yet suddenly terribly real. It sank in past all her veils of certainty. She was in the hands of murderous idiots.

  Rob Roy gathered himself for the rest of the news. Calli heard the difficulty in the silence. Finally, he spilled it, “They’re separating out the charge of treason and moving up your court-martial for mutiny.”

  “What about my witnesses?”

  “Pike decided Farragut’s testimony is immaterial to the mutiny charge.”

  The words that followed sounded odd coming from a pretty woman. As executive officer of a battleship, Calli knew a lot of them.

  “I told him that,” said Rob Roy. “Verbatim, I think. I have a contempt cite to show for it.” Produced it for her.

  “How can Farragut’s testimony be immaterial!”

  “Pike says it doesn’t matter whether Farragut gave you command of Monitor or not. Pike’s reasoning—if you can call what’s happening inside Pike’s head reasoning—is that Farragut had no authority to give Commander Bright’s ship—his words, don’t look at me like that—to you, and you should have known it.”

  “I still have the right to subpoena witnesses.”

  “Not when they’ve been pronounced dead.”

  Calli made her fingers stop their trembling. They extended long, still, and straight. “I have been arrogant.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “John’s not dead, you know,” she said, quiet, certain.

  “I have to believe that,” said Rob Roy Buchanan.

  She looked up at her baby-faced lawyer, comforted by his presence, grateful. “How did you know to call Ambassador Van Aarten?” Suddenly she wanted badly to see Van Aarten again. He had been a second father to her. Thoughts of him were warm as a blanket by the hearth on a snowy evening.

  Rob Roy answered, “He seems to have been your foster father de facto, if not legally.”

  “He was. But how did you know that? How do you know so much about me?”

  “I’m a fan of yours, Commander. I tripped over you while I was studying Farragut’s career.”

  “Why were you studying John? A case?”

  “No.” Rob Roy stood up regally with a Napoleonic pose, though he was probably close to twice Napoleon’s height. “Commander Carmel, you are looking at the greatest military strategist ever to captain an armchair.”

  “Ah, one of those.” She had to smile. If only to keep from tears.

  “I’ll have to tell you sometime how I would have won the battle of Corindahlor Bridge.”

  “Corindahlor Bridge was a victory for our side,” Calli pointed out to him. “Or is your armchair on the Roman side?”

  “No. I’m on the American side. But, you see, I would’ve won it without making martyrs of the Roman Tenth. Big mistake that part. Alamo. Masada. Thermopylae. Corindahlor. Did more for the losers than the victors.”

  “So why did such a brilliant military mind not try a military career for real?”

  “I’m in the Navy.”

  “You’re a lawyer.”

  “Know your strengths. Know your limits. As a soldier, I make a fine lawyer.”

  “Then win my case,” she told him, dead serious.

  “I will. I have to. I’m not going to lose you.” Stopped, amended quickly. “This one. The case. I meant to say I’m not going to lose this one.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “No. I didn’t.”

  General Pike came out of his seat as if ejected when the report came in that Merrimack had been sighted on approach to Fort Eisenhower.

  “Destroy her,” said Napoleon Bright.

  General Pike snapped right round.

  “It’s a Trojan horse,” Commander Bright said to Pike’s demanding, startled stare. “We won’t get another chance. You know as well as I do, we have to take her out right now.”

  General Pike regarded his protégé a long moment. The kind of moment as exists near light speed. The moment seemed eternal, though it was only a moment.

  14

  NEVER SHY OF DRAMATICS, John Farragut kissed the station deck upon safe arrival at Fort Eisenhower, sprang to his feet, clapped the grit from his hands, spat, asked lightly of the first person he saw, “Is Calli still here?”

  The wide eyes he met belonged to a dockworker, who dropped his maintenance bot. “Captain Farragut!”

  Farragut nodded acknowledgment. Yes, he was Captain Farragut.

  “You’re dead!”

  “Oh? How do I look?” He grinned. Did not expect an answer to that one, so he repeated his first question. “Commander Calli Carmel. Did she get away?”

  “Oh, no, sir. She didn’t get away. They shot her.”

  The look on Farragut’s face vaporized the nerves of anyone in his path. Did not abate even when he learned the dockworker was mistaken; the guns the man had heard had been for Lieutenant Commander Jorge Medina.

  Calli had been released. An order was out for Commander Bright’s arrest.

  They caught him. But not before Brighty hit John Farragut in the fist with his face.

  The stationmaster, one General Pike, ordered John Farragut to his office. Railed at him with a spray that set Farragut to blinking at every s and p and t. Demanded to know: “What did you do with the patterner!”

  Farragut blinked. “Sir?”

  “The pilot of this ship!” The image of “this ship” showed on all the displays in the general’s office—in section, in 3D, at all angles. This ship was the Roman Striker which Farragut had delivered to Fort Eisenhower. The little ship that had nearly taken Merrimack. “Where is the pilot!”

  “Oh. Him,” said Farragut. “I bundled him up and dropped him for Red Cross delivery.”

  That despite Roman insistence that the man would die if detached from his ship. Perhaps he would, but Farragut had already done the detaching, and had no intention of delivering that ship back into enemy hands.

  “I suppose you gave over his dog tags, too,” said Pike sourly.

  “No.” Farragut produced the tags. “I don’t think Rome’s going to have any difficulty identifying that boy.”

  The general glanced at the tags before he clamped his hand shut round them in a tight fist. “Septimus,” he snarled. “Suggests there’s at least six more of those Satan-built things.”

  “And it�
��s way past time someone told me what Satan built,” Farragut suggested.

  “We would know exactly what a patterner is, if you hadn’t handed this one back to the enemy!”

  “I gave a critically wounded soldier to the Red Cross,” said Farragut. “In accordance with conventions of space warfare.”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” Pike waved away the annoying rote. “You gave up covert technology along with him!”

  “The components were not exactly removable,” said Farragut. “I would not stoop to that.”

  Pike stiffened. “You suggest I am stooping?”

  “Are you, sir?”

  Pike was on his feet, vibrating. “I don’t know why others think the sun rises and sets on your ass, but mind you, Captain, that opinion is not shared here!” And tore the bark off Farragut’s tree for the next five minutes.

  At the end, General Pike said stiffly, in dismissal, “You will deliver a copy of your debriefing to my replacement.”

  Replacement? “You’re being promoted?” Farragut asked.

  “Are you trying to be funny?”

  Farragut’s eyes were wide in confusion. “Was I funny?”

  “Not in the least.”

  “I just wanted to know if congratulations were in order.”

  “Get out.”

  “General Pike? I have a CIA agent in my brig. Could you arrange for her to be collected—?”

  “Out!”

  Farragut learned only later—sitting with Calli and her very young lawyer in Mad Bear O’s space bar—that General Pike had been promoted below the bottom of the galactic birdcage for his role in Jorge Medina’s rushed execution. Only because Pike had realized his mistake in time not to open fire on Merrimack was he not drummed out of the Fleet Marine altogether.

  There were no nonhumans in Mad Bear O’s. Not that they were excluded; they chose not to come. Different species tended to socialize with their own kind when out to relax. Each had its own idea of what constituted fun, relaxation, flirtation, beauty, music, stink, or noise. Where species mixed, you knew business was being conducted.

  John Farragut, Calli Carmel, and Rob Roy Buchanan were here to get drunk to the strains of a jazz trio improvising in a chromatic scale.

  Calli sang the blues for Napoleon Bright. She had tried to get him considered a med case. But Pike had slapped a certification of perfect health on him. Not the sort of official record you can elbow into the annihilator. Therefore, Brighty was officially sane and fully responsible for everything he did.

  Calli rattled the ice cubes in her Scotch. “In the Roman army the sentence for giving false evidence is bludgeoning to death.”

  Rob Roy shooed a fat little beetbird off the table. “This isn’t Rome.”

  “Yeah.” Calli looked away, out the clearports, to the lights of ships coming and going. “That’s why we’re going to shoot him.”

  An expectant snare drumroll ended in a brief hesitation and a leaden thump.

  Thrrrrrrrrrr stomp! Thrrrrrrrrrrr stomp!

  The sound carried through the hull, through all the decks and bulks of the station. Hideous. Inescapable.

  That menacing thrrrrrrrr stomp!

  The firing squad waited, expressionless. They did not look entirely human, but Fleet law mandated they be human. And provided for one of the weapons to fire blanks so that any of those executioners might hide behind the hope that he had not killed one of his own.

  The drummers advanced like windup soldiers. Thrr rrrrrrr stomp! You could not see their eyes under the shiny black brims of their caps.

  The witnesses looked unhappily human. Stern. Uncomfortable.

  Brighty advanced in cuffs and hobbles. Unrepentant. He showed more anger than fear. He shot a cold black unwavering gaze Calli’s way.

  She did not flinch.

  Her lawyer stood behind her, looking like a boy dressed up for church. General Pike had mandated, if he was going to attend a military execution, Mr. Rob Roy Buchanan had damn well better get a haircut. And a shave.

  Rob Roy’s uniform was perfectly tailored to his tall lank frame, perfectly clean, creased like new—because he never wore it—but Rob Roy had a boy’s knack for squirming within his clothes so as to look perfectly sloppy mere moments after passing inspection.

  At Calli’s insistence, Rob Roy had made an eleventh-hour bid for a stay of execution on grounds that the prisoner could be under the influence of an unknown Roman contaminant.

  A quick med review found nothing. No stay could be granted. But an autopsy was promised.

  When the moment came, Brighty refused the blindfold. A sound like a groan or a sigh came from somewhere—from the witnesses, the drummers, or the firing squad, you couldn’t tell.

  It was a dare: If you are going to shoot me, you’re going to have to look me in the eyes.

  The drums silenced just long enough for you to feel relief at the cessation of that infernal thrrrrrrrr stomp! When the drums started up again, it was with what someone called the death rattle.

  A command passed to the sergeant at arms. Came the litany of the end: Ready. Aim.

  Brighty stared down the guns, then pivoted his head slightly to fix a lizard gaze on Calli.

  If he were looking for her to crack, he would die disappointed. She showed only regal professionalism. Looked him in the eye without faltering.

  Had anyone been looking her way they might have seen her hand steal behind her back, palm open, and accept the hand that slid into it—her lawyer’s—and squeeze at the final command.

  PART FOUR

  Wolf Star

  15

  FORT THEODORE ROOSEVELT WAS huge. Its array of lights made the glitter of Fort Eisenhower seem provincial and dim. The star city that had grown up around Fort Ted sprawled wider than some solar systems, more populous than many colonial worlds.

  The space fort lay only eighty light-years from Earth, in the direction of the galactic rim, just north of the galactic equator in the constellation of Auriga.

  The Wolf Star—which was not Wolf 359 and not the third closest star to Sol—lay two hundred light-years from Earth in nearly the opposite direction from Fort Ted. You could see the Wolf Star from Earth, south of the galactic equator in the constellation of the Southern Crown.

  Only two hundred sixty light-years separated the Wolf Star from Fort Ted. The Wolf Star was close enough to be a menace.

  The Wolf Star’s inhabited planet was properly called Palatine. It was also known as Rome, as it was the seat of the resurgent Roman Empire. The names were interchangeable. Rome. Palatine. But no one ever called its citizens Palatineans. They were Romans. They were also called wolves, lupes, and countless derogatory terms, but never Palatineans.

  The Roman Empire stretched across the galactic southern plane of Near space, as far as the nations of Earth expanded across the northern plane, each trying to outflank the other.

  Rome had the edge toward the galactic hub in Near space. Several Earth nations from the Asian Pacific had effectively cut off Roman and U.S. expansion toward the rim.

  Altogether, humankind had spread over less than one-eighth of the galaxy. Expansion was somewhat self-limiting. The U.S. had not been able to hold a colony at two hundred light-years distance. At fifteen hundred light-years, most nations could consider their colonies temporary holdings. Any people it took you two months to reach were not going to pay your taxes or obey your laws. That was human nature.

  The Wolf Star kept a tighter grip on its possessions and had spread its control farther—and thinner—than Earth. Only one hundred fifty years old, the Empire was vast. At first independence, Rome had launched an imperial binge that spread its reign to four hundred planets. Unlike the nations of Earth, Rome would flag any planet it got to first, inhabited or not, and did not hesitate to incorporate alien civilizations into its Empire.

  To populate its colonies, Romans bred like guppies, leaving their zygotes in incubators, so that many Romans had only Rome to call their father and their mother.

  The
soldiers of Rome’s mighty Legions numbered in the millions, including aliens, child troops, and automa tons. Rome’s mechanized fleets, the killer bots, were beyond U.S. counting.

  The biggest force ever seen in one place had been at Rome’s sesquicentennial, when fifty Legions of foot soldiers marched before the Capitoline—the mountain-sized imperial complex on Palatine—while far overhead, fleets of warships flew in precise formation before Caesar’s spaceborne residence, a mountainous structure nearly as massive as the Capitoline, called Fortress Aeyrie. The gold work on Fortress Aeyrie was all real. The blue-white fire spouting from the gold griffin acroteri was hologram, as were the eagles soaring in the hologramic clouds around the gleaming fortress. When in orbit, Fortress Aeyrie’s lights were visible from the planet’s surface even in daylight. The Praetorian Guard, Caesar’s formidable elite, kept a highly visible presence around both residences.

  The Praetorian Guard traditionally wore Caesar’s own colors. Caesar Magnus—born Ulixes Julian Eu genus—was a Julian, so the guard ships shone black and gold.

  The show of force had astonished everyone, even the citizens and slaves of Rome.

  The Wolf Star’s astronomical proximity made the United States’ Fort Ted the most heavily fortified place in the known universe. A siege of Fort Theodore Roosevelt would win Rome nothing but the forever quagmire of a war of infinite attrition.

  Flight Sergeant Kerry Blue did not see the approach. Knew better than to try to look. You never saw anything on approach to either fort coming through the Shotgun. They shut you down to minimal life support, turned off your lights, enclosed your whole ship in a gargantuan reflective foil, which made you look like a titanic popcorn bag. Then you popped.

  They say you felt nothing, because displacement was instantaneous, but Kerry always did. You popped into another giant foil bag of nothing. You didn’t even make a thunderclap, the way you did when displacing into an atmosphere. They pulled the foil away from your ship and, glory be, there was Fort Teddy taking your breath away.