by R. M. Meluch
Farragut was beginning to feel something like fear, when suddenly, quietly, he found him, Jose Maria, in a crouch, on the balls of his feet, his back resting against the bulk, his sword on the deck before him, his hands over his face. An image of remorse, but he could not possibly regret killing those marauding parasites.
He had got himself cleaned up. His clothes were immaculate, his black hair neat and glossy as a show horse’s tail. An elegant and lonely figure down there.
“Jose Maria.”
Still in his crouch, Jose Maria de Cordillera straightened his back flush to the wall, and lifted his wet face to Farragut. “She is gone.”
“Mercedes,” said Farragut. He leaned against the wall with Jose Maria, but stayed standing. “You don’t know that, Jose Maria. There’s still hope.”
“Oh, I will find ways to deny it, too. But I know she is gone.”
“How,” Farragut challenged.
“I can tell you the date and the hour. I woke in the night, in sweat and terror. I sat straight up and spoke her name aloud. It was only later that I learned the Sulla was missing. There is no scientific explanation for what happened to me, but such things have been reported in old wives’ tales for ages. I do not discount the tales of old wives merely because they appear to defy current bounds of reason. The popular record is too strong to ignore. I knew she was gone.”
“You’re talking clairvoyance,” said Farragut, arms crossed, skeptical.
“No. I think I am talking telegnosis. I do not disbelieve what I cannot explain.”
Of course not. He couldn’t and still be Catholic.
“My Mercedes and I had a connection. Perhaps a resonant harmonic. She lived and I felt her presence with me always. And then, suddenly, I did not. I carry an empty place where she always was,” said Jose Maria, hand to his heart. He sighed, deep and sorrowful. “You know. You know. And still you hope. The persistence of the human heart.” Tears spilled from his black eyes. He reverted to his cradle tongue. “Dios! Dios! She was so scared. She died in terror and I was not there.”
27
KERRY BLUE SLOPPED THROUGH the remains of the melted gorgons. Stuck her mop in the wringer. Gri maced at what came out. “Ugh.”
Dak lifted another deck grate for her to mop up the sludge underneath. The muck pooled deep down here in the lower sail. “Need a hose over here!”
Merrimack carried a lot of things—a full hospital, a partial torpedo fabrication plant—but she did not carry automated cleaning equipment. That was why God invented Marines.
Captain Farragut came through without his normal buoyant cheer. His face looked unusually moody. He stopped to watch his Marines work, and his expression got positively angry. “No,” he muttered, to himself it seemed. Then louder, stepping forward. “No.” He yanked the mop out of Kerry Blue’s hands. “You’re not doing this.”
Okay by Kerry Blue. Colonel Steele might not like it, but the captain was the captain, and who was she to argue with the captain?
Carly, Reg, and Cowboy looked up from their work to stare at Captain Farragut.
“Stop, stop, stop. All of you.”
The Marines foundered, confused. Did the captain want them to come to attention?
“Put that down,” Farragut zeroed in on Twitch Fuentes, who was clutching a vacuum hose, unable to believe he could be getting off this crummy detail. And right under Colonel Steele’s nose, too.
“Colonel Steele,” Farragut barked. “Issue sidearms to your dogs and come with me.”
“Sir,” Steele acknowledged.
And so off they went to the detention hold.
The hold was weirdly quiet within, and Kerry wondered for a moment if the prisoners weren’t all dead. Or preparing a trap.
Captain Farragut made the MPs unlock the hatch. The instant it was open, he charged right through the hatchway, ahead of his armed escort. They scrambled after him in time to see him roar at a bunch of Romans standing in rigid ranks: “What the hell was that!”
The prisoners remained at parade perfect attention. They had begun the assault with such a poor showing—all that screaming—that evidently they decided to scrape their dignitos together and meet their fate like Romans. In disciplined futility.
Farragut must have been the last thing they expected to come bursting through the hatch.
But here he was, breathing fire. He stalked up to the front line of soldiers and grabbed one by the throat—looked like a lion with a baby zebra—and slammed him up against the bulkhead. “You knew!”
Kerry could see the furtive glances pass among the other Romans. Could tell from their perplexed stares that no one had told these men that the monsters were all dead.
They were slowly getting a clue, though, and they were incredulous. Looking at Farragut like a fragging archangel with a flaming sword.
Kerry would swear he had fire jetting out his blue eyes.
Farragut roared again, “When the hell were you going to tell someone!” Got no answers out of them other than their imbecilic, stunned stares.
Farragut dropped his baby zebra to round back on Colonel Steele. “TR. Get my boat cleaned up. Them.” He thrust a finger at the Roman prisoners. “Make them do it. Your dogs do not pick up any equipment that doesn’t shoot!”
“Aye, sir!” Steele acknowledged enthusiastically.
The captain stomped out, smoking hot.
The Marines shepherded the Romans out of detention, armed them with vacuum hoses and mops and rags.
They came along tentatively. Docile. Amazed.
Kerry enjoyed poking in the back anyone who did not move fast enough to please her. She liked this detail much better. She’d been trained in twenty-four scenarios. This was another new one, but far and away the best ever.
One Roman, his hands stinging raw from the caustic slop, looked to Kerry and asked, in English, “What is this crud?”
“Dead monsters,” said Kerry. “They melt when you kill ’em.”
“Where are they? The monsters?”
“Under your stupid feet, you dwit!”
“All of them? Where are the rest of them?”
“We killed them. Shut your face bung and use that mop or I’ll take it from you and you can use your tongue.” Kerry leveled a sighter beam on the Roman’s crotch.
Caught Reg, from the corner of her eye, screwing up her brow at her and mouthing silently, Face bung? Cowboy sniggering, “I love you, Kerry Blue.” And Dak, shoulders shaking silent guffaws, working up to say something. She didn’t even let him get his mouth open. “Shut up, Dak.”
The prisoners mopped in silence.
Farragut came by again. Looked like God in Navy blue. He supervised a moment in silent, frowning approval, then turned away without speaking.
It was not like Farragut not to say a word or twelve hundred.
To his back someone called, “Captain!”
A Roman.
Farragut turned, blue eyes raking across the prisoners. Kerry could tell that Farragut knew the speaker wasn’t one of his own. Farragut knew the voice of every last one of his company and crew down to the lowest grunt. He even knew hers.
As the captain took a step toward them, the Roman prisoners all dropped their cleaning equipment. The Marines took immediate aim with their splinter guns. But the Romans were only coming to attention. Then—unbelievably—saluted.
Farragut turned his back on them and stalked out.
A service for the dead.
At times like this TR Steele was in awe of Captain Farragut. You’d never know the captain was American blue blood. He talked like just folks and could brawl like a street dog, or he could stand up there in front of God and everyone with his tear ducts wide open, and it didn’t make him any bit weaker.
Steele would have looked like a sap.
Steele set his jaw hard as a headstone, just glad someone was crying for his boys and girls, because he sure couldn’t.
Lieutenant Glenn Hamilton was back on her feet the next day, her leg still
encased in a med sheath to restore the chunk of muscle the gorgon had bitten from her thigh.
She retreated to the hangar deck, carrying out a solitary damage assessment. She was off duty this watch, but she did not want to deal with Patrick right now. So she worked.
She hugged a memory she thought she had imagined. On the Fury, when Farragut killed the gorgon that attacked her, when he caught her falling. The feeling of safety in his arms. The way he’d pressed her to him, his hand behind her head. His lips on her hair. She’d felt that. Thought she made it up, but she felt that. John Farragut kissed her hair.
Farragut was always hugely affectionate to everyone. But that, that had been a little over the line.
John Farragut kissed my hair.
She had never seen him afraid, because Farragut never feared for himself. She had felt him afraid there on the Fury. Heard the catch in his breath, felt the tremor in his hands as he held her close to his thrumming heart. Held her as if she was a precious thing he had almost lost.
She was not even sure it happened the way she remembered it. The way she wanted it to have happened. It had shocked her. Not an unpleasant shock. It was very easy on the pride, coming from the captain of the Merrimack, after her own husband—one of the few men on board fortunate enough to be sharing his bed with a flesh-and-blood woman (a damn pretty one at that, Dr. Patrick Hamilton!) on Merrimack’s long tours—Patrick Hamilton hooked into a Hot Trixi Allnight virtual joyride.
“But she’s not real,” Patrick Hamilton had defended instead of apologized, baffled by her hurt anger.
“I am!” Glenn had cried.
He did not get it.
Patrick also had trouble carrying her the rest of the way to sick bay when John had given her over to him after rescuing her from the monsters on board the Roman Fury. Glenn’s one hundred pounds got rather heavy between decks, and Patrick had to set her down once to regroup.
Glenn had not married Patrick Hamilton for any brute qualities. Patrick was an intelligent, boyish, slender man, with a dry sense of humor. Companionable. Could be very sweet. Could be very inconsiderate. Hell, Patrick Hamilton could be an ass.
Left her vulnerable to dreams. That big, swashbuckling John Farragut could harbor a secret love for her was too much like a dream she wanted too badly to believe right now. It was too easy on the pride. Too easy on the heart.
She convinced herself she had imagined too much into the encounter on board the Fury.
Convinced herself she had imagined all of it.
Until suddenly she was alone with him again.
She had just made note of a couple of inoperative lamps, when John Farragut dropped out of the lift shaft. He had been doing a visual inspection of the cables—had probably been swinging on the cables, knowing John.
He looked startled to see her here. Then sheepish. Awkward, the way he had never been with her. For an indecisive instant he seemed about to beat a retreat on some pretext.
Then his expression changed. The blush was still there, but he had decided to hold his ground and own up to what he had let show. He glanced about the vacant half-lit hangar. Gave an abashed smile, as he might if caught stark naked. Spoke, embarrassed, ironic, “Hi.”
His blue eyes met her gaze and did not look away.
She had imagined nothing.
Suddenly it felt dangerous to be here. Heat welled. Fear. Sexuality.
Glenn should just walk up the ramp tunnel and report the inoperative lamps to the Og.
So why am I not walking? she wondered. Suspended in the moment. Listening to her own heart pound. Watching John Farragut’s eyes.
He had shown his hand. Now he was waiting for a move from her.
She ought to go. Why was she stringing this out when she had no intention of going through with—with what?
And realized she had no intention of stopping whatever was about to happen. She felt warm and longing and she was going anywhere this man wanted to lead her.
A light metallic ping of something dropping on the deck made her break her gaze. She heard its clink, plunk through the grate, and roll-spin to a stop.
John Farragut crouched, lifted up a deck grate, retrieved what had fallen beneath. Stood up with her wedding band between his thumb and forefinger. Dropped it into her palm. “Klutz.”
The back of his fingers brushed her cheek before he ceded the field.
Two days after the battle with the gorgons, John Farragut came to see Jose Maria in the lab. The ship’s medical officer, Mohsen Shah, was with him, puzzling over beakers of sludge. Gorgon remains.
“Machine or biological?” Farragut asked.
The doctors shook their heads. “I am having no idea,” said Mo, and Jose Maria had no words at all.
˝“Animal, vegetable, or mineral?” Farragut tried again.
Again they shook their heads. Jose Maria lifted one of the beakers, gave it a swirl. “Fluidity,” he said. “I am—I am entirely at a loss.”
“But that’s the dead phase,” Farragut nodded at the dirty brown stuff. “Can’t you reverse engineer it from that?”
“This—this—soup consists of common elements and unexciting compounds,” said Jose Maria. “What is missing is the code of its existence. It moves itself. It moves itself at near absolute zero in total vacuum.”
“Well there’s another axiom out the porthole,” said Farragut.
“A lot of traffic through that porthole lately, young Captain.” Jose Maria let himself sit. His stately posture slipped. “We are back to square one, and I do not know where to go.”
“You can come to the command deck,” said Farragut. “We’re approaching your wife’s planet.”
The planet Telecore—the construction base for the Far Cat. From there, Farragut hoped to find the Far Cat. And Jose Maria had hoped to find his wife.
“We passed through a noise zone, like scramscat transmissions,” Farragut explained on the way. A Roman installation would try to mask, diffuse, scramble, and scatter its signals escaping into space to imitate natural radiation and stellar noise. “But we came out into a clear zone. The scramscat stopped.”
“That is odd,” Jose Maria agreed. Why scramble when you are sending nothing in the first place? “Then might the Romans have seen us coming and have shut off all transmissions?”
“I can’t imagine how you could take a whole planet dark. I mean someone would microwave their leftovers. Something. Then again, these are Romans.” Farragut argued with himself.
He took his ship to stealth mode, altered course, sounded general quarters. Merrimack approached Telecore from an overshot angle.
Still the scanners detected no transmissions from the planet.
He would have expected someone, even on a small colony, to let something slip. Activate a remote, signal a friend, forget to cancel the automatic feed from a weather satellite.
The planet they approached was dark. Physically dark, shrouded in brown clouds with little albedo.
Jose Maria moved forward, tense. “That is not the planet Mercedes described.” A blue-green jewel wrapped in white lace. “I fear I have led you into a trap.”
He’d been given the wrong coordinates. Jose Maria would have sworn to heaven, and bet all of Terra Rica, that the Romans could not have broken his and Mercedes’ code.
And Farragut still believed that. “Damn peculiar sort of trap.” He turned to his scan tech. “What’s down there?”
“No life, sir.”
“I asked what is there.”
“Yes, sir,” the scan tech said quickly, did a quick read of the major features. “There was a settlement here, all right. Ruins. Looks like Roman construction. Dead vegetation. Can’t even say it’s rotting. There’s no bacteria.”
Jose Maria jerked in physical startlement. Farragut said, “Now how the hell does that happen?”
The scanner looked for it. Found it: “The planet’s hot! Radiation, sir! Not naturally occurring!”
Farragut nodded. Had feared, expected that. “Known sig
nature?”
“Yes, sir,” the scan tech confirmed. “There’s a match in the system. It’s Roman.”
“Did someone blow up Rome’s nuclear installations down there?”
“No, sir. Not that kind of radiation signature.” The tech turned from his console to look up at his captain, wide-eyed. “Looks for all hell like a Roman Legion took a neutron hose to the whole world.”
28
THE PLANET TELECORE SWIRLED under the high muddy winds of nuclear winter. Impact craters and scorched trenches pocked and laced the ground. A Roman sanitation crew had done a thorough job here.
Of Dr. Mercedes de Seville de Cordillera’s terraforming artistry, or of anything else living, there was nothing.
“The cleaners were here,” said Mr. Vincent.
No wonder Merrimack had met no guard ships. There was nothing here to defend.
Mr. Vincent shook his head at the readings. Bitter. Astonished. “So their Catapult goes operational and they just erase the whole base.”
Rome had been known to take terrible measures to keep its secrets.
“Where are the people?” asked Jose Maria.
“They killed their workers,” Vincent said.
Farragut shook his head. “Unlikely. Romans aren’t as stupid, inhuman, and wasteful as they’re cracked down to be.”
Despite U.S. propaganda, even he knew that Romans were not comic book thugs who disposed of their servants like movie extras. “I have to believe they moved their people out first.
“Something had to turn septic for them to do this. I’m sorry, Jose Maria, we’re not going to find anything down there.” Farragut clasped Dr. Cordillera behind the neck and gave him an encouraging shake. “But we know your wife wasn’t there. Mr. Gray, move us out.”
Glenn Hamilton lay in bed, drifting uneasily near sleep, her back to Patrick, the ship on guarded alert moving through space that should be thick with Romans but wasn’t.
A buzzing clamor made her jerk and sit straight up, shaking like a shell-shocked soldier.
