Wolf Star (Tour of the Merrimack #2)

by R. M. Meluch

  The alien spheres ignored the decoy. As if they recognized Hermione as a bone they had already picked clean.

  Recognized it how? “Those things can’t be the same spheres that ate Hermione,” said Mr. Vincent. “Their top speed and where we found Hermione don’t add up. Means these things have to be talking to each other.”

  “And I’ll bet you the Qarfin Bank they’re talking in resonance,” said Mr. Gray.

  “Impossible,” said the senior engineer.

  “Kit, the weight of evidence has crushed that argument just about flat,” said Farragut, and without taking a breath started shouting very fast: “Cease fire! Recall remaining Star Sparrows!”

  Mr. Gray acknowledged, ordered the recall, then questioned his captain, “Sir?”

  “We’re not the only ones learning here. We’re teaching them! That’s what happened to Rome! They taught the gorgons all their weapons, all their technology, all their tactics, and that’s how they got slaughtered.”

  30

  JOSE MARIA LOOKED A BIT startled. Took a moment to shake off a few axioms, then nodded. These giant clots of frozen aliens separated by light-years were learning, sharing knowledge, adapting.

  Merrimack’s best course of action for the moment was to steer clear until someone could come up with a better one. Rome had not been able to pull back and think, damned by the same weakness that lost them the Near Cat—Rome had stationary targets to defend. A fixed site was death in a space battle.

  “Sir, if we stop resonating, can we shake the gorgons off our tail?” Mr. Vincent asked, as if Captain Farragut knew everything about the aliens.

  The crew thought the captain knew everything because they needed for him to know everything.

  “Well, let’s run a little experiment on that,” said Farragut. “Mr. Gray, take us dark. Sneak us around behind a couple of those alien spheres then ping ’em. If we get a picture of their butts, then, Mr. Vincent, I would say the answer is yes, we can shake them. TR, you don’t look real sure about this.”

  Colonel Steele tended to remain silent in the company of educated men and women, but his frown was speaking loudly. He cleared his throat. Hoped his question wasn’t stupid. “If the gorgons home in on res pulses, why aren’t there a bunch of gorgon balls headed for Fort Eisenhower right now?”

  A squirm-making silence grew long, before Hamster said, “Who says there’s not?”

  Several sets of eyes grew very big. Commander Gray snapped fingers at Mr. Vincent at tactical, who quickly organized a resonant scan of a two-klarc radius surrounding Fort Ike.

  And located the alien spheres. A lot of them. On trajectories originating from the general direction of the galactic hub. At present speed the nearest of the spheres were still six years out. But at the end of those six years, the same thing that destroyed the Far Cat would be at Fort Ike.

  “We’ve got our own fixed site to worry about.”

  Rome had apparently constructed their Deep End displacement chamber farther into the gorgons’ territory. If Rome had obeyed the U.S. sanction against building a Catapult in the Deep End, then it would have been Fort Ike who discovered the monsters.

  Or someone else. “Mr. Vincent, scan all U.S. colonies in the Deep End. A hundred-parc radius. Find me who’s in trouble out here.”

  Found what they did not want to find. FTL spheres moving toward every one of Earth’s deep colonies. At current speed, the predators were two years out from the planet New California, and a scant six months out from the globular cluster IC9870986 a/k/a the Myriad, where the LEN were conducting an emergency evac of two lightly populated planets. That planetary evacuation’s short deadline just got nine years shorter.

  “I do not want to explain this to the LEN,” said Farragut, hand over his face. “And I’d rather eat gorgon guts than tell the Archon of the Myriad. We just have to kill all these things before it comes to that.”

  A bee banged around the command deck, smacking off the consoles and attacking the techs, its little abdomen pumping the instinctive motion of bee rage in racial memory of a stinger.

  “The insects,” Farragut said following the bee’s manic path. “How do the insects figure into this?”

  “There is an appearance of connection,” Jose Maria allowed.

  “Are they ratting us out?” said Farragut. Did not wait for an answer. “Mr. Gray, space all the ship’s insects. Every last cricket, bee, ant, moth, earthworm—no forget the earthworms—insects. Insectoids. All of them. Out the air lock.”

  “Please.” Jose Maria held up a hand.

  Commander Gray hesitated, looking to his captain as Jose Maria pleaded quietly, “Stay the bees’ execution for a time, young Captain. The insects did grow calm in between our battle with the aliens and our visit to Telecore. It suggests the insects are reacting to the aliens rather than calling to them.”

  “Reacting to what, Jose Maria? Why are they bouncing around now? We don’t have any gorgons on board.”

  “Do we not?” said Jose Maria.

  Farragut went momentarily dumb. Would have thought that answer obvious.

  Jose Maria went on, “Are the gorgons perhaps an infection that is suppressed below detection but does not quite go away? Or did we pick something up at Telecore that only the insects can sense?”

  Farragut didn’t like it. Didn’t accept it. “I think I’d notice if we had gorgons on board. And I can’t take the chance. The bugs are going out.”

  “There has been enough death.”

  “They’re insects, Jose Maria.”

  “They are innocent lives. Perhaps more than innocents. Might they, in fact, be warning us?”

  Farragut loved the man but was about to throw him off the command deck.

  Then Lieutenant Glenn Hamilton said, “I think they are, Captain. Warning us.”

  “Oh, for Jesus.” Farragut rolled his blue eyes. Women and civilians.

  But he ordered a shipwide search for “anything gor gonoid.”

  Thoughts ran more to homicide than to extermination. Colonel Steele knew he wasn’t going to find anything out here. This was an idiotic assignment.

  TR Steele had gone hull-walking outside the ship with F/S Cowboy Carver. Searching for gorgons. Felt like he’d been sent to fetch a left-handed baseball.

  Artificial gravity was odd out here. Fluctuating. The direction of its attraction roughly inward toward the ship, but unpredictable. The shimmer of the force field some thirty feet above (beside? below?) them made the surrounding blackness surreal.

  The atmosphere was feeble out here, so Steele and Cowboy wore space suits. Magnetic boots helped them keep their footing on the hull. Didn’t want to lose contact. The force field could be dangerous. You did not want to touch it.

  But the boots also made simple walking more like a march through mud.

  Cowboy moved with a cowboy swagger. Lean, all muscle even to the brain, Cowboy’s body formed a wedge from shoulders to narrow hips. Women thought he was gorgeous. The only woman who mattered, Kerry Blue, still thought Cowboy was gorgeous. She hated him too hard. Meant she still loved him. For that, Cowboy ought to die.

  Starlight shone in a red Doppler smear on this side of the ship. Lamplight took a strange bounce from the force field, brightened the gray metal hull.

  “Hey, what’s this?”

  Cowboy kicked at this. A thigh-high pile of black, crusted stuff, big lumps of it, as if some titan forgot to clean a gigantic grill.

  “Clean it up,” said Steele.

  “Me?” Cowboy squawked. “I didn’t do it.” And opened a com link, “Hey, Captain. Something odd out here. We got barnacles.”

  Since when did Cowboy Carver report directly to Farragut?

  Farragut responded, but not to Cowboy. “TR, find something?”

  “Sir, I—” Dammit. Had not meant to take this to the captain. Could not exactly tell him never mind now that crater-mouth Cowboy had opened the com. “I think it’s molten debris blown out of the Fury stuck on the hull. It looks like b
ig burned carbon lumps.”

  Cowboy poked at the pile with his gloved forefinger. It didn’t give. “You know, I think this might be Kerry Blue’s cookies. I just throw ’em out the airlock. So this is where they land.”

  Kerry Blue made cookies for Cowboy Carver? Steele wanted him so very dead.

  Cowboy took his knife to the crusted stuff. The blade did not so much as prick the surface. “Yep. This is Kerry’s bakery, all right.”

  Cowboy crouched down to try to wedge his blade between the black heap and the hull. His helmeted head bent over his work, intent.

  Steele blinked in the peculiar light. Might be hallucinating out here. One of the crusted blobs seemed to move.

  Did move. Was opening.

  Disbelief made time stretch. A slow-motion quality to it. The solid heap took on shape, grew a pincered head. Or was that a clawed arm? Turned glossy as a beetle’s back. Pincers sharp as razors parted to encircle Cowboy’s bent neck.

  Blue-white flame leaped from Steele’s blowtorch in a hard jet. Cowboy ducked and rolled, swearing. “Gak! What are you trying to—ho, skatbricks!” Dodged a fiery, thrashing pincer.

  The other globules opened—briefly—under Cowboy’s and Steele’s blowtorches.

  Over the smoldering remains, Cowboy’s clap on the back of Steele’s shoulder rocked Steele a step forward. “Thanks, Old Man.”

  Cowboy. Steele had just saved Cowboy’s life. Steele snarled. “What was I thinking?”

  And Cowboy laughed. Never knew Colonel Steele could make a joke.

  “They weren’t the same thing,” Cowboy said at debriefing.

  “They have to be the same thing,” Steele told the officers and scientists.

  “No,” said Cowboy. “Gorgons got whippy bitey leggy things all over a blobby bag body. Those things out there were armed and way bigger. They got jointed legs and pincer things.”

  Steele rapped down a beaker of sludge on the table between himself and the investigators. “They look the same now.”

  One of the examiners leaned forward to sniff the beaker. “Which creature is this?”

  “Yes,” Steele said, sour.

  The lab had specimens of melted gorgons and specimens of the creatures Steele and Cowboy had dispatched on the hull. Without labels on the beakers, no one could tell which was which.

  “A red blood cell does not look or act like a white blood cell, neither of which looks or acts like a cell from a muscle or from the brain,” Dr. Cordillera offered.

  Farragut listening in, leaning back against a wall, got into it here: “Jose Maria, you’re saying we’re fighting some huge space body’s white blood cells?”

  “I cannot know. I am throwing out analogies from my own frame of reference for consideration.” Jose Maria lifted the beaker from the table. Gave the brown sludge a swirl before his eyes. “They die the same. How is our insect life faring now?”

  Farragut had forgot all about them. A quick demand for report revealed that the bees of Merrimack had returned to their hives, their buzzing a soft, peaceable hum.

  “God Almighty.”

  The implications were astonishing—the two sets of monsters were the same. Insects could sense them both.

  And, more significant still: “We have a warning system.”

  Farragut signaled the command deck: “Mr. Gray, cancel order to space the insects.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “If I may be so bold, young Captain,” said Jose Maria, a preface to advice.

  “Go ahead, Jose Maria. Your guess on these things is better than mine.”

  “I advise disabling the ship’s resonance chambers. Res pulse exists everywhere at the same instant, which means there is no effective difference between sending and receiving—one touches the harmonic either way.”

  “You mean if the JC contacts us—”

  “I believe such contact would betray your ship’s position to the predator.”

  The ship’s res specialist agreed in theory, though he still didn’t know how anyone or anything could pull a location off a res pulse. He excused himself from the debriefing to go disable the ship’s resonant chambers.

  Merrimack altered course, ran dark until she was in a position calculated to be well behind the gorgon spheres stalking her.

  “If we don’t come out behind the gorgons, that means they can track us without our resonating,” said Farragut. “And it means the insects are going out the air lock.”

  The only way to know was to resonate.

  The scan tech hesitated on the switch, warned, “This could betray our new position.”

  “If they don’t already have it,” said Commander Gray. “Execute scan.”

  Took a resonant scan of the area Merrimack had vacated. And glory be, there were the gorgon spheres, roaring blindly away after Merrimack’s old position.

  A second scan revealed the gorgons turning hard about. Expected that, but still came as a shock “They’ve reversed course. They do locate by res pulse! They’re chasing us.”

  Farragut was about to signal the lab to ask what the insects were doing, when an entire of swarm of bees invaded the command deck with an enraged hum.

  Farragut moved carefully, so as not to crush any bees. “Let’s see if we can’t give the gorgons a wild goose to chase.”

  He ordered Merrimack to turn toward the galactic hub and resonate again to encourage their pursuers. Then go dark and double back, disable all res chambers.

  In moments the bees quieted, settled to a placid search for anything edible in Jose Maria’s ruby collar tack and in the red-and-yellow console lights before they gathered up and went home.

  Steele stood uneasy on the command deck, eyes shifting, as if They were listening. Mumbled near to a whisper, “We think they can’t see us, but we know we can’t see them.” Didn’t put much faith in the testimony of bees.

  “I believe we threw them off,” said Commander Gray. “But, Captain, the lieutenant colonel is correct. The darkness works both ways. Tough to fight what we can’t see.”

  Actually, Farragut could think of a few options but did not want to use any of them. “I’m not fixing to teach those gorgons one more blessed thing about us.”

  “That doesn’t leave us with much to do out here,” said Colonel Steele.

  “Orders?” Mr. Gray asked.

  “I’m beginning to like the Roman suggestion,” said Farragut, and issued the order: “Run like hell.”

  “Any particular direction, sir?”

  There was really no choice but to fall back, regroup, and organize a mass extermination. “Fort Ike.”

  Commander Gray instructed Navigation to plot a course to Fort Ike, and relayed the order to the helm. “Run like hell.”

  “Running like hell, aye.”

  “Occultation nine by fifteen by one forty-eight,” the lookout sang.

  Farragut had not thought there were any alien plots on this path. “Take us wide of the sphere.”

  “Not a sphere, I don’t think, sir.” Positive ID was tough with a passive scan. Then, “Occultation twelve by twenty by one thirty.”

  “Identify,” said Farragut.

  “Possibly ships. Possibly human make. Occultation eighteen by three by one ten.”

  Bogeys. Three of them. Something very deliberate in their placement.

  No one runs into anyone by accident out here.

  “Occultation eleven by eight by twenty.”

  “Oh, for—” Farragut pounced on the tactical station, watched the plots appear. On the left. On the right. On the up. On the down. The plots constricting like a snare. Didn’t need a fine scan. “That’s Roman. Pilot! Ram it to the gate! We’re going through!”

  As Merrimack sprang, the Roman ships opened fire. Their positions were staggered so each had a clear shot at Merrimack without danger to their counterparts on the far flank.

  Merrimack ran out her guns and charged, blasting through the closing gauntlet. Did not need to take out the ships. Only had to make their field gener
ators dip. There was no stealth in this maneuver. Just punch and speed, which Merrimack had. Ran at the force field barrier—

  “Yeeee HA!”

  —and through.

  Merrimack ran full out. You could hear the engines, feel the deck throb, take savage joy in the strength of this ship. The Roman ships turned about to give chase, and you had to laugh at them, because they hadn’t a prayer of catching up.

  Cowboy Carver shot the moon out a sternside clearport.

  The Roman ships could not catch Merrimack. You had to wonder why they were still back there, chasing. But they hung in, dogging Merrimack’s widening lead through two watches.

  Merrimack would enter Fort Eisenhower’s fire zone in eight more hours.

  “Those ships follow me into the fire zone, I’m keeping one as a souvenir,” said Farragut watching the rear display.

  Then, from the lookout: “Occultation five by two by thirty.”

  No! The mind would not accept it.

  Those coordinates were in front.

  “Occultation five by nineteen by forty.”

  Elation turning to sand.

  “Occultation ten by nine by nine.”

  From the pilot, hope descending: “That’s not the space cavalry coming out from Fort Ike, is it?”

  Farragut, stoically, “I don’t think so, son.”

  Watched the tactical display, the angry lights blinking on before of them, one by one by one.

  Tactical started, “Sir, it’s a—”

  Farragut nodded. Knew what this was. “It’s a Roman Legion.”

  Dead ahead.

  31

  FARRAGUT SHOUTED OVER the intracom: “Og! Redeploy force field. Brace for a hit from any direction.” A split-moment before Marcander Vincent sang out from the tactical station, “Javelins headed toward us, from all quadrants. Nineteen of them. Twenty. Impacts in twenty-nine to forty seconds, sir!”

  “Battery! This is Farragut. Target incoming javelins.”

  The pounding of the cannon thundered through the decks with the hiss of the ship’s beam weapons discharging. The burn smell snaked through the tight corridors, carried up to the command deck.