Wolf Star (Tour of the Merrimack #2)

by R. M. Meluch

  “We got gorgons on the screens,” Kerry said to no one, anyone, in the dark.

  Knew now why John Farragut was in here.

  Numa Pompeii was allowing the captain of the Merrimack to die with his crew.

  33

  UNGODLY NOISES FROM THE force field told the prisoners that the gorgons were insinuating their way through the ship’s defensive screen. That metallic scritching had to be tentacles against the hull. It would not be long now.

  Glenn Hamilton cocked her ear to the changing sounds. “They’re in.”

  “We’re going to die in this cage!” someone cried in the crowded detention hold.

  “Belay that,” Farragut ordered.

  After a slow, agonizing while, sounds of weapons fire diminished within the ship. Did not mean the enemy was on the run. You still heard enough scritching. Meant the gorgons were overwhelming the computer controls.

  The air felt thick in Farragut’s lungs.

  He waited for the expected miracle. Heard it in the smallest snick amid the shouting and banging uproar that resounded through the big ship.

  The detention hold’s locks had failed.

  Farragut bellowed, “Open that hatch! Look alive! Those closest to the hatch, get out and get clear! Do not block the exit!”

  Kerry Blue shuffled with her squadron mates toward the hatch, inch by inch, stinking bodies pressed together—no one exactly pushing, but no one leaving any space between himself and the person in front of him.

  There was just no herding seven hundred people through one hatch fast enough when your lives depended on it.

  Kerry craned her neck round, looking for Farragut. Glimpsed him. Way in the back of the back. Kerry looked up at Colonel Steele, damp skin of her arm stuck to his. “Orders? When we get out of here?”

  “We still have our orders from Farragut,” Steele growled. “Stay alive.”

  The Romans made no move to stop the POWs spilling from detention, so even John Farragut, at the tail end of the file, got free of the hold. By then the Romans had switched from beam guns to ceremonial bayonets, antique revolvers, and roundsaws to combat the gorgons. Anything with a blade was in use. Merrimack’s crew and company found no useful weapons to be had.

  Farragut sprinted to an unattended sensor compartment, and ordered his senior engineer, Kit Kittering, to locate Merrimack on the plotter screen. But the screen was dark and stayed dark. Gladiator’s sensors were all down. The only thing operative in the room full of unfamiliar equipment was the battery-powered backup lamp.

  “That’s why no one is in here,” said Kit. “Even if Merrimack is out there, we won’t be able to see her.”

  “I see her,” said Farragut, startled, looking out a clearport.

  The Merrimack. Right there. So close he could not take in any more than a wide stretch of gray hull. Only knew the ship was Merrimack because she was his.

  Kit’s great round doll eyes briefly widened at the featureless gray bulk. “John, that could be any ship.”

  “No, that’s my Mack!” He knew her every inch, every flaw (she had none), every dimple. “She’s gotta be hard docked and inside Gladiator’s force field to be that close. That’s her port side and Gladiator’s got to be docked to her cargo bay two. The access will be three, maybe four decks down from here and twenty meters that way. Where would I find a vertical access in this hulk? Are you familiar with the layout of a Gladiator class battleship, Kit?”

  “Gladiator is the class,” said Kit. Rome had constructed only one. “I don’t think the blueprints ever got out. Anyway, John, I don’t think they would have the Merrimack right—”

  Surprised shouts sounded from three, maybe four, decks down, in English: “Merrimack! It’s Merrimack! She’s here! She’s open! This way!”

  Clanging on the vents took on a distinctive Morse rhythm. Reg Monroe started spelling aloud the taps. “That’s the captain! Merrimack is here!”

  Kerry heard it, too. “Where? How do we get there from here?”

  Dak came loping up, pointed with a broad, twice-broken finger. “Take this corridor to the T intersection. Go right. Take the ladder. Hard to starboard and down the ramp.”

  Carly wrinkled up her face at him. “Now how the hell do you know that?”

  Dak nodded backward. “I asked a guy back there.”

  “You asked a Roman for directions?” Reg’s voice ascended off the register.

  “Yeah.” Dak’s big sloping shoulders shrugged.

  None of his mates could believe it. But that was the direction all the excited shouting was coming from.

  “He said we better hurry. The lupes are gonna push her off.”

  Reg, Carly, Twitch, Cowboy, Kerry, and Dak looked to Colonel Steele. Steele was about to give the go ahead when Cowboy yelled, “Gorgons! Six o’clock on the real fast!”

  Aliens were coming up the corridor behind them—a black mass of ugly.

  “Go!” Steele ordered.

  As ready for combat as a clutch of rabbits, the Marines of Alpha Flight took off at a barefoot run, the hideous scritching rolling hot after them. At the T intersection the way broke right and left. Cowboy, in the lead of the retreat, broke up in an acrobatic leap, swung up on a pipe, kicked an access panel out of the overhead, and hoisted himself up.

  Down on the deck were gorgons on all sides—a clot on the left closing in, more on the right barreling off the way the Marines wanted to go, and the mass of gorgons from behind, moving in fast. Cowboy in the overhead, hanging upside down like a trapeze artist, yelled, “Come on!”

  Steele seized Reg by the waist and threw her upward to Cowboy, who caught Reggie’s wrists and hauled her up into the vertical shaft with him.

  Kerry next. Too high. Separated her ribs on the downward yank as Cowboy caught her wrists. She went up breathless, stunned with pain. Tried to climb up past Cowboy to where Reg was, higher in the stack. Could not breathe.

  Carly, crowding in from below, gave Kerry a push on the ass. “Chica linda, some help, por favor!”

  “Kerry’s hurt,” said Reg.

  “She’s okay,” said Cowboy. Caught Twitch Fuentes. “Move it up. We’re on a real deadline here.”

  Kerry climbed, grimacing.

  Steele, down below, called, “Big load, coming up.”

  “Hey! Hey! Don’t get personal!”

  “Shut up, Dak.”

  Oofs from Steele, like boosting a sleeper sofa. Lots of weird sounds from Cowboy and Twitch, hauling Dak up into the shaft.

  Kerry had to stop. Curled around a waste pipe. Looked down. No one left down there to boost the Old Man up. And Colonel Steele was not a small guy.

  But stampeding gorgons with snapping tentacles converging on you can make you fly. Big yells, and Colonel Steele was up. Dak caught his wrists and heaved him into the overhead just as the gorgons from the six- and nine-o’clock corridors connected at the T intersection below the shaft. Looked like a snake’s nest down there.

  The whole snarl of them swarmed to the three o’clock and stampeded onward—the way the Marines wanted to go.

  Reg whispered, “They didn’t look up. Why didn’t they look up?”

  Kerry clenched her teeth, wrapped one arm around her rib cage. “Don’t really give a squid.”

  “They want something bad that way,” Dak said, filling the vertical access, shouldering his way up the stack.

  “We want something bad that way,” said Carly. “That’s the way to Merrimack.”

  “Lupes must’ve slathered up the Mack real tasty. You think?” said Cowboy.

  “Could be,” said Carly. “I’d still rather be on Mack than here. This boat ain’t exactly vermin free.”

  A glimmer of light returned to the bottom of the stack. The gorgons had passed on by. Steele clambered down, headfirst, for a recce, checking all three corridors.

  “Clear?” Cowboy asked.

  “Not clear.” Steele twisted around upright. Sounds of gorgons’ skittering toothy feet approached. “Marines, proceed up. We�
��ll try to circle around to the dock from the next level. Move! Blue, you can move your ass faster than that!”

  Fighting tears, nostrils flaring, Kerry acknowledged through her teeth: “Yes, sir!” Followed Reg up the shaft. Better off mad. Kept her mind off the pain.

  The Marines moved like a line of rats, nose to tail, Reg leading. Reg had a sense for how ships were put together, and she brought them out on a catwalk twenty feet above the loading dock where great cargo doors lay open like parted jaws to swallow eager gorgons swarming from Gladiator to Merrimack.

  The gorgons moved with a singular will. Ignored the Marines up above and the few Roman soldiers on other catwalks around the dock. Kerry crouched on the grating, arms round herself, head between her knees. The doors. The doors. Right down there. And no way to get through them.

  The alien rush ebbed. There came an exchange of shouts in Latin from the dock and elsewhere, but no more gorgons.

  “There’s our chance!”

  Carly had no sooner whispered when a ratcheting clangor filled the empty space.

  The cargo doors were cranking shut.

  “No!”

  Cowboy leaped down the twenty feet, rolled on the deck, and up to his feet. He charged at one of the Romans at the winch.

  The Roman dropped him with an easy crack of the butt of his beam gun across the side of Cowboy’s head. The Romans continued cranking at the winch. Got up a rhythm. The cargo doors were clattering together easily, faster.

  Dak and Steele vaulted over the catwalk railing, hung from the grate, dropped to the deck, and rolled. Steele roared at Dak, “Help them!” Of the Marines stranded above, while he, Steele, ran at the doors. He had nothing to wedge between them. They boomed shut before his nose.

  Colonel Steele had been a drill sergeant once, in the dawn of his career, and still sounded it. “Open this!” he thundered in a voice that might have made even Romans obey, had they understood English.

  Didn’t seem to. They exchanged shouts with the upper decks. Acknowledged orders. Gave their weight to reluctant levers that creaked, budged, banged into position.

  A clunking sounded from outside the hull. The sound of separation.

  “Merrimack abst!”

  Cowboy pried himself off the deck. Jumped at the doors like a caged kangaroo rat. “No! No!”

  Reg stared, stunned, from the catwalk. Met the dark eyes of a Roman soldier at one of the levers. Oddly sympathetic eyes. The Roman spoke to her in English: “No tears now, pretty Yank. You didn’t want to catch that ship. We’re going to blow it up.”

  34

  UPON BOARDING HIS gorgon-infested ship, Farragut had been met by a squad of Marines at the dock, who were passing out swords to all boarders having only two legs. “Compliments of Lieutenant Hamilton, sir. Glad to have you aboard, Captain Farragut.”

  “The Romans left these?” Farragut felt the satisfying weight of the blade in his grip. It was good to be armed again.

  “Yes, sir. We were surprised. They took everything else.”

  Maybe because the swords had worked once against the aliens, Numa assumed the swords would not be effective twice. Or maybe it was just because Numa disdained swords.

  “I do love that man’s hubris,” said Farragut. Took possession of his ship.

  Nothing computer operated worked over here either, the ship smothered by whatever force the alien mass exuded. Air was still tough to draw. Numa had managed to off-load thousands of his gorgons on to Merrimack.

  But the gorgons here acted differently than the last swarm Merrimack had encountered. The gorgons of the last swarm had attacked whatever was closest.These snubbed the easy snack in pursuit of something irresistible.

  “The Romans stowed something mighty tasty on board is all I can think,” said the Marine who accompanied Captain Farragut through Merrimack’s corridors, hacking a path through those few monsters still interested in random prey.

  The captain’s first order was to run out his flag.

  The Romans had taken the Stars and Stripes, so someone quickly made up one and hand-cranked Old Glory out. Not perfect but just as proud and more defiant for its flaws.

  “Captain on deck!” a Marine proudly announced Farragut’s arrival on the command platform.

  The few techs and specialists there leaped to their feet. Farragut took stock of who he had: Ben Mueller, the com tech who normally sat mid watch. Marcander Vincent, Merrimack’s junkyard dog of a tac specialist, scabs on his face, both his arms bandaged from a close encounter with a gorgon. Qord Johnson, the cryptotech, young guy, freckled, flat-nosed, with fuzzy rust-brown hair and amber eyes. The second-string pilot, Jul Cortez. They all cheered as if the captain could breathe life into their dead systems just by being here.

  Farragut clasped their hands, embraced them, grabbed his little lieutenant behind the head and kissed her on the mouth. Under the circumstances it didn’t raise any eyebrows. John Farragut was an expressive man.

  A deep, ratcheting clatter made him rear back, alarmed. Sounded like cargo doors shutting, and he shouted to anyone, “Why are those doors closing! We’re not all here! I am not abandoning our people on Gladiator!”

  An anonymous voice shouted back from below: “Ready or not, yes we are, Cap’n! Gladiator closed first! They mean to space us!”

  The ship heaved, canted. Farragut fell against a control panel.

  The voice again. Pretty sure it was the Og: “We didn’t do that, Cap’n! We were pushed!”

  Ready or not, Merrimack was departing with the crew she had.

  “Who is here, Hamster? Do I have enough to fly this boat?”

  “Maybe half, Captain,” said Lieutenant Hamilton. “Maybe.”

  “Colonel Steele!” he bellowed. “TR! You on board?”

  “Don’t think he made it, sir.”

  “Commander Gray?”

  No one had seen the XO.

  “Hamster, looks like you’re acting exec again.” Wanted to know if her husband had made it on board, but now was not the time to ask anyone. “Find out who we’ve got, and fill in the holes. I want this ship operational and all the gorgons dead. Does that uffing Striker still have its barrel stuck inside gun bay sixteen?”

  With all systems fouled, he might be able to take over the patterner’s demonic little ship. But the report came back from someone who ran all the way up to gun bay sixteen and back, “No, sir.”

  As Merrimack drifted apart from its captor, Farragut got a visual of Gladiator—coated with gorgons. Half of Farragut’s crew was still on board that ship.

  “Kit!” Farragut bellowed at the top of his voice. Knew his senior engineer was on board. She had come over with him. “Kit, can we steer?”

  His engineer ran to the command deck to answer, gasping for oxygen. Took her a moment, hands on knees, to catch her breath. “Don’t know, sir. We’ve got a strange mess in the back. A mad heap of gorgons—thousands—tens of thousands—outside Engine Room Six.”

  “What are they doing?”

  Kit straightened, opened empty hands. She had no good answer. “Biting. They’re even biting each other. Like there’s something in the middle of them they ALL want.”

  “In Engine Six?”

  “No, sir. In the maintenance shed right outside. And every compartment adjacent to it. God knows what’s in the maintenance shed. They want it.”

  Captain Farragut and Lieutenant Hamilton spoke at the same time. “Bait.”

  Looked at each other.

  “Why would the Romans put gorgon bait there?” said Kit Kittering.

  “To lure the gorgons off Gladiator?” Hamster suggested. Seemed obvious.

  “Well, it concentrates them real nice. A lot of them, anyway,” said Kit. “Containment systems are functioning. Gorgons can penetrate them, of course, but it takes them time. I could seal off the affected compartments and lob in an incendiary. Take out about nine-tenths of our gorgon problem in one crack.”

  “No!” said Hamster.

  Kit turned arctic. Kne
w her job better than any mid watch officer. “Just because you burned out the Fury, sir, doesn’t mean I don’t know what kind of bomb to use to contain destruction to only the maintenance shed.” Told her. Captain’s sweetheart be damned.

  “No,” Glenn Hamilton said again. Appealed to Captain Farragut. “I think there’s already a bomb in there.”

  Farragut lifted his eyebrows—thinner eyebrows since they had grown back from his brush with Hamster’s blowtorch aboard the Fury. He murmured. “What good’s a lure without a hook?” And to Kit. “What do you think?”

  Kit had to concede, with a pained nod. The God-blessed Hamster was right. “Got to be a bomb on board.” That would explain why the Striker’s barrel was absent from Merrimack’s gun bay. “And I bet it will take out more than the maintenance shed.”

  Gladiator had some systems controls back, but the intercom was not one of those, so the crew were shouting orders between decks. It was all in Latin, except for Colonel TR Steele bawling like a bull, “Pompeii! You can’t do this!”

  Merrimack. The Romans were going to blow up Merrimack .

  Steele’s mission presented itself—the reason God had stranded him on Gladiator. While TR Steele breathed, no one was going to blow up the U.S.S. Merrimack.

  Kerry Blue never ever thought any responsibility so huge would fall into her hands—never when there wasn’t some equally expendable grunt next in line to take up where she failed. Never thought she would have anything of value to offer Colonel Steele. But Kerry Blue had had lots of stepdads and had grown up learning bits of lots of languages. Kerry, Carly, and Twitch could piece together some of the Latin the Romans were bellowing for all to hear.

  A lot of it was just yelling from soldiers locked in combat with the gorgons. But the voices that mattered were very loud and speaking very clearly to make their orders heard—calling for Merrimack’s destruction.