by R. M. Meluch
Did not take long for Congress to throw a primordial fit. John Farragut had passed on the chance to end slavery, take over trading alliances, get a piece of Roman taxes, annex some of those lucrative colonies, investigate Roman bio-research violations. The list was long.
Captain Farragut was summoned before a Congressional committee via the res com.
Farragut shut them down quickly. “This is an expensive call and too late. You don’t like the deal, take it up with the pinhead who put this clause in the Navy regs that gave me authority to negotiate it. My enemy, as he says, put his hand under my foot. I stepped on it. But I did not harvest the rest of his body parts, because I need him up and breathing to help me fight. Y’all are really not grasping what happened here.”
“What’s to say this isn’t a trap?” The Senator from Oaxaca there.
“Caesar is going to walk in subjugation for a trap? What else do you want said? No, you’re right. It’s a trap. The moment Caesar put his head under that arch, we inherited his war. Here it is in terms y’all might understand: Fort Eisenhower must be evacuated within six years. That means the Shotgun shuts down in six years. Palatine will be dead in one hundred thirty years. Later that same year, Earth will be eaten alive, which may be just fine for you if you don’t have grandchildren. But since we’re all feeling human beings here, I suggest you stop dividing up the spoils of the conquered and start fighting the Hive now. Right now. Unless one of you can figure out how to start yesterday. Having said that, y’all will have to excuse me. I have to get back to work.”
Gladiator returned the captured equipment, personnel, provisions, dog tags, and teeth to Merrimack.
Captain Farragut composed messages to the widows, the moms, the dads, the children. Starting with his XO Sebastian Gray. Hoped like hell the last thing he’d said to Gray was not to call him Cal by mistake. Scarcely had time to know him. Knew he’d left behind his wife Narinda with two young boys, Terrance and Justin. A blind springer spaniel named something or other. Knew there was a pocket keettrig nesting in the attic, which Gray had to evict next time he got home. Home was Providence, one of the American colonies. Farragut guessed he ought to arrange for someone to take care of the keettrig for Narinda. Or do it himself if orders took him near Providence. No one had seen Gray buy it, so Farragut couldn’t even tell Narinda that her husband had died valiantly.
Oh, yes, he could.
TR Steele had been returned to Merrimack in a bag. A med bag. In ragged shape but still alive.
Also returned in a med bag was some idiot, bandaged over his eyes, who kept calling over and over, “Marco! Marco!”
The MPs were beginning to wonder if this weren’t a Roman plant, because of the bandaged face, because no one knew his voice, and no one knew who in blazes was Marco.
Till Lieutenant Glenn Hamilton broke out in an astonished sobbing laugh: “Polo!”
No matter what, Patrick Hamilton could make her laugh.
Glenn Hamilton could not follow her husband to the ship’s hospital, where he was carried—babbling joyfully “Marco! Marco!” the whole way—until the end of her watch. When she came to his bedside, the bandages over Patrick’s face were fresh.
He had taken a dying gorgon in the face. A pair of new eyes were being cultivated for him in a tank next to his cot.
When Glenn slipped her hand into his, Patrick asked, “Have I lost you to Captain Farragut?”
“What do you mean?” Could not believe how lame those words sounded coming out of her mouth.
He gestured blindly at the organ tank next to his cot: “I have eyes!”
Glenn could not speak. Could not think.
“I’m not wrong, am I,” Patrick said more than asked.
“You’re not right either,” said Glenn.
There was a motion of eyebrows lifting under the bandages. “Meaning?”
“John Farragut was nice to have around when you were making me feel like—I can’t even tell you what it feels like.”
“Hull, do you remember what I said when I asked you to marry me?”
Her eyes stung. She remembered exactly. Tried to keep the unsteadiness out of her voice. She recited back to him: “Hull, you could do better, but I wish you wouldn’t.”
He nodded on his pillow. “And I was lying here thinking, and I thought I was going to offer you your freedom when you got here. But screw that. I’m fighting for you, Glenn Hull.” He sat up, put up his dukes. “Let’s do it. Point me at your Superman.” He jabbed at the air.
“He’s not here, Patrick.”
“Oh, thank God.” He fell back on the cot.
May as well have challenged a bull gurzn. “Glenn, I swear I’ll never look at another woman.”
“You don’t need eyes to see Hot Trixi Allnight.”
“Hot Tr—! Who wants her?”
“You did!”
Patrick’s arm flopped at his side. “I just had to see what all your thugs thought was so special.”
Her thugs—what Dr. Patrick Hamilton called the navvies and Marines behind their backs. They were hers because she was an officer. Patrick was just a scientist in uniform.
“And?” Glenn waited for the verdict on Trixi’s specialty.
“I still don’t see it. She’s no Glenn Hull.”
Glenn left Patrick’s hospital compartment. Gasped.
John Farragut was waiting in the corridor, leaning back against the bulk, his arms crossed, as if he’d been there for some time. Regarded her strangely. Puzzled maybe.
“John?”
He straightened up. Glanced away, brow creased. Looked back to her. Decided to speak. “Okay, Glenn, here it is. He’s an ass.”
She dropped her gaze to the deck grates a thoughtful moment. At last looked up, looked into his eyes. Nodded yes.
“But he’s my ass.”
General Pompeii returned the captain’s bourbon in person in preparation to take his leave. The gorgons would be heading to this location after the recent flurry of res transmissions. It was time for Gladiator, Merrimack, and Fortress Aeyrie to be elsewhere.
Farragut brooded over what Caesar had said earlier regarding Monitor—that she had been hunting Fortress Aeyrie.
No wonder Napoleon Bright had refused to tell him Monitor’s mission.
“What the hell were they going to do when they found Fortress Aeyrie!” Farragut wondered aloud. “Kidnap the emperor?”
A bit of Numa’s old superciliousness returned. The general gave a disingenuous shrug of his massive shoulders. “That would be your side’s information.”
And Farragut understood now Rome’s reluctance to ask the United States for help.
Farragut muttered softly, “God blessed tunnel-visioned schemers!”
“You blame the snake for having tunnel vision?” said Numa.
“No, I blame the snake for being a snake. Numa, what was that harmonic you stuck on board my boat to lure the gorgons?”
Numa Pompeii shook his head. He didn’t know. “I got it from our snakes.”
Farragut checked over the ship’s manifest. “I think that’s everything.”
“Not quite,” said Numa. “I have also been ordered to turn over to you a valuable piece of equipment, the emperor’s patterner.”
The phrasing gave Farragut pause. “His patterner. That’s a person, right?”
Numa gave an enigmatic glower. “If you say so.”
“Permission to come aboard.”
“As if I could stop you.”
Farragut collected kisses on either cheek from Jose Maria de Cordillera at the starboard dock along with a bottle of well-aged cognac. “I liberated this from Gladiator.”
“Good man.”
“It is good to see you restored to your ship, young Captain. A bit of a deus ex machina, is it not? As in ancient Greek plays, when all looked lost, a god stepped in and made everything right again.”
“Oh, no. Everything is not right, and what’s behind this is the furthest thing from God,” said Farragut.
“I know that well. And I have a request, young Captain. If your mission is now to destroy this thing, this Hive, I would travel with you. I think I could make myself of use in your lab.”
It had the sound of a vendetta. Farragut guessed, “The Romans told you what became of Sulla.”
Jose Maria’s black eyes glistened. He smiled tragically. “They do not know.”
“I don’t believe it! Where’s Numa? I’ll beat the answer out of him!”
“They truly do not know. They never found her. Sulla was the first victim of the monsters, they think. But she vanished without a trace, so they assume, but they do not know. Hope turns like a thorn in the heart, because this hope is a lie, and I know it.”
Farragut made a fist, with nothing to punch. “If only Rome had asked sooner. This would have been a different ball game. Hell, Jose Maria, you’re a learned man, can’t you build a time machine? Do this over?”
Rhetorical, but Jose Maria answered anyway. “In theory. If one views our ten-dimensional universe in three dimensions—which is the only way we can view it—picture, then, the universe as an expanding balloon and we all dots on the surface of it. We grow farther and farther apart from each other as the universe expands, but no single one of us can be called the center.”
“Where does that take us?”
“Because time and space are a single entity, in theory, to go back in time, you could circle the entire surface of our universe-balloon to bring you back where you began.”
“It’s a damn big universe.”
Jose Maria nodded. “It is. And remember that the balloon is expanding. You would need to travel faster than light to outrun the expansion of our balloon, which, in real time, we cannot do.”
“We do it all the time,” said Farragut.
“We exceed light speed, that part is true. But not in real time. Mass increases as an object approaches light speed—from a sublight observer’s perspective. From our perspective, I still measure seventy-eight kilos no matter what speed I travel. At light speed, energy is infinite, time is infinite, neither of which condition is possible in real space-time. We never actually travel at light speed. We go faster or slower, but no one has ever observed us at light speed.”
“Which is another way of saying it doesn’t happen.”
“In effect, yes. Just as when we exceed light speed, we become irrelevant to the universe and, in effect, leave it. We become unobservable from our sublight observer’s vantage. Picture us now inside the balloon. We have left the surface of the real space-time universe and are in a sense tunneling from point to point without hitting all the points in between.”
“So with a deep enough tunnel we can go back in time,” said Farragut.
“Alas, that is where reality sets back in. You would need to exceed threshold velocity to dig that kind of tunnel. As you say, it is a damn big universe. And even were you able to break threshold and reach the required velocity, the journey would last several billion years from your perspective. You would not arrive intact. From the observers’ perspective, of course, none of it would happen at all.”
“Jose Maria, you weren’t with me at the Myriad. I think we had that kind of tunnel. Twelve billion years deep. Maybe, maybe, if I could just have stopped the Arran from going down that hole—”
“We would still be here,” a strange voice finished his thought.
Jose Maria de Cordillera and Captain Farragut turned to the speaker.
The emperor’s patterner. Not eager to board, he had not asked permission. He waited at the dock between Marine guards.
Augustus was now unplugged from his machines, looking only slightly more human, rigidly tall, but pained, as if their talk struck him as exceedingly tedious and embarrassing.
“Problem?” Farragut prompted, beckoning his Roman “equipment” in past the Marines.
“To speculate on things that are not real and can never be real,” said Augustus, “is a waste of energy and time.”
Jose Maria smiled benignly. Jose Maria had apparently made acquaintance with the patterner while in Roman company. The patterner’s brusque manner disturbed him not at all. “Good heavens, Augustus. Regretting what might have been is an ancient sport. Possibly a Roman invention, though I think Adam and Eve must certainly have played it. Can you say there is nothing you have ever done that you never wish you could have done differently, if only you had the chance?”
“There is,” said Augustus, dark and distant. He turned to Farragut. “I’d have pulled the trigger on you at the Myriad.”
Confirmed what Farragut already knew. He and Augustus had met before.
Augustus continued, to Jose Maria. “Yes, Dr. Cordillera. I would like to have that one back.”
Farragut was afraid he must have looked hurt and personally insulted, because Jose Maria asked for him, “And what would that have changed, patterner?”
“In the end, nothing,” said Augustus, expressionless. “Which is why this exercise is pointless. Entropy is a basic condition of the universe. The enemy are entropy incarnate. They are inevitable. Done is done. All roads lead here.”
“And there you have it, young Captain,” said Jose Maria blithely. “There is no going back.”
Augustus said, “You won.”
“I won,” Farragut echoed, no triumph in it.
“The only way out of this is straight ahead,” said Jose Maria.
“I can do that.”
Not the victory he wanted. But it was the one he had. Straight ahead at full speed was really the only way Farragut knew how to go.
Lieutenant Colonel TR Steele’s new fingertips were as broad as the ones he had frozen off in Gladiator’s hangar deck, but they were pink, girly soft, with thin, pliant nails.
The new tip of his nose did not bother him so much because he could not see it, and he’d never been much for looking in mirrors.
But those new fingers were right in front of him as he emptied the contents of the late Flight Leader Hazard Sewell’s locker into a small box.
These could not be his hands. Didn’t look like they’d ever fought beside this guy.
Hazard Sewell had died honorably, horribly, fighting gorgons. Better hands should be handling his stuff.
And Cowboy Carver’s locker should not be allowed next to Hazard Sewell’s locker.
“Cowboy got himself killed and Alpha’s a better squad for it.”
Should not have said that. But it was out there now, and Colonel TR Steele could not reel it back in. Left him in the awkward position of having to eat words to a subordinate. The subordinate he had a hopeless crush on.
He talked thick, through a lump in his throat. “Sorry. I know you loved him.”
“I didn’t,” said Kerry Blue. “I never did.”
And that sent Steele into giddy orbit, though it was obviously a lie. “Blue, you’re crying over his empty locker.”
“ ’Cause I’m an idiot!” Kerry shouted through tears. “I loved someone I made up. Guy I loved looked like Cowboy, lived like Cowboy. Made me feel like I could fly. But the guy I loved loved me back just as hard. And I am so damn mad at Cowboy for not being that guy! Cowboy made me feel this big when he wasn’t making me feel sky high.” Marked off the tip of her little finger with her painted thumbnail. “Lying, cheating, married son of a—Hell, if he didn’t die here, he’d a died of boredom. Sorry, sir. You didn’t need to hear that.”
“Not hurting me.”
Kerry Blue dragged a khaki sleeve across her angry face. “I am not crying. Over nothing. Scum. He was scum. I’m not saying I’m glad he’s dead. He was one of us. I’m just saying—didn’t everybody always say?—that boy’s gonna die young. Some things happen ’cause they just gotta happen. There’s nothing of mine in here.” She slammed Cowboy’s locker. “Can I go, sir?”
Steele didn’t want her to go. Wanted her to stay here, with her silly pink nails, that slight curl in her soft brown hair. He just liked having her near him. Tough, trashy, girl-soft and Mar
ine-hard Kerry Blue. Talked with her whole body. A great little body. He looked at her mouth and remembered her kiss when he thought he was about to die in that black, cold hangar. Had given him something to live for. He wanted to live.
She was asking to go. And that was probably a desperately good idea.
Steele gave a gruff rasp, “Dismissed, Marine.”
Watched her walk out, loose, rangy, rolling.
Keep your eyes above the neck, soldier, an inward rep. Put it out of your head. Not going to happen. Not in this or any lifetime.
Some things were never meant to be.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
PART ONE - Scorpion Sting
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
PART TWO - Turnabout
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
PART THREE - Firing Squad
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
PART FOUR - Wolf Star
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
PART FIVE - KALI
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
PART SIX - In Manus Tuas
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
