Strength and Honor

by R. M. Meluch

  One of first procedures in the Protocol was to organize a nano scrub of the entire ship, starting with Captain Farragut, who had been in contact with Augustus.

  The patterner’s body was rife with medical nanobots. Augustus may have left some nanomachines behind. And those might not be medical devices he left on Merrimack.

  Merrimack’s hospital was bigger than most city hospitals.

  The medical officer, Mohsen Shah, was waiting for the captain when he arrived from the command deck to the ship’s hospital on a levitated stretcher.

  Doctor Mo Shah was an ageless man, placid, with warm, sad puppy eyes. A Riverite by creed, Mo took things as they came. “Be allowing yourself to be relaxing,” he instructed his patient.

  To a Riverite, everything was a process. “The River is flowing,” he told Captain Farragut serenely.

  The River was talking to a salmon.

  Lying still was not Farragut’s natural state. When he lay back and closed his eyes, he was right back there in that chilling moment, in Augustus’ grip, unable to move, locked in the control of a malign strength.

  The sensation of being held so still, so helpless, hurtled him back into a childhood memory, when his father used to pin him down in a choke hold and tell him he had to see if he could take it. You have to know you can take it. John Farragut never wanted to go back there.

  The ordeal had brought back the same helpless feeling all over again. He could not move.

  He kicked.

  “The River is flowing,” came Mo’s pacific voice.

  Fortunately Farragut didn’t have a voice with which to tell Mo what he could do in his River.

  Mo turned up the gas.

  Farragut’s eyes closed themselves. The gas did not relax him. It threw him into twilight.

  Augustus’ voice came to him once again, speaking against his ear in soft menace: I have the same orders you do.

  Farragut had been certain in that moment that he was about to die. Knew it and could do nothing about it. But the voice had continued:

  “Fortunately for you, only one of us has his orders from a legitimate government. I need you to let me out.”

  The strained angle at which Augustus had trapped Farragut’s head restricted his air, and Farragut could barely squeak out, “I can’t do that.”

  “Oh, I wasn’t asking you,” Augustus said, and his thumb smashed the com on Farragut’s wrist. Then a quick fist to Farragut’s throat crushed his larynx.

  Farragut could not breathe, could not inhale or exhale. His throat was completely closed. Farragut felt his own face turning purple, his lungs burning, trying to expand.

  Augustus hauled him up, facing him. Red and green blotches swam in the air between Farragut’s fading sight and the gaunt face of the patterner.

  Augustus’ fingers gripped Farragut’s throat and yanked his trachea back open.

  Farragut inhaled in blinding pain. He tasted blood and tried to cry out. He made no sound louder than a heaving breath.

  Farragut was thewed like a bull and loved to fight. He hadn’t lost a match in a long time. But Augustus was six foot eight and reinforced with steel and synthetics. Farragut struggled with all the effect of an infant throwing an almighty tantrum. His attempts to get free only annoyed Augustus.

  At some point Augustus had enough, and he struck Farragut hard on both sides of the neck, interrupting the blood flow to his head and folding him to the deck.

  Farragut had some awareness of being tossed over Augustus’ angular shoulder and carried. Somewhere along the way, Augustus had lobbed an incendiary through a hatch, and climbed a ladder. The deck swam away from Farragut’s watering eyes.

  A top hatch opened. Wind fluttered up around him into the lesser atmosphere of the hull. And then he was on the hull.

  Cold. He was upside down and having trouble breathing. Could not draw enough oxygen.

  And then he was down another hatch, another ladder.

  Augustus let him drop in a heap on the deck like a hunter’s kill. But he was breathing.

  No one else was here. He heard the fire alarm, heard shouts and stampeding feet passing by on the other side of the partition.

  And then he saw the Striker.

  It took a moment to register what he was looking at because the colors were wrong. This Striker was blue and white. John Farragut had become accustomed to seeing Augustus’ own Striker painted red and black, Flavian colors. Augustus’ Striker had been destroyed.

  Augustus recently liberated this blue-and-white Striker from a madman who got it from another dead patterner. Augustus had not been able to enlist any of Merrimack’s crew to repaint the Striker for him.

  This Striker had the same evil lines as his own. But there was no hard ordnance left on the hard points. Those had been spent over a half century ago by its original owner. Still, the Striker had its energy weapons.

  Augustus used Captain Farragut’s biometrics—his retina print, his fingerprint, his DNA—to authorize a launch window through Merrimack’s force field, and to override attempts from the command deck to lock him in.

  He didn’t need Farragut’s voice print. Voices were too easy to duplicate.

  The cargo doors opened.

  The higher pressure air of Mack’s atmosphere rushed out with a moan through the wide doors to the layer of thinner air held between the hull and the force field. Now, Farragut thought, now will he kill me?

  Augustus should have killed him long ago and always regretted not doing it when he first had the chance.

  He ought to now.

  Augustus climbed onto his Striker, rode it up the lift through the cargo doors.

  The cargo doors were shutting. The outrush of air sped up through the narrowing egress. Augustus’ black clothes fluttered in the wind. He looked down like a perverse angel. He was not aiming a weapon at Farragut down there, lying flat on his back, looking up from the deck.

  Augustus was not going to kill him.

  Augustus had already told him why:

  Only one of us has his orders from a legitimate government.

  Augustus did not recognize Romulus. To Augustus, no legitimate authority had declared this war.

  Without a war, blowing up Merrimack or killing Captain John Farragut would be acts of piracy and murder. Augustus was not a pirate.

  Augustus, now and always, served Rome.

  “John Farragut.”

  Augustus the battered warrior looked down on him from atop his Striker. His face looked like seamed granite carved into the semblance of perfect Roman features. Cables in his forearms and behind his neck hung loose, unplugged.

  “When we cross paths again, know that I will not hesitate to kill you.” Farragut whispered, all breath, no voice, “Yes, you will.”

  Maybe Augustus heard him, maybe he read his lips, but Augustus blinked. He said something obscene in Latin, dropped into his cockpit, and the cargo doors banged shut between them.

  Farragut stagger-crawled across the cargo bay to an authorization pad. He fumbled to cancel all authorizations that would permit opening the force field. He could not speak the instructions and he could not key fast enough.

  He heard the breach forming in the field, heard the Striker power up and push off the hull.

  The force field resealed.

  Captain Farragut heard himself being paged.

  He crawled to an intracom, rose up to his knees and hit the intracom. He hailed the command deck, whispering. The intracom would not register the shape of his voiceless breaths. The com tech on the command deck scolded him to get off the intracom if he wasn’t going to say anything.

  Farragut charged into the briefing room, trying out his restored voice box on his assembled officers, “Do I look like a pork butt? Because I sure feel like one.”

  Colonel Steele stood at one end of the table. He flushed dark, mortified. He would not sit. The Marines who policed Merrimack were Steele’s men. One Roman had turned the proud Fleet Marines of the 89th into cartoon tail-chasers.
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  Sitting at the table was the ship’s Naval Intelligence officer, Colonel Bradley Zolman. Colonel Z was a dark-haired man of middle height, lean as a ferret. His face might have been attractive if he ever smiled, but that theory had never been tested as far as anyone on Merrimack knew. Captain Farragut could not call him humorless, but Colonel Z was definitely humor deficient.

  Commander Gypsy Dent was also here, stony, embarrassed at her own failure to contain the patterner.

  Two xenos, Doctor Weng and Doctor Sidowski, held down the far end of the table. Weng’s and Ski’s uniforms were so pristine that the two men might have been CIA incognito. Scientists’ uniforms got unfolded from their original bags about as often as CIA pretenders’ uniforms did. Anything other than a lab coat made a xeno feel like a dog dressed up for a tea party. Weng and Ski had neglected to add their proper insignia to their uniforms, so they looked as badly dressed as they felt.

  Also in the briefing room was Merrimack’s chief engineer, Kit Kittering, a little doll of an officer, boy slender, with short dark hair, big round baby doll eyes, and the foulest mouth on board ship. Apparently just about everything in Kit’s world was capable of fornication.

  “Where do we stand now?” said Farragut, roving the length of the briefing room, too agitated to sit.

  “At war,” said the IO in the most compact of nutshells. Colonel Z elaborated as best he could. “The exact nature of the war is not clear. Romulus never presented us with an ultimatum.”

  “Has Rome attacked anyone?”

  “Not so far,” said Colonel Z. “So far as we know.”

  There was a lot the Merrimack might not know from out here in the Deep, orbiting a planet that lay off the edge of all the maps.

  “Word is that Romulus is expelling Americans from Roman ground and Roman space,” the IO continued. “Romulus is confiscating all U.S. equipment on Roman soil. He already recalled Roman soldiers from U.S. territories before he declared war. We knew this was coming. We just expected quite a few more steps between that and this.”

  “Do we know what Romulus expects to get out of the war?” Gypsy asked. “What it will take to finish it?”

  “We don’t know,” said the IO. “And strategy is not our business. This is the Navy, not the Executive Office.”

  “It’s our business to know what we’re doing out here,” Farragut told Colonel Z. “I haven’t received orders. You?” Farragut would not put it past the Intelligence community to angle around him.

  “Not yet,” said Colonel Z. “I have my hands full executing the Divorce Protocol.”

  It sounded like an excuse but Farragut recognized that the Divorce was a huge task. “We’re knocked blind and sideways out here.”

  “With the Hive,” Doctor Weng reminded him.

  “We’re out here with the Hive,” said Doctor Sidowski.

  “I know that, gentlemen,” Farragut acknowledged.

  A new Hive swarm had emerged right down there on the planet Telecore below them.

  At the moment, the gorgons of Telecore were stranded on Telecore. The new gorgons seemed to be as inept as one might expect of any newly hatched thing. But Hives could learn—faster than people learned evidently, because the first Hive had driven Rome’s armed forces to the brink of extinction.

  These new gorgons had not figured out that they could fly. And no one knew how long it would take them to learn that they could not only fly, but they could escape the planet’s gravity, survive in a vacuum, retain mobility in the deepest cold of space and achieve faster-than-light travel when collected together in a sphere. It could take years, centuries, even millennia, for them to learn. Or they could be chasing Merrimack tomorrow.

  The xenos had known little enough about the earlier Hive. This new Hive presented a whole different set of unknowns. First among those, Farragut put to the xenos: “Why aren’t they dead? There’s nothing to eat down there.”

  The Hive was polymorphic. The cells on Telecore were the gorgon type—the eating form. A gorgon appeared as a large dark shapeless sac covered all over in hoselike tentacles, any one of which could take a good bite out of you, because all the tentacles terminated in mouths. The moment the new gorgons erupted out of the Telecore ground, they snapped up everything edible.

  The planet’s meager food was swiftly exhausted and the gorgons were looking for more.

  “We think—” said Ski.

  “Maybe—” Weng hedged.

  “We have an idea—”

  “A hypothesis—”

  Farragut could see his exec, Gypsy Dent, on the edge of her chair, glaring at the two scientists as if she might reach down the table and smack them upside the head to make one of them finish a sentence.

  Doctor Sidowski must have seen her, because he blurted without qualifiers, “They’re powered by resonance.”

  Faces around the briefing table wore stunned expressions. Captain Farragut was not shocked. The suggestion had been made to him a long time ago that the Hive was a single vast interstellar organism cohered by resonance.

  The theory had since been supported by the manner in which the previous Hive perished. Commodore Farragut’s Attack Group One had exterminated the original Hive by disrupting its intergalactic nervous system with a single resonant pulse.

  As a unified resonant being, the Hive whole might subsist on energy consumed by any of its cosmically scattered units. It was rather preposterous to think on, but the only theory that fit the preposterous facts. One thing humankind had learned from the first Hive: you can’t starve a gorgon.

  As long as some part of the Hive somewhere in the universe had enough to eat, the gorgons of Telecore might realistically wait the best part of forever for their next meal.

  “Probably,” Farragut allowed the resonance-sharing premise. “But we’ve seen swarms drop below some magic number where they’re not worth maintaining. That lot down on Telecore isn’t bringing in any energy to the whole. Why doesn’t the Hive cut its losses? I want to see spontaneous disintegration down there. Why isn’t it happening?”

  “Because we’re here?” Weng suggested and instantly looked as if he’d shot the captain.

  Farragut blanched. Merrimack was a resonance source and receiver. Gorgons sensed the Mack’s presence. Perhaps resonance promised food, and the proximity of resonance made the Telecore swarm valuable to the Hive whole.

  John Farragut was keeping the swarm alive.

  “Oh, for Jesus.”

  Dealing with a Hive was like navigating a minefield. Farragut hated mines.

  He shook off his blunder and pushed ahead. “I can’t leave those monsters down there unsecured. Any solutions for me, gentlemen?”

  “Quick and dirty fix,” said Weng. “We could nuke the whole world and take out the local swarm—”

  “—But then the rest of the Hive will learn about us from that,” said Ski.

  “I don’t like that idea,” said Farragut.

  “Neither do we,” said Weng, then turned to his colleague to make sure. “Do we?”

  “No,” said Ski. “We do not.” From battling the last Hive, the xenos knew that any experience of a swarm member was an experience immediately shared by the interstellar whole. You shoot one gorgon with a beam gun, then you must assume that all the Hive members across the universe now knew what a beam gun could do to them—though “knowing” was too elevated a term to attribute to Hive impulses. Augustus had once likened the Hive to a gut. A gut processed input, but it couldn’t be said to “know” its own processes.

  Nevertheless, the Hive whole would have an awareness of what happened at Telecore. They would be aware if the gorgons of Telecore died, and maybe from their dying glean “knowledge” of what killed them.

  Knowledge was power. Farragut wanted to keep the new Hives as powerless as possible.

  “I need a plan,” Farragut told the xenos. “A viable plan for dealing with the Hive swarms on Telecore in the event we need to leave the planet—because we will be leaving the planet. I can�
�t see the Joint Chiefs parking the Mack out here watching baby monsters while Near Space is at war.”

  “A plan, sir. Aye, sir,” said Weng.

  “Several proposals, sir,” said Ski. “For your approval.”

  The effort to maintain Hive ignorance might be futile. The range of the Hive entirety was incalculable, and God alone knew what other beings elsewhere in the universe were teaching the new Hives even at this moment. But John Farragut was never one to stop running until the umpire called him out.

  He did recognize that he could expect no help from Rome. Rome lost most of its Deep End colonies to the first Hive.

  Hives. There had been two.

  Presumably there were two again. It was only a guess— a good guess, but still a guess—that the new monsters were offspring of the old Hives, because the new monsters were popping up in places the old Hives had been like recurrences of Ebola.

  That made for a lot of new gorgons on a lot of old Roman colonies in the Deep End of the galaxy.

  But the Empire had withdrawn its remaining populations from the Deep End. Rome ceded all their liabilities to their enemy.

  Except one.

  There had only ever been one occurrence of the Hive in Near Space. That had been on the Roman colony of Thaleia.

  No new generation of Hive had erupted on planet Thaleia.

  So the new Hive threat was confined to the Deep End. Rome counted on the United States’ self-interest to hold it there.

  The Hive was a U.S. problem now.

  That placed the United States in a two-front war— fighting the Hive in the Deep and Rome in Near Space.

  Captain Farragut turned to his XO and his IO at the briefing table. “We’ve got two Roman ships of war out here in the Deep End and unaccounted for. Do we have anything on their heading?”

  Colonel Z shook his head. “Wherever Gladiator and Horatius are, they’re running dark. They may be headed back to Palatine, but who knows? We can’t ignore the possibility that they could be lining up a strike on Fort Ike. In the first scenario, we don’t need to worry about them for another three months. The other scenario would be ugly.”