The Twice and Future Caesar

R. M. MELUCH'S
TOUR OF THE MERRIMACK:

THE MYRIAD (#1)

WOLF STAR (#2)

THE SAGITTARIUS COMMAND (#3)

STRENGTH AND HONOR (#4)

THE NINTH CIRCLE (#5)

THE TWICE AND FUTURE CAESAR (#6)

Copyright © 2015 by R. M. Meluch

All Rights Reserved.

Jacket art by Stephan Martiniere.

Jacket designed by G-Force Design.

DAW Book Collectors No. 1698.

Published by DAW Books, Inc.

375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

Any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.

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ISBN: 978-1-101-63738-8

To Jim,
All my yesterdays.

To Stevan,
All my tomorrows.

7 June 2443
U.S. Space Battleship
Merrimack
Globular Cluster IC9870986 a/k/a the Myriad
Sagittarian Space

T
HE
S
TAR
S
PARROW
SPRANG
with a scathing shriek. The deck heaved. The ship rang behind it.

“Missile away.”

Captain Farragut heard a murmured benediction from Jose Maria. He hadn't known he was on the deck. Farragut demanded, “Tracking.”

“Tracking, aye. We are on course. Accelerating well. Perfect launch, sir.”

Perfect
. Ten minutes too late to achieve intercept. “Take us down from redline.”

Calli relayed orders to back off
Merrimack
's tearing speed.

All attention remained on the speeding Star Sparrow. No one on the command deck spoke above a murmur, constantly updating velocities, accelerations, the deficit to intercept. All indicated the attempt to stop the message from reaching Origin was going to fail.

Farragut tried to convince himself that he was wrong, that failure was
good. Augustus was right; there was no changing the past. Those innocent beings on board the Arran messenger ship would get away alive. That was the way it would happen. Augustus was never wrong.

Tried to inhale calm.

Augustus was always right.

And still the desperate need to run as if his world depended on it.

Low, professional voices read off dispassionate progress reports of the Star Sparrow, the Arran messenger, the Hive swarms.

Captain Farragut watched the chronometer. Watched the plots creep across the tactical map. The Star Sparrow was dead on its estimates, accelerating precisely as calculated.

The variable was the target.

“You're making a race of it, John,” said Calli. “The Arran messenger has not kept a constant speed.”

“What's our deficit now?”

“Six minutes.”

“Augustus, coordinate a firing sequence with fire control.” At thousands of times the speed of light, the moment of contact would be brief in the idiotic extreme. He could not risk the explosion occurring a million miles after impact. Detonation by resonant command may be instantaneous, but the decision and execution was not.

Augustus nodded vacantly.

Farragut requested an update. Waited for the inevitable deficit.

“Target is twenty minutes from the gate. Missile twenty—Whoa.”

Farragut's head snapped aside. “Explain ‘whoa.'”

“Target is decelerating! Five-minute deficit. Four! Three!”

“Control Room! Fire Control here. At this rate of closure we may overshoot.”

“I've got you, John,” Augustus assured him from the depths of his altered thoughts. “I'm not slowing this bird till we're there. We aren't there yet.”

“
Nineteen-second deficit
! Target still decelerating. Eighteen!” Tactical lost his professional monotone. “Arran messenger turning to line up its approach to the
kzachin
.
Ten-second deficit.
Five seconds. Four.”

And a long pause.

“Status,” Farragut demanded in the long quiet.

“Deficit holding at four seconds. No.”

“No, what?”

Tactical made a fist. Opened it. “Five-second deficit. Six. Target is reaccelerating.” Dashed beaded sweat from under his nose. “We're losing it, sir.”

Calli demanded coolly, “ETA of target to the gate?”

“Five minutes.”

At two minutes, Farragut asked again, “Deficit to intercept?”

“Ten seconds,” Jeffrey reported gloomily.

Farragut hesitated, ordered, “Push the missile.”

The resonant control signal went out to the Star Sparrow's guidance system. “Balk,” Fire control reported.

“Override balk.”

“Overriding, aye— Distortion! Missile flame out! Star Sparrow is running dead.”

There would be no more acceleration from the Star Sparrow, no course correction. The missile sped on inertia.

“Deficit at fifteen seconds. Sixteen. Climbing.” The young specialist turned his eyes up. “We're not going to make it, sir.”

This is it.

Barring miracles, it was all over. Done is done. Farragut could only watch and wait out the final minute. Wait—for what?

For nothing, he hoped. John Farragut inhaled deeply. His chest felt full of heavy air, as if a gorgon swarm were sitting on it.

He told himself it would be okay. In fifty-four seconds Augustus would be laughing at him and asking him to explain why he opened fire on an unarmed, manned vessel, and John Farragut would be feeling ridiculous. He never imagined wanting so badly to be ridiculous.

He searched for Jose Maria on deck. Wanted to say to him: Here's to Augustus laughing.

He felt a presence immediately behind him. A touch, a breath on his hair. A kiss on his neck.

And he was angry. A line crossed and never expected. Farragut's hair prickled, face burned. He did not appreciate the gesture, and the timing stunk. It pissed him enough to snap around from the face of the imminent Judgment and demand, “What was
that?
”

Augustus elled his thumb and forefinger against his opposing palm, flipped a quick word in American Sign:
Later
.

John Farragut felt himself go wide-eyed. Tough to scare, he was suddenly profoundly terrified.
Later never comes
.

He stared into bottomless eyes. Crushing the tremor out of his voice, he commanded quietly, “Now, I think.”

Because he sensed Augustus had no intention of
ever
explaining that. For all Augustus' talk of the immutability of time, Farragut got the feeling Augustus did not expect one or both of them to be here thirty seconds from now, and
that
had been an end-of-the-world stunt Augustus need not live with for more than thirty seconds.

His eyes were suddenly not blank at all. Always, when plugged in, Augustus' eyes became vacant hollows, the thoughts racing deep inside. This time they looked back, aware, omniscient. The patterner had taken in all, synthesized all the minutiae, and saw what he had not seen before this moment.

Farragut stared at him.
You just recanted!

Saw the answer in his eyes.

MUNDI TERMINUM ADPROPINQUANTE
.
Now that we are approaching the end of the world, John Farragut.

Your individual existence is a statistical miracle. We are, each and every one of us, highly improbable, a one-in-a-million event at conception. History turns on a space big enough for angels to dance on. I do stand by inevitability.
But inevitability works on a macroscopic scale. Macroscopic events are inevitable. The blizzard will come. But the when, the where, and the unique shape of each snowflake is a function of chaos. One breath out of place, and that one singular snowflake never forms. I mistook us for macroscopic
.
Intuition is subconscious knowledge, and while logic says changing history is impossible, intuition says there are things beyond my ken; and you are a patterner, John Farragut. You know. You
know
.
And you're right. You are chaos. I won't explain later, because there is no later. There is no earlier. There is no time at all. Simply put, it was miraculous knowing you, and that was good-bye.

So said the eyes. Aloud, Augustus answered with an ironic near smile, “I still think you're an idiot.”

But Farragut understood him as clearly as if he'd spoken all of it.

I'm right!

The floor of the world kicked out from under him. This was the end of the world he knew.

Did not want to be right.

He faced forward, terrified now. The countdown fell on cotton ears.

“Arran messenger ten seconds from the gate. Nine. Eight.”

There is no later
.

“He's accelerating again.” The count sped up. “We have four seconds. Three. Two. Messenger at the gate—”

Closed his eyes.

Oh, God, it's done. If it happens, it will be this instant. I won't even know. Either I'm here or I'm not, and I never was.

Breathed.