The Twice and Future Caesar (37 page)

6 February 2444
U.S. Space Battleship
Merrimack
Earth orbit
Near Space

John Farragut sighted Lieutenant Glenn Hamilton on the elevated access walkway that circled the open space below the sail.

When Hamster was on the command deck, in crisp uniform, she looked like a seasoned officer. And so she was.

Here, in soft gray sweats, her brown-red ponytail bouncing behind her, she looked terribly cute. She should not be allowed out of her cabin like that. John Farragut just wanted to grab one of the cables, swing across the gap like Tarzan, seize her, and swing back.

He grabbed hold of a cable.

Hugely bad idea.

He let go of the cable and waited for Glenn to jog around to where he was.

She slowed, paused, jogging in place. Her face was wet with sweat. She sniffed, then greeted him with an almost smile. “Hey.”

“Why are you on the loose at this hour?” Farragut asked. It was the evening watch. Hamster should be sleeping.

The smile vanished. “My cabin's crowded.”

Glenn and Patrick Hamilton had one of the few conjugal cabins on
Merrimack
.

Anger rose. If Patrick Hamilton had someone else in that cabin instead of his wife . . .

“I'll clear it out for you,” Farragut offered. “I've got a brig.” He would be more than happy to stuff Patrick in detention. Adultery wasn't a crime, but it was sure as hell against regs.

Glenn shook her head. “The brig won't hold Hot Trixi Allnight.”

Something exploded behind Farragut's eyes. He saw sparks.

Patrick was married to the beautiful Glenn Hamilton and yet he was playing around with a programmed imaginary sex donna in a dreambox? Farragut wanted to extend a plank out the air lock and make Patrick Hamilton walk it.

“I can remove Doctor Hamilton from your cabin if you want to sleep in your own rack,” Farragut offered. “Happy to do it.”

“I don't want to sleep there,” Glenn said.

“I'd let you use my cabin, but that would send the wrong message.”

Glenn stopped jogging in place. Her face got soft, sad, wistful. Her gaze dropped to their feet. “
Would
it?” she asked.

Too many thoughts and feelings collided into a giant pileup. He stammered. John Farragut never stammered. “Um. Message received. Unable to comply.”

Glenn looked away. “I'm sorry. I'm off base.”

Farragut was a long time putting words together. Breath stopped in his broad chest.

“If it were only a matter of crawling over broken glass, I'd be there.” But there were stars on his shoulders.

Hamster's sudden smile was dizzying. “You have no idea how much I appreciate that, John.” She beamed up at him. Wiped her face on her sleeve. “I'm just going to rack out in the hospital. Good night.”

“Good night, Glenn.”

11 February 2444
U.S. Space Battleship
Merrimack
Earth orbit
Near Space

The Marine Wing of the 89th Battalion flew top cover for the ground grunts who were tasked with plumbing gorgon holes in China. Sensors don't pick up gorgons. You gotta jab a probe down there and be ready to kill whatever comes up. Left alone underground long enough, gorgons divided in two.

Lieutenant Colonel TR Steele wanted to brig Kerry Blue so she wouldn't be flying close support over the gorgon holes, but he couldn't come up with an excuse.

At least Kerry Blue wasn't on the ground, doing hole duty.

Steele could not keep her safe. She was a Marine. She was here to stand in harm's way.

What idiot let women serve in the Fleet Marines, anyway?

Kerry Blue existed in the moment. She doesn't anticipate. She's right there, in the right now. She doesn't dream.

Steele dreamed. Things he should never dream about one of his Marines. He couldn't get rid of her. Had no reason to transfer her out. And when he thought of transferring her, he couldn't breathe. Might as well transfer a lung.

She ruled his up, his down, his horizon. He could not keep her safe.

Merrimack
's tactical monitors showed images from Guangdong Province on Earth. The gorgons had been mostly neutralized there for the moment, but they'd left the coast devastated. Lieutenant Colonel Steele's Marines were still securing the holes.

Imported rock dragons were used as telltales in the area. Rock dragons wore a crust of silicates on their hides that made them indistinguishable from the ravaged ground. You didn't see the rock dragons until they detached from their rocks and slithered away. They could sense gorgons almost as well as insects could. You see a galloping rock, you know there are gorgons there.

The rocks in Guangdong were quiet for now. LEN soldiers at the space dock helped unload relief packages for the needy residents.

Officials stamped the arriving packages as they were offloaded from the transport for dispersal.

Doctor Patrick Hamilton burst through the hatch onto
Merrimack
's command deck.

Immediately he shied as the MPs presented weapons.

Doctor Hamilton cringed and babbled and finally got out a word. “Sir!” He looked pale. Offered a language module toward the XO with quaking hand. He flapped his other hand toward the tactical display. “You need to look at that with this turned on.”

Here was obviously some kind of xenolinguistical emergency.

Annoyed, Calli nodded for the MPs to allow the civilian-in-uniform to approach.

Commander Carmel took the offered module. She plugged it in behind her ear as she viewed the tactical displays.

She
saw
.

Immediately she was shouting, “Lieutenant Colonel Steele! Get a detail down to Guangdong. Detain those people.” She pointed at the officials who were stamping the incoming relief supplies. “Use extreme caution.”

Steele dispatched one of his ground units to make the arrests. Only when they were in motion did he ask the XO why.

Calli indicated the stamps, which the officials were using to mark all the incoming boxes and bags of relief supplies.

The stamps were Hanzi characters. Steele couldn't read them.

Calli turned to Patrick. “Doctor Hamilton. Do you want to translate this cluster?”

“Yes, sir. The stamps read: ‘Gift of Romulus Imperator.'”

“Oh, hell!” Marcander Vincent at the tactical station blurted. “I must've watched the LEN deliver thousands of tons of food down there! All those bags got stamped with—I thought they were port officials! Everyone thinks—”

Calli gave a single hard nod. “Yes, they do.”

Disaster relief. Gift of Romulus Imperator.

Calli covered her eyes. Hated to be played. She should have seen it.

It was a very Romulus sort of stunt.

Calli turned to Patrick Hamilton as if just remembering he was there. She spoke as if she were swallowing a bone. “Thank you, Doctor Hamilton.”

She didn't say more, but Patrick heard the unspoken thought anyway:
I guess there might be a reason we have you on board after all
.

16 February 2444
U.S. Space Battleship
Merrimack
Earth orbit
Near Space

A disturbance on the low band registered off the scale. It signaled the displacement of a very large mass, very close—close enough to Earth to set off the Horizon Guard alarms.

It happened on Lieutenant Glenn Hamilton's watch. “Identify that,” the Hamster demanded.

Tactical: “Spherical object. Two mile diameter.”

Marcander Vincent brought up a visual on the tactical display.

A Hive sphere. An entire sphere.

The magnitude of everything that had come before diminished. The enemy were arriving by the millions now.

Glenn Hamilton felt the hope sink out through the deck.

She woke up the ship. “Battle stations!”

F
LIGHTS
OF
M
ARINE
S
WIFTS
banged down on their landing slips atop
Merrimack
's wings. Clamps locked them down. Elevators hauled the fighter craft inboard and brought them down hard.

A Long Range Shuttle carrying another company of Fleet Marines from Guangdong Province docked with the space battleship. Fleet Marines stampeded aboard in cadence.

Captain Farragut charged onto the command platform carrying his shirt, jacket, and boots with him. His scabbard hung from his shoulder. He dropped the boots as he took in the image on the tactical display.

The colossal sphere lurked in the darkness, just visible by earthshine. Forbidding. Ice-crusted. Motionless.

Farragut nodded forward. “Where is that?”

Tactical: “Three times Lunar orbit.”

“Trajectory?”

“None.”

Farragut pulled on a boot. “Is it dead?” He desperately wanted it to be dead.

“It could be dead,” Lieutenant Hamilton said, not convinced. “It
might
not have survived displacement.”

It looked inert.

Then the frozen sphere shrugged. Long fissures gapped in its surface. Ice flaked off as it expanded. Looked as though it ought to be thundering, but of course it wasn't making a sound in the vacuum.

Very close focus showed a black serrate appendage breaking through the frozen dead layer. Tactical announced: “That's not a gorgon.”

Targeting: “They're razors! We have razors!”

Razors—also called soldiers or can openers—were the harder form of the Hive. Gorgons were the mouths and the stomachs of the Hive. Razors were bigger, hard-shelled, and sharp-clawed. They were the Hive's bodyguards. Razors broke hard targets. Like
Merrimack.

Commander Carmel arrived on deck just as the sphere contracted, went still, then swelled and ruptured. Black glaciers sheared off and shattered into living pieces flying all directions.

Creatures like monstrous armored beetles, bigger than most men, clawed free of the broken ice and set to eating the food immediately available in the vacuum, which was the remains of their own dead.

Farragut pulled on his other boot, hopping a bit. “Commander Carmel, as soon as all hands are on board, damn that thing to hell.”

“Aye, sir. Helm. Bring us in close enough to smell the brimstone.”

You could hear Marines shouting out roll call several decks down.

Merrimack
advanced. A black-gray wall of ice filled her tactical displays.

They had to get the guns close. Otherwise the Hive would erase tags and foul the trajectories of the loads. Calculating the future position of a target was impossible at any distance. The Hive knew how to evade. “Fire Control, mixed loads. Stand by.”

“Mixed loads, aye. Standing by, aye.”

Commander Carmel waited until the razors were so close the ship's collision alarms went off.

“Fire Control. Fire when ready. Fire everything.”

Kerry Blue heard/felt the ship's guns coil and hiss. The lights dipped. You knew something was massively wrong when that happened. Then came the first sick buzz of something in contact with the ship's inertial shell.

Kerry ducked her head on reflex. Like that was going to help. She turned her eyes upward. “They're coming in.”

The XO's voice sounded on the loud com: “All hands. All hands. We have hard hostiles on board.”

The Alphas exchanged looks. Kerry Blue had thought the boarders were gorgons. Just assumed gorgons.

There were razors in Near Space?

“Hey Ranza! Did you train for razors?”

“Those the big black shiny ones with the claws?” Ranza gave her sword an experimental swing. The blade made a mighty swooshing sound through the air. “Yeah. Bring 'em.”

The hum of insinuation got louder. It sounded like the monsters were everywhere.

No Swifts flew in a Hive storm. Kerry Blue and all the other Marines and crew stood by to repel boarders. The Fleet Marines trained on twenty-one scenarios. This scenario wasn't anyone's favorite.

Lieutenant Hazard Sewell led a charge out to the starboard wing where the Swifts were hangared. The Hive had developed some concept of efficiency. Parts of the ship designed to be opened to the outside were now the enemy's first points of entry.

Hive razors were clawing at the flight elevators.

A wind picked up Kerry Blue's ponytail. There was always some air movement in a ship this size, but this was different. Her ears popped with the pressure change.

“Hull breach!” Kerry said. Sure, everyone else had already figured that out.

The first monsters had pressed themselves through the force field and now pried their way through the ship's hull.

Air spilled out of the ship to fill the gap between the outer hull and the inertial shell.

Kerry Blue ran hard, snarling, teeth clenched.
Schistschistschistschist!

She burst into the maintenance hangar. Peripheral motion, shiny black, made her swing. Giant claw fell, still clacking.

Kerry Blue kicked, fed the monster its own mouth.

She stomped on a pincered claw. Brilliant. As if she could crush something that could squeeze itself through an inertial field. She stabbed. Sword point still worked.

Sounds of struggle bounced off the bulks, slammed back at her ears. Grunts, sword clashes, clangs. Twitch Fuentes yelling. Not sure if Twitch meant to say something or he was just yelling. Didn't sound right.

Kerry sheared off two claws. The soldier melted.

“Twitch! Where are you?”

Didn't see him.

She heard him. Gargling. Not Twitch's normal strong baritone.

Black carapaces cracked and disintegrated under Kerry's sword strokes as she advanced stomp by stomp. “Twitch!”

Heard him. Speaking in tongues.

“Twitch! Talk! Use words!” Kerry cut off a claw. Another.

“Twitch!”

Twitch was gurgling now. Sounds ricocheted off all the hard surfaces. Up was down. No direction. “Carly! What is that man saying!” Where was Carly, and why wasn't Carly with Twitch?

Kerry Blue was already yelling,
“Medic!”
She knew there'd be need for one by the time a medibot got out here.

Kerry advanced, Cole Darby clearing her six. They came to a maintenance pit. A melee down there.

Twitch emerged from the maintenance pit, head and one shoulder. His face was as white as brown could be, shining with sweat. Planted his elbow on the main deck and pulled himself up from the pit by one arm. Something waggled at his other shoulder. It was what was left of his sword arm.

Twitch didn't seem to know he was wounded. Kerry Blue slapped a med seal on the bleeding stump.

Twitch's narrow eyes went round in horror, as if just now realizing his right arm wasn't attached to him. Tried to turn around, gabbling, “Get m'arm! Get m'arm!”

Reg Monroe yelled at him, helping to drag him up to the deck. She was half his size. “Grow a new one! That one's gone. Leave it.
MEDIC!
”

“ARM!”
Twitch bellowed wildly.

Kerry Blue suddenly understood. Twitch was famously bad at putting words together. “He's not saying what he means! He's only torqued about his frogging arm because he's got to be holding onto
Carly!
Where's Carly!”

“Oh, jeez!” Reggie cried. She whirled with her sword and sent pincers flying.

Dak Shepard jumped into the maintenance pit.

Up on deck, Twitch mumbled, eyelids fluttering. “Get m'arm.”

“Dak is getting,” Kerry assured him. She spun round and almost stabbed Reggie.

Twitch murmured, “
No me gusta. No me gusta
.” He didn't like this at all.

“Stay with me, Twitch,” Kerry yelled at him. “You're not deading on me,
hermano
. I won't let you.” Heard the whine of an approaching medibot.

Dak lumbered up from the pit clutching an unconscious Carly Delgado to his side. Twitch's arm came along, dangling. Twitch's broad hand was locked fast onto Carly's suit, not letting go for anything.

* * *

Augustus cut through monsters with inhuman speed and machine precision, coldly efficient. No wasted motion. No wild strikes.

Until he stopped. Froze with his sword upraised.

His head turned dreamlike slow. Unfocused eyes directed toward John Farragut.

“Augustus!” Farragut shouted into Augustus' blank face.

Augustus' sword lifted, winding up for a strike. His eyes were vacant.

Jose Maria darted behind Augustus and yanked his patterner cables out of his neck.

Augustus swayed in place.

Jose Maria cut down the alien that reached between them.

Detached pincers twitched and dissolved through the deck grate.

Awareness returned to Augustus' face. He grunted. Might have been thanks.

There were too many monsters. He swung at the nearest.

More razors were forcing themselves in.

A sphere just like this one had crippled
Merrimack
in the Myriad. But the stage was different here. This was Earth space.
Merrimack
couldn't run.

And
Merrimack
was not alone.

Sounds like ripping metal tore through the ship with screaming heat.

“Cavalry's here,” Farragut said. No one could hear him over the noise, as many decibels as the ship's sonic filters allowed through.

Outside, the battle cruiser
Rio Grande
strafed the length and breadth of
Merrimack
with a flamethrower.

Fleet Marine Swifts from
Rio Grande
darted through the vacuum, hunting down surviving razors, picking them off one by one.

26 February 2444
U.S. Space Battleship
Merrimack
Solar System
Near Space

Merrimack
licked her wounds. Repair crews and technicians tended to the ship. The hospital was over full. There had been no deaths, but the wounded numbered just about everyone.

Captain Farragut visited every one of them. Augustus last.

“It overtook you,” Farragut said. “The Hive.”

“It did,” Augustus croaked. He pushed at his temples. “I got the Hive harmonic.”

John Farragut's mouth dropped open. He sputtered, “That's outstanding!”

“No.” Augustus opened his eyes. “I had it. It's gone now. I knew it while I was a part of it.”

“Just—
tell
me.”

One hand caged Augustus' face. He peered out between his fingers. “First, you tell me how you translate a thumbprint into a rutabaga.”

“You mean there's no correspondence.”

“None. Our expression of harmonics has no counterpart in Hive existence or awareness.”

“We use numbers.”

“The Hive doesn't.”

“Everyone uses numbers.”

“The Hive doesn't.” Augustus' face creased in pain or concentration. “Even while I was part of the Hive I didn't define the harmonic because I
was
it. I was Hive. The harmonic was my existence.”

“You said you had the harmonic.”

“I did. I don't.”

“Can't you rerun your thoughts?”

“There wasn't any thinking being done.”

“Do you remember the Hive wanting me dead?”

“Oh, that wasn't the Hive,” Augustus said.