“In theory,” Donner qualified.
“Can we at least proceed carefully?” she begged. “Please don’t launch a ship to Origin telling them what you know now. Not without a plan for containment. You could erase us all.”
“I do not give promises.”
He’s going to bring them here. Fast as he can.
She knew it. He had seen the past and found it unacceptable. The people of his home world were all dead, and this must not be. Donner forbade it.
The wrong ship formed around Glenn Hamilton as she displaced shipboard from the planet. Disoriented, she knew at once that this was not her SPT 1. This had to be the LEN vessel
Woodland Serenity
.
Doubly disturbing, in that she had requested retrieval to her own vessel, and she really did not trust the LEN’s French-built displacement chambers to transport snot.
To the first face she met, Lieutenant Commander Hamilton demanded, “Why am I here? Is my boat all right?”
The Eyebrow stormed into the displacement bay, a swarthy man wearing green fatigues as if he were military personnel. Deep brown eyes glowered from under that single bushy brow. “Mrs. Hamilton. Mrs. Hamilton,” he scolded her with her name. “This is criminal.”
“Yes, this is kidnapping. You had no right to intercept me.” She gingerly jumped off the displacement disk lest they opt to send her elsewhere in that frogified death trap. “You will dock with my SPT boat and restore me to my intended destination immediately.”
“This way, Mrs. Hamilton.”
“We are docked with my SPT boat?” she asked, somewhat mollified.
“This way, please.”
She strode briskly after the Eyebrow, her heels clicking a light angry cadence. Her thoughts raced and tumbled. She had made a mess of this. She had not succeeded in warning Donner off the
kzachin
. No, in fact, she was pretty sure she had just spurred him in quite the opposite direction.
Damage control, then. How to contain the consequences? Minimize the damage. Needed to devise a course of action.
Her escort stepped aside, gentlemanly, making way for her to proceed ahead of him through a hatchway to a long corridor. “Mrs. Hamilton.”
She tried not to wince. Not that she did not love Dr. Patrick Hamilton, she did. But first thing she did once this was all over was going to be changing her name back to Glenn Hull.
She marched briskly ahead—
Toe hit. Not enough warning to put on the brakes. She slammed full face into a bulk. Nose, brow, chin.
The holographic corridor vanished around her. Now she saw the bulk through teary eyes. Nose swelled.
Language unbecoming an officer.
She spun to face the hatch as it slammed shut, caging her in this small compartment. She announced with level authority, using her command voice: “This is piracy.”
She received no response. She paced—carefully—the cell’s true dimensions that were visible now. Two meters by two meters by two and a half meters. Slow fear threatened to close in on her. She pushed it away. It was not useful.
Neither was self-blame, though she had a great stockpile of that to face later. She had let herself—and probably her two SPT boats—fall into unauthorized hands. She could not sit here and await rescue. John Farragut would go extragalactic if he saw this.
She did not know how far Captain Farragut intended to run those two swarms, but she could not let him return to this. He would take a baseball bat to the Eyebrow.
Entertaining as that might be, it would not advance her career.
She was shaking. She had lost control of her independent command.
She steeled herself, forced the quaking down. She would just have to regain control.
And when the
Merrimack
returned,
she
would crack the Eyebrow with John’s baseball bat.
Her eyes roamed the blank walls. This would never happen to John Farragut.
John, where are you?
Merrimack
hurtled onward, shrouded in weird quiet. No scritching. No off-tune hum of insinuation. Everything touching
Merrimack
’s field was dead.
The normal wobble and pitch of the deck was gone. The ship ran rock steady. You could not know from within her that she even moved. The ship felt still as the grave.
With a sudden muffled explosion, the ship lurched severely. Captain Farragut lost his footing. In catching himself, his hand mashed into a control board. Calli fell into him. A technician pitched forward, nose into the console. Came up with a bloody mouth.
Shouts erupted from below. A rumbling shuddered underfoot. Acrid smell of burning plastic laced the air.
“That was
inside
,” said Calli. She crawled to the central com and demanded a report.
The answer came: “We have fire, mid-deck, gun bay twenty.”
As Calli received the report, Farragut consulted a systems technician, “Did we take the fire-fighting system off-line?”
They had taken most systems off line in preparation to meet the swarm.
“Yes, sir.”
“Put it back on-line, please.” Farragut tended to sound casual in a disaster.
The report from mid-deck was unclear. They
thought
the gun crew had tried to fire an exploding projectile from bay twenty. Best guess was the shell had not made it clear of the barrel. The barrel ruptured on board, leaving a holy holocaust down below.
Smoke roiled too thick for anyone to withstand. They could not extinguish the blaze by isolating the section and opening it to the deep airless freeze of space. They could not even vent the smoke. The ship was buried deep in a solidity of compressed gorgons. There was no way out.
Calli commanded over the loud com, “Battery, hold your fire! No one fire! All units, do not fire. Triage to gun bay twenty. Fire containment crew report to mid-deck.” She turned off the com to murmur, “God almighty.”
“Why don’t I hear the engines?” Farragut asked.
“The engines shut themselves down to nominal,” Systems reported. “All vents are blocked. We are overheating.”
The engines cooled by cycling coolant past the near zero of surrounding space.
Farragut turned to Tactical: “Are we moving?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How fast and which way?”
“Sublight. The collision dropped us out of FTL. We are on the same vector as before contact. The swarm came with us.”
“They learn quick.”
The navigation specialist with the bloody lip muttered at his console, “Sublight. At least someone will be able to find our dead hull.”
“Belay that. Can we steer?”
“We can steer, sir. But we’ll lose speed.”
To which Systems added, “We can’t accelerate without cooking ourselves.
Farragut looked to Calli. His XO concluded, “The battleground is right here.”
“We aren’t the only ones hurt,” said Farragut. “Get me a sounding. How bad off are
they?
”
At the very least
Merrimack
had incinerated a thick layer around her force field and left at a minimum a fifty-meter-diameter path of destruction directly behind her.
“They are dead to a thickness of nine meters all sides except to the stern, which is dead straight back to the surface.”
That gave
Merrimack
a few moments in which to think while the enemy ate its way through its dead. But, “We’re going to burn up if we don’t get some of them off us quick.”
“Take the force field down to nominal until the live ones close in,” Farragut ordered. The force field was the single biggest draw on the engines. “Are any of the guns functional?”
“Not the projectiles, sir. The pressure on the force field is off the scale. We’re buried alive. The dead mass has pushed in through the gun barrels.”
“Can we
displace
anything into the mass?”
“Negative!” Systems was quick with the answer. “The displacement unit is tricky at the best of times. It uffs itself without Hive help. If we turn on the chamber, the Hive’s likely to displace gorgons aboard.”
Farragut nodded. “If the Hive learns how to displace, this war is over.” He took in a breath, chest tight. Exhaled hard to expel excess carbon dioxide. Could not seem to get enough air. “Status atmospherics.”
“All green,” said Calli. She had already checked atmospherics. Twice. “I feel it, too.”
“Swarm,” Farragut murmured. Uffing their senses.
“Yes, sir,” Systems confirmed. “We’re not really suffocating. Yet.”
“Belay that.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Stand by to bring the beam cannons back on-line.”
“They’ll expect that,” said Calli.
“No, Mr. Carmel.
You
expect that. We haven’t used beams against the Hive in a long, long time.”
“Because the Hive always overloads the controls.”
“And for all they know, we have learned our lesson and quit using beams.”
“You don’t think they’re waiting for this move?”
“No. I don’t think they have it in them to anticipate our moves in a new situation. They learn by precedent, like computers. Computers count patterns back through the most recent choices. We haven’t used beams in a long time. They won’t expect us to restart now. To react, they’ll have to see the threat, evaluate the threat, then neutralize the threat. And I have to hope the time between steps one, two, and three takes more time than it does us to drill a vent to the surface.” He turned to Augustus for comment. “That’s Plan A.”
“I like it,” said the intelligence officer. “Given that I don’t see a Plan B. Be quick.”
“Fire Control, how long will it take to burn through to the surface?”
The weapons specialist pulled his lips tight across his teeth. “More time than we’ll have. These are can openers out there. Not soft bodies. They’re armored and they’re dense.”
“How about shooting through the dead?”
“Why would we shoot the dead?”
“I need vents for the engines. Everything behind us is dead. We came in that way. It’s got to be pretty soft back there. Can we cut a tunnel back out the back?”
The specialist heaved a useless breath. “It’s our best and only shot.”
“Line ’em up. Straight shot out the back. Drill me a vent.”
“How many cannons are we bringing on-line?”
“All of ’em. Aim anything out the back that can be aimed out the back. For the rest, rake, drill, blast, shoot until we redline.”
“And if we redline before we break through to the surface in the back?” Calli asked quietly.
“Then push the line. There is no choice here. We do this or we die here. So we do this.”
“Yes, sir.”
Captain Farragut picked up the loud caller to brief the ship. Heard himself talking, but no echo of his voice through the corridors. “And God
bless
, there goes the loud com.” He tossed the caller over his shoulder. “I’m going to tell the crew in person. Set it up, Calli. Wait till the gorgons eat through to our force field, then give it all we’ve got.”
“You want to wait that long, Captain?”
“I don’t want to waste a single erg shooting dead gorgons I don’t have to.”
Augustus followed him off the bridge. “Don’t shoot until you see the blacks of their pincers?”
“Don’t swing at the first pitch,” said Farragut.
He bounded through his ship, informing his people of the situation and the plan. Arrived on mid-deck, where smoke still rolled in a thick gray cloud from the ruptured hatch of gun bay twenty, its fire wall bowed in, gore spattered on the corridor’s inner bulk.
Farragut waved through the smoke to peer through the hatchway to the carnage within. A blasted rent in the hull left a clear view to dead gorgons mashed against the force field’s invisible barrier.
“Holy God.”
Farragut knelt to pick up a button still sewn to a shred of fabric. He held the button between his palms as he might hold the hand of the dying. Spoke with deep tremolo, “Who is this?”
Augustus watched the fire-suited Marines around him. All in John Farragut’s hands. That button might have been—might still be—any one of them. The captain held them in his hands, asked their names. John Farragut owned these people.
A flap-eared youth asked, “We gonna buy it, Captain?”
“Hell no,” Farragut answered in a big voice, with a smile and a wink. “It’s a piss-poor day to die!”
The Farragut magic that Augustus so loathed infused hope and heart into those despairing faces, when he knew even John Farragut could not get them out of this one.
The captain made his rounds, spreading his idiotic hope through his doomed ship, until the familiar sick hum of gorgons trying to insinuate through the force field surrounded them. He raced back to the bridge. “Stand by!”
“Standing by.”
“Do it, Mr. Carmel.”
“Fire Control!”
“Fire Control, aye.”
“Bring beam cannons on-line.”
“Cannons on-line. Aye.”
The lights dimmed. The beam chargers cycled to full power.
“And we are charged and green, sir.”
Calli gave the order: “Fire. Fire all banks.”
“Firing, aye.”
The lights dipped again. Sound razored in the confines, a raking sizzle and burn with a closing wall of heat. A ghastly unhealthy warble permeated the beleaguered force field.
Calli and the systems tech looked to Farragut. “More power to the force field?” Calli asked.
“Negative.”
“Aye, sir.” They needed everything for the guns. If the guns did not cut through, then the force field would only prolong the dying.
An alarm sounded. A red light flashed on the console. Systems reported: “We’re cooking. Guns turning to auto-shutdown.”
“Override that,” Calli ordered.
“Aye, sir.” The tech switched to manual.
“Someone give me a depth,” Farragut demanded.
“Nine meters to the surface.”
“We’re getting power spikes!” said Systems.
The swarm interference had reached the beam controls. The firing system fluctuated between shut off and overload.
“Shut down all but the rear-firing cannons,” Farragut ordered. “Maintain fire to the stern.”
“Maintaining stern fire, aye. Five meters to surface.”
Beam chargers whined high revs, then drooped, then screamed.
