The Twice and Future Caesar Read online

  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

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  Version_1

  Contents

  Also by R. M. Meluch

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  PART ONE: Labyrinth

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  PART TWO: Orpheus in the Underworld

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  PART THREE: Reichenbach Falls

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  PART FOUR: Total War

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  PART FIVE: The Ends of a Lemniscate

  Chapter 29

  To Jim,

  All my yesterdays.

  To Stevan,

  All my tomorrows.

  from The Myriad

  7 June 2443

  U.S. Space Battleship Merrimack

  Globular Cluster IC9870986 a/k/a the Myriad

  Sagittarian Space

  THE STAR SPARROW 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 ridi
culous.

  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.

  COLONEL TR STEELE didn’t know where he was. He didn’t know who he was or what he was. He had the sense of nearing a surface, which suggested he was under something. It was dark. He wasn’t breathing. But he had a heartbeat.

  He neared consciousness while they were moving him. Didn’t know who they were. His eyelids fluttered. He heard, as if through thick gauze, concerned murmurs from the people lifting him. One voice sounded sudden alarm, but Steele couldn’t understand the words.

  What language was that?

  Did I crash?

  The last thing Colonel Steele knew, he’d been in the cockpit of his fighter Swift, lining up his approach to dock with the United States Space Battleship Merrimack.

  And now he wasn’t.

  He had a sense of time having passed. But how long? Hours? He had a bad feeling that it was longer than hours.

  How did he get here? Where was here?

  Was that voice speaking Latin?

  Oh, hell, he was sinking back into red-black nothingness.

  Where was the Merrimack?

  And where the hell was Kerry Blue?

  5 January 2448

  U.S. Space Battleship Merrimack

  Indra Aleph Star System

  Perseid Space

  The universe was all wrong.

  Rumor had it that Flight Sergeant Kerry Blue had married the Old Man.

  Yeah, right. A flight sergeant married to a full bird colonel? Not in this man’s Fleet Marine. Flight Sergeant Shasher Wyatt wasn’t idiot enough to believe that squid story. And the idea of Kerry Blue married to anyone? In what universe?

  But how then to explain how Kerry Blue went from anybody’s port in a storm to sleeping alone in her own pod?

  Kerry Blue was pretty. Okay, fine, she was what passed for pretty on a space battleship patrolling the edge of nowhere. The longer Merrimack stayed out here at the galactic rim, the prettier Kerry Blue got. She had it all over those perfect lindas in the dreambox for being real. But you could have one of those dream babes anytime—anytime you were off duty. You couldn’t have Kerry Blue anymore, anytime, at all. That hurt. And for some stupid reason it made her more wantable.

  And then there was Cain Salvador—Lieutenant Cain Salvador, if you can believe that—acting like her daddy with a shotgun. You touch Kerry Blue on pain of, well, pain. The rumor was that Cain had been best man at the supposed wedding. But just ask him if that was true and Acting Wing Commander Cain Salvador would order you to do something anatomically unacceptable involving a . . . well, anyway. Cain was not the problem. The Kerry Blue of old could get around any chaperone God ever invented. The problem was that Kerry Blue didn’t want to get around Cain. She really did act like she was holding a docking beacon for the one man who wasn’t on board. And when Kerry Blue fixed on one guy, the rest of you lot were so not screwed.

  So the only ball Flight Sergeant Shasher Wyatt got to play with Kerry Blue involved a hoop.

  It was Team Alpha versus Team Baker in the starboard maintenance hangar. The Bakers were swabbing the deck with the Alphas, who were not tall.

  Alpha Six, Kerry Blue, jumped for the basketball.

  So did Geneva Rhine, Alpha Three, the one they called Rhino. Rhino was an upholstered boulder with a cute elfin face. Rhino slammed into Kerry Blue like—well, not like a charging sugarplum fairy. And Rhino and Blue were on the same team. Just the sound could knock the air out of you.

  Shasher Wyatt winced.

  Kerry Blue came down from the jump, breathless and ball-less. Her feet missed the deck. She landed on her back and rolled. Shasher Wyatt staggered. An alarm clanged.

  The status panel flashed red. Shasher Wyatt was over Kerry Blue, trying to help her up. He fell too.

  Other Marines on the court in the maintenance bay staggered. The ship shivered. The deck heaved. There was a sound like rocks crushing. The ship’s energy shell buzzed.

  Whatever Merrimack allowed you to feel wasn’t anything close to whatever really hit her. The real sounds were muted way down to something that wouldn’t blast your eardrums out.

  The tremor in the deck was just the smallest suggestion of what had actually hit the space battleship.

  The tremor suggested that Merrimack had just been nuked.

  Right now the ship’s auto-defense program would be turning the Mack on her central axis faster than your brain synapses could fire, shifting her attitude and raising full shields to cover the engine vents.

  Over the loud com the Dingo’s voice sounded: “All hands. Siege stations.”

  Siege s
tatus locked the ship up until the command staff could find out exactly what they were dealing with.

  Everyone hated sieges. No one—not the navvies, not the Fleet Marines, not the ship’s dogs—no one liked a defensive fight. You just wanted to get out there and blow something up. Nothing flew under siege. The Marine Wing’s fighter craft were locked down in the hangar bay. Nothing to do but stampede with the rest of the team to the projectile gun blisters and wait for something to open up.

  Up ahead of Shasher Wyatt, Kerry Blue was racing Dak Shepard to get to the hatchway of gun bay twenty-five first. She was going to lose that race. Dak used to be a linebacker. But instead of squashing her at the hatchway, Dak grabbed her, shoulders and ass, and launched her into the gun blister ahead of him.

  Shasher was last man in. Climbed onto his gun.

  Of course the foxtrotting gun ports were buttoned shut. That meant the torpedo tubes would also be shut and the missiles clamped down inside the ship’s inertial shell.

  The only guns operable at the moment would be the battleship’s energy weapons. Those were for the Navy shooters. The Fleet Marines with their projectile weapons had no trade. Got to stare at the blast covers. The monitors didn’t show nothin’. Had to wonder if they were broken.

  So here was Team Alpha, twiddling their thumbs.

  None of them twiddled well.

  And there’s Kerry Blue seated at her gun next to Shasher. He watched her thigh move as her heels tapped. Heard her muttering, “C’mon c’mon c’mon.”

  Shasher didn’t say anything. No one wants to hear the new guy talk. Shasher had just come over from the Battery. Always wanted to fly. Not flying now.

  Here in the gun bay was Dak Shepard, Alpha Two. Solid guy. Dak was a brick. Swam like a brick. He was all muscle, even to his brain. Dog devoted. Dog friendly. Doesn’t drool, but he sweats. You can’t call him stupid. Okay, fine, you can, but you really want Dak on your team.

  Carly Delgado was in the four slot. Strong, hard, tough, bad as a hornet. Bony. Fast. Plays with knives. That little fist swings around like a rock on the end of a whip, and Shasher Wyatt wakes up in the ship’s hospital. Why don’t you just spar with a bobcat next time, Shasher?