R. M. Meluch - The Sagittarius Command: A Novel of the Merrimack (Tour of the Merrimack #3)

THE

SAGITTARIUS

COMMAND

A Novel of the Merrimack

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D AW B O O K S , I N C .

DONALD A. WOLLHEIM, FOUNDER

375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

ELIZABETH R. WOLLHEIM

SHEILA E. GILBERT

http://www.dawbooks.com

THE

SAGITTARIUS

COMMAND

R. M. Meluchs

TOUR OF THE MERRIMACK:

THE MYRIAD (#1)

WOLF STAR (#2)

THE SAGITTARIUS COMMAND (#3)

THE

SAGITTARIUS

COMMAND

A Novel of the Merrimack

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D AW B O O K S , I N C .

DONALD A. WOLLHEIM, FOUNDER

375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

ELIZABETH R. WOLLHEIM

SHEILA E. GILBERT

http://www.dawbooks.com

Copyright 2007 by R. M. Meluch.

All Rights Reserved.

DAW Books Collectors No. 1421.

DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Book designed by Elizabeth M. Glover

All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

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ISBN: 1-4295-5582-3

U.S. PAT. AND TR. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

MARCA REGISTRADA

To Jim.

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P A R T O N E

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Emergence

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THE HARSH WHITE SUN and the softer yellow day star shone directly overhead. Herius Asinius squinted against their combined light, searching for something wrong. Commander of Legion LXXI Draconis, Herius Asinius had a finely honed sense of wrongness.

Saw it. A smudge on the sky way up high among the icy streaks of cirrus clouds. More than one smudge. And they were moving.

Like veils of smoke or torn shreds of netting, they undulated in the lofty winds.

Sheets of the stuff rippled, furled, and spread back out, slowly falling. An edge of a broad sheet slipped, spilled the wind, dipped down quickly, caught the air, and spread itself out yet again.

Lower, closer, the cloudy sheets took on dimension, bigger, peppered, more like a swarm of gnats blowing in from a lake.

The lower they descended, the clearer it became that each gnat was a meter wide and haloed in tentacles.

Herius Asinius, on the stone rampart of the Roman fortress, lifted his wrist com, swearing and shouting into it for someone to identify the descending clouds. But he already knew what they were.

Mostly they were called gorgons or, altogether, the Hive, as the gorgons in their countless millions seemed to compose one organized whole. A single vast alien entity characterized by an inexhaustible, indiscriminate capacity to eat organic matter.

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R . M . M E L U C H

And Herius Asinius threatened all ships in orbit with crucifixion for not alerting him to this latest waves coming.

Someone should have detected the gorgons distinctive spheres approaching the planet Thaleia before the damn things hit atmosphere.

No one answered from above.

The ships coms could be out.

Or everyone up there could be dead.

The very first appearance of Hive swarms on Thaleia days ago might be excused as wholly unexpected. The Americans had led Rome to believe that the Hive could not possibly arrive in Near space for another hundred years.

But gorgons were here, on the Roman planet Thaleia, right now, less than fifty parsecs from Palatine. Been here for days.

Was it only days? How many? Felt closer to an eternity. How time crawls when you are in hell.

And how in bloody hell had more gorgons come to the planet without warning from the lookouts in orbit?

Herius did not care if Rome was desperately short of soldiers; someone was going to die for this. Someone besides Herius Asinius, who was pretty sure he was not getting out of this alive anyway. Whoever let gorgons approach Thaleia needed to hang on a cross for a while and have his children killed before his eyes, then get eaten by gorgons.

Herius roared orders to his legionaries as he hefted a beam cannon onto his shoulder, and trained it on those clouds. Fired.

The netted clouds were elusive. The gorgons splayed themselves flat, tentacles fanned wide to make themselves into a net of parachutes. Under fire, they split apart into individual parachutes, drifting on the wind. They fell in spidered rain, tipping and dodging, darting in the air currents like minnows. The fortress gunners scribbled the sky with fire. Oh, you hit some, but it was like trying to prevent every drop of rain from touching the ground.

Early in the siege, Legion Draconis had scorched a wide ring of land around the Roman fortress and brought all the residents from the surrounding region inside these stone walls. The burned fields around this place made it unattractive to the ravenous aliens.

Despite all the beam fire from the high ramparts, the rain of gorgons made landfall by the hundreds of thousands in the forested hills beyond the burn area.

T H E S A G I T T A R I U S C O M M A N D

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The fortress was an ancient style structure, made of local red stone.

The buildings within its thick walls were roofed in terra-cotta. It was a historical re-creation, never meant to serve as a real shelter in AnnoDomini 2445. But when the invading aliens caused computerized systems to fail and made automated defenses turn on their makers, these primitive walls of stone became the place of last refuge.

The monsters continued to fall in the surrounding hills. The legionaries fired beam cannons until the sky was empty and all was dead quiet on the blackened perimeter.

Green birds came over the hills in a wheeling flock. Alighted on the ramparts, chattering, their double wings flicking.

Herius Asinius lowered his beam cannon from his shoulder.

Dropped into a crouch on his heels, let his head hang. His back ached.

His soul ached.

He had thought his legionaries were getting ahead of the monsters.

Till this. A rain of gorgons.

How in the hell?

Heard footsteps on the catwalk. The sound halted a few paces away from him. Are you hurt, Domni?

Herius Asinius shook his bowed head and waved off whoever it was. The footsteps continued along the wall, paused once. The legionary fired a single shot over the wall. Walked on. It was a sometime dream of Herius Asinius to be the one to stand between Rome and its most deadly peril. In his dream, however, he had all the resources he needed to win the desperate battle.

Troops in the Deep Endtwo thousand parsecs away from here, on the far side of the abyss between galactic armsthose troops had weapons with which to combat these aliens. Legion Draconis did not.

Legion Draconis was equipped to battle conventional enemies in Near space with modern weapons. Herius Asinius had never been trained inor armed forcombat against gorgons. He felt set up, cheated. A naked slave thrown to the lions.

And he could not runtake his Legion, withdraw to his ship Horatius, and abandon the planet Thaleia to the predators.

It was unRoman.

It was unthinkable.

Herius Asinius was going to die here.