The Myriad: Tour of the Merrimack #1 Read Online Free PDF Page A

alone. But the planet was located on the Hive highway; it was Merrimack ’s business now. If the world was dead, Farragut had to know. It would mean Merrimack was on the right path. If alive, then Farragut had to know why, how , when the Hive had passed so close by.
    So the battleship pressed on, flying fast forward through ninety years of video/radio history of the planet, reeling the transmissions in for the computer to unwind, sort, and decompress for playback.
    The xeno crew on board studied as fast as they could before the LEN could take over the project, as the LEN invariably did. Yet, not to keep the League of Earth Nations unaware, Merrimack ’s crew dutifully assembled a courier missile to report the discovery. A quick call for mail, and the courier missile was on its way to the Fort Eisenhower Repeater.
    Courier missiles, like torpedoes, could push through the distortion threshold and arrive at Fort Ike, with its Repeater and its Shotgun, many times faster than a manned vessel could.
    Out here in unexplored space, on silent run, Merrimack was on her own, as isolated as a sailing vessel of old. She had no access to her res pulse that could have notified Earth at once. Resonance was instantaneous. It also was, apparently, the Hive’s dinner bell.
    Hive seemed able to pick up any resonant pulse, no matter the harmonic. Resonant receivers of human design could not pick up a res pulse not coded to its exact harmonic. The Hive not only detected all resonant pulses, but it could home on them, and eat their source.
    From the moment Earth discovered resonance and sent its first pulse—“Watson, come here. I need you!”—Hive swarms had turned toward Earth, and kept coming in multitudes.
    The Hive’s invading swarms had to get past Palatine first. So the blockade was there, in Roman space. Roman and U.S. ships patrolled the same zone, holding off the ravenous spaceborne swarms.
    John Farragut never fought a defensive war. His Merrimack , in a flanking maneuver, was now headed around the invasion front in search of the Hive’s home world, to take the battle back to its source.
    As the battleship moved toward the F8 star, the recorded years folded in. And the crew waited for the sickening inevitability of pictures of the local insectoid life rising in plague swarms—the hideous, consistent, first sign of Hive approach.
    The insectoid form, one of the most successful and universal of life-forms in the known galaxy, was apparently resonant-sensitive. Insectoids had an uncanny ability to perceive Hive presence. Insectoid panic was often the first warning humans had of Hive proximity.
    But the signals from the F8 system persisted peacefully for an agonizingly long time. Farragut caught a xeno in tears, a sweet, pillowy, “mom-ish” woman with a bottle-red cloud of hair. Farragut asked her what she had found that made her cry.
    “Nothing.” The xeno daubed tears from the bags under her eyes. “I’m falling in love with this culture. And they’re dead. They have to be. I don’t want to watch them die. Can’t we speed up, Captain? Just—just get it over with.”
    The natives’ clothing changed, their cities spread, with no sign of FTL technology other than their sudden presence. It made no sense. There was no pattern.
    “I have a patterner on board,” Farragut said. “Let’s take him for a test drive.” He hailed the ship’s MO, Mohsen “Mo” Shah, on the intercom from the control room. “Is my IO fit for duty?”
    “He is being on duty,” said Dr. Shah. “Did he not report?”
    Farragut turned to his XO, Calli Carmel. “Did he report to you?”
    Calli’s beautiful brown eyes went quizzically blank for an instant, then shared a bemused stare with her captain, as if one of the ship’s engines were now giving itself orders. “No.”
    Farragut answered absurdity with absurdity, “I wonder what he assigned himself to.”
    Dr. Shah’s voice sounded again from the intercom. “Captain? May I be having a