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

chest, TR Steele never looked anything but formidable.
    “Stronger than any of us,” Mo Shah answered.
    “How many of us?” Farragut asked, curious now.
    “I am having no idea.”
    “Just tell me, Mo,” Steele abandoned subtlety, since he was never good at it. “If I need to take the son of a bitch out, how many Marine guards do I need?”
    “I would be suggesting a gun. He is still being human.”
    “And he’s still on our side until further notice,” Farragut reminded Steele. “Unless he’s psychotic or suicidal. He isn’t. Is he, Mo?”
    Dr. Shah gave a noncommittal shrug. “Bad temper is not necessarily being psychosis. But you cannot be altering a biological organism and not be having side effects. Period. Only God is knowing what got nicked in Augustus’ brain when they did whatever they did to make him a patterner.”
    “Meaning what, exactly?”
    “Meaning—” Mo considered a moment. “Be watching your ass, Captain Farragut.”

    “Captain Farragut and Colonel Steele! Control room.” The XO’s voice projected an urgent sort of calm over the intercom. “The recon patrol is coming in.”
    Farragut and Steele glanced to the chronometers to see what they already knew: The recon flight was early.
    Steele breathed a vulgarity, met the captain’s eyes, about to apologize for his word choice, but Farragut said benignly, “Let’s go see how deep it is.”
    Merrimack ’s starboard hangar deck was a wide space, fully three decks high—the entire height of the starboard wing. Elevators brought the Swifts inboard from the flight deck. The Swifts’ distortion fields kept them from coating over with condensing ice.
    The Swifts were scarcely inboard and clamped down when canopies popped and the recon team jumped down to the hangar deck, tucked helmets under their arms, at attention. Erks had standing orders to ignore Captain Farragut unless specifically called to attention, so they crawled over the returned fighter craft, industrious as ants. Hoses hissed. Recorders were pulled, air reloaded, flight times logged, systems checked.
    “Echo Flight reporting, sir!” the young flight leader spoke in a shout. “The natives are still alive in the F8 system—and they have company, sir!”
    “Hive?” Farragut guessed.
    “Shepherds.” Steele’s guess.
    “No, sir. No, sir.” The flight leader’s face jerked from captain to colonel. “We ran into more signals from two different sources. There are signals coming from the other two rider star systems.”
    “What kind of signals?” Farragut asked.
    “Same kinds, sir. Videos look like the same humanoids, and we have a computer match on the audio. An exact match on some of them.”
    “Exact?” Farragut felt his brows contract in doubt. “You mean the same words?”
    “No, sir. Identical audios. All three planets are rebroadcasting the exact same transmissions.”
    Farragut believed the young man, but told him what he was struggling with: “Those three solar systems are ten, twenty, and forty-three light-years apart, and they’re sharing messages? You found FTL capability?”
    “No, sir. Nothing other than the fact that they’re doing it. Somehow. Sir. We have no clue how those electromagnetic signals are getting planet to planet. We picked up no sign of ships in transit between the stars, and believe me, sir, we looked. They have spaceships, but every one we detected was flying inside one of the solar systems and clocking no better than seventy-nine percent c. We picked up no FTL-capable ships, and no FTL signals.”
    “Obviously they do have FTL signals,” said Farragut.
    “Yes, sir. But we can’t detect them.”
    The captain did not argue with the report merely because it was impossible. “Any evidence of how these beings got to these three planets?”
    “None, sir. Absolutely none.”
    Farragut turned to a very young, very dark xeno who had come to the hangar deck in curiosity. “No evidence? No historical stories in those videos about