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

board the Merrimack, lolled in his swivel chair, leg hooked over one armrest. “That is the only language on all three worlds.”
    Farragut felt his brain knot. “How did you know there were three inhabited worlds?” The captain had only just learned it himself, and Patrick Hamilton had not been on the hangar deck to hear the recon flight’s discovery.
    “Oh? Did you find the other two?” Patrick gave a most unhappy, useless laugh. “It’s in the words. There are three inhabited planets in the Myriad—that’s what the locals call this cluster—the Myriad. The planets are called Arra, Rea, and Centro. The three worlds are all one nation. They also talk about a planet called Origin, which is not in the Myriad. Origin is someplace far, far, far, far away.”
    Of course there would have to be an Origin. Three planets with only one language among them could be nothing but colonies. So where was Origin? “Do they have a word for FTL?”
    “Captain Farragut, everyone has a word for FTL from the moment they discover one hundred eighty-six thousand, two hundred ninety-one miles per second. Doesn’t mean they have FTL. It’s dangerous business trying to piece together a culture from its language. Language comes with a lot of antique baggage; tends to be full of anachronisms and fictions. Elves, emperors, perpetual motion. And a royal furball has nothing to do with royalty or fur. Your Roman says the Myriadians are not flying FTL.”
    Patrick Hamilton grew more morose in his envy. The despair of the obsolete and inadequate. “Five frazzin’ hours.”
    “And this works?” Farragut held up the language module.
    “Plug that in, and all these recordings make sense. It’s—it’s elegant. I could not have made that with seventeen years and a bevy of graduate student slave labor. It’s like I’m sitting here with a bow and arrow and he comes along with a disrupter and a triangulated sight. Where’s the justice?”
    Sad to see an educated man whine like that. Sadder still that a man with a strong, pretty, classy wife like Lieutenant Glenn Hamilton should be referring to his graduate students in terms of a bevy. Made the captain want to slap him. Said instead: “Don’t sit there crying in the dust, Ham. I need you.”
    Captain Farragut brought many a man back to life with those three words: I need you.
    And Farragut did need his xenos. Cluster IC9870986—the Myriad—was turning into one of those upsetting, wholly baffling discoveries like the Xi artifact—a slab of lead five billion years older than the universe itself—existing just to piss people off.
    “Where is Augustus?”
    “Oh, he turned white, unplugged, and left a few hours ago.”
    The quartermaster had billeted Augustus with the spare torpedoes, partly in intentional slight, partly in consideration of Augustus’ height—torpedoes were seven feet long, just four inches better than Augustus—and partly to keep the Roman clear of the American officers, who wanted nothing to do with him.
    Captain Farragut found his IO lying half in his pod, half out, looking none too well, nursing a headache with a hand over his eyes. The Roman did not look up at the captain’s entrance into torpedo rack room number six.
    Farragut paused. “You look like you’re fighting to hold onto lunch.”
    Augustus lifted a three-fingered shrug over his eyes. “Lost that battle.” He lowered his hand and demanded flatly, “What do you want?”
    “I’ve been listening to the recordings with this.” Farragut held up the language module. “This is amazing.”
    “You are easily amazed.”
    “How did you do this?”
    That made Augustus laugh. The laugh was neither happy nor kind. “Superior Roman technology. And we surrendered to this?”
    Farragut either missed the insult or didn’t care. “The commander of my Marines wants to know how you found us when we never sent coordinates to Fort Ike.”
    “When you started blowing up things at the cluster’s perimeter, you were