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

visible for parcs on the low band. You looked like a puffer fish.”
    Gravitational murmurs were instant but of limited detectable range, becoming quickly tenuous at an inverse square ratio to distance.
    “Puffer fish do it out of fear,” Augustus added.
    “I wasn’t afraid. I’m trigger happy.”
    “I hear that about you. Are the Myriadians still alive?”
    “Yes!” Farragut said happily.
    “I was afraid of that.”
    Not a sentimental sort, this Roman. And life was not what either of them had come looking for. Where there’s life, there is no Hive—unless the Hive was eating the life. Merrimack was hunting the Hive.
    “You lost the gorgon trail,” said Augustus.
    “Looks like it.” Farragut returned to the language module, eager as a child on Christmas day to try out his new toy. “If I wanted to say ‘we mean you no harm,’ how would I?”
    Augustus stirred his long limbs. “You want to talk? ”
    Language modules at this stage of alien contact were normally used for listening.
    “What would you like to say to the Myriadians? ‘Why aren’t you lunch?’ ”
    Farragut ignored him. “I’m pulling up a dozen words for we and two dozen for you. I don’t know which to use.”
    Augustus gave a wry smile of disbelief and amusement. “Do you just dive into a pool when you can’t see the bottom, John Farragut?”
    “These people talk over distances of light-years without resonance or FTL. I need that technology. Imagine talking over astronomical distances without the Hive picking it up. And I need it before the LEN kicks us off the site.”
    Augustus conceded the point, sat up, and became abruptly helpful. “Myriadian you s and we s are very specific. Your choices immediately establish what you are in relation to your addressee.”
    “If I say Ila kendi ru nacon di , will they at least know I’m friendly?”
    “The moment you say that, they’ll know you’re an idiot. Ila is juvenile feminine. And your choice of you s—intended, no doubt, to be friendly—is insultingly familiar. The road to war is paved with good intentions. And you forgot the significator.”
    “The what?”
    “That initial click you hear at the beginning of every Myridian phrase. The pitch signals whether the mood is indicative, interrogative, or imperative.”
    “Ham says you knew there were three inhabited planets in the cluster before the recon flight knew there were three inhabited planets.”
    “When you understand what they’re saying, it becomes obvious.”
    “So are there any clues in the words as to how these people are traveling between planets?”
    “Only implication by omission,” said Augustus. “The words suggest that the Myriad is an autocracy, which suggests that things of strategic importance will not be broadcast. Knowledge is power. Power is tightly held in an autocracy. The really good stuff is not floating about for just anyone to pick out of empty space. There is a lot not said about interplanetary travel—except that the Myriadians travel between planets regularly. By spaceship.”
    “Not the spaceships I’ve been seeing.” Echo Flight’s recordings showed only very primitive vessels.
    “The very ones,” Augustus assured him.
    “We’re missing something.”
    “That’s obvious.”
    “How are they sending messages between worlds?”
    “Courier ship.”
    Farragut made a sound of impatience. “Back to those ships again! Isn’t there any mention of some—I don’t know—extra step that gets the ships from one place to another. Displacement? Boost gate?”
    “Of course there must be. But it’s phrased in dubious and alien terms.”
    “What terms?”
    “I don’t know. You’re the one with the language module. You find it.”
    “But you made this,” Farragut gave the language module a shake. “I can’t sift through years of broadcasts. You have to know.”
    “I forget.” Augustus lay back down, coiled his long figure, one arm cradling his abdomen, turned his back on his captain,