The Ninth Circle

by R. M. Meluch

  Dr. Minyas was the junior xenozoologist on this expedition. And she was too, too perky. Had orange-blond hair. Freckles. Looked young. Maybe actually was young. Looked like she breathed country air. Her given name was Melisandra. She went by Sandy.

  Patrick nodded like a proud daddy. “The heads.”

  Glenn made a stab at polite interest in her husband’s work. “The heads?”

  Patrick spread his arms out as far as he could to each side to indicate size. “The heads.”

  The mammoths’ heads would of course be, well, mammoth.

  “Those giant heads act as sound chambers,” Patrick said. “The size of that head was my clue that there is more to mammoth communication than those few bird chirps Szasz has on record for mammoth speech.”

  “Speech?” Dr. Szaszy repeated, his brow tight, questioning the linguist’s word choice “Speech. Not animal sounds? You think my mammoths are sapient?”

  “Nah,” said Dr. Rose with a mouthful of popcorn. “This is really a recording of Lowell’s stomach, isn’t it?”

  “I haven’t looked into the sapience of Lowell’s stomach,” Patrick said. “But I know the mammoths are saying a lot more than Szasz thought they were. And they’re doing it over distance. Just like Earth’s elephants.”

  Glenn asked, “Elephants are sapient?”

  Patrick passed on the sapience question and said, “Elephants communicate by low-frequency sounds.”

  Sandy Minyas nodded knowingly and added, “Same as giraffes.” She took a stance at Patrick’s side with a bright smile, letting everyone know that she and Patrick were of a mind.

  There really is such a thing as time travel, Glenn thought dully. I’m back in high school.

  Glenn recognized the animal behavior playing out here. Sandy Minyas fluttered her knowledge at Patrick. This was how brains flirt.

  Doesn’t even care that I’m right here with a ring on.

  Patrick responded to Sandy’s stroking. “Exactly.” He smiled down at her. Patrick liked short women. His wife, Glenn, was short.

  And the ring can go out the air lock with you, darling.

  Sandy said, faux coy, “I didn’t know you were a xenozoologist too, Patrick.”

  Glenn was closer to thirty than she was to twenty years old, and she was not about to play games with a junior naturalist or anyone else.

  You catch him, dolly, you can keep him.

  Glenn went back to their compartment. The ship was nearing its destination, and she wanted to finish sleeping.

  She was an outsider on this voyage.

  Patrick’s colleagues didn’t know it, but Glenn was a thug. Military.

  Glenn Hull Hamilton served as first lieutenant on board the United States Space Battleship Merrimack. She thought she should’ve been first officer by now, but she’d been passed over. Again.

  She had no hope of ever becoming the exec of a space battleship without holding an independent command first. She knew this.

  She also knew that whatever ship she could get for her first command would not be the kind of spacecraft that carried a xenolinguist, so she had never requested a transfer.

  The space battleship Merrimack had been Glenn and Patrick’s home for six years. For six years Patrick served as xenolinguist on board a ship that talked with her guns. Patrick was effectively a spare part.

  Glenn knew Patrick wasn’t happy on the Mack. So it was only fair that the two spend their six-month leave where Patrick wanted to go.

  Which brought them aboard the League of Earth Nations ship Spring Beauty bound for a planet named Zoe. Patrick was useful on the scientific expedition. He was valued.

  Glenn was baggage.

  Planet Zoe lay in the farthest part of the outermost arm of the galaxy in a region known as the Outback.

  People showed their true colors far from home.

  Glenn was afraid of her own colors. She wasn’t fond of Patrick’s either. Glenn was afraid this was the seven-year gnaw in the gut. Afraid she’d fallen out of love with him.

  Everyone on Merrimack said Patrick was a lucky man to have Glenn. No one on Merrimack said Glenn was lucky.

  She was starting to see why everyone asked, “What does she see in him?”

  What does she?

  She had stalled her career for this man.

  She lay down on their bed.

  This trip will either be the thing that breaks us apart or the journey on which I finally murder him.

  Four guards hauled Nox into a wooden shed at the edge of the Legion base.

  Inside the shed was hot, the air thick.

  When his eyes adjusted to the relative dark, Nox saw in one corner of the shed a bloody tarp draped over a heap on a table.

  A bloody boot hung out from under one side of the tarp, dangling over the edge of the table at a broken angle.

  The guard nodded at the covered heap and asked Nox, “What is this?”

  Nox answered, “I’m guessing that’s my brother, Cinna Antonius.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “I killed him,” said Nox.

  “And how did you do that?”

  “I pushed him off the cliff,” Nox said. He felt detached, as if he were controlling his body from a distance, above and apart.

  “Anyone with you?”

  “No.”

  “These things are usually done in packs,” the guard said.

  These things. They suspected this was a hazing. Nox caused his body to form the words, “This was personal. I hated him.”

  “You want to reconsider that statement?”

  “No. It wasn’t a hazing if that’s what you think. It was murder.” He felt an inward wince hearing himself volunteer the idea of hazing.

  Too much?

  He suddenly felt like he was four years old again, when he’d gone into his father’s den sporting a cut on his little chin and announced, “Daddy, I wasn’t playing with your razor.”

  He fought to stay detached.

  “You pushed him,” the guard repeated Nox’s statement back at him. No credence at all in that voice. “Why did we find you looking for the body?”

  Keep digging, Nox, you’ll hit bottom eventually.

  “To hide it,” Nox said. “I didn’t want to get caught.”

  “You took long enough getting down from the cliff.”

  How do you know that?

  This man wasn’t a guard. He had to be an inquisitor in guard’s clothing. Maybe the others were intelligence officers too.

  “Yes. I am a coward,” Nox said. Stand up front and flap your arms wide enough and hope they don’t look for anyone behind you.

  “We know you are coward,” the inquisitor said, dismissive. “You ran away. You came back to get the body. That won’t save you.”

  “I know.”

  There would be no breaks here. Nox didn’t deserve any. Imperial Inspectors had been through here recently—high-ranking men from the Roman capital world, Palatine.

  The military installations on Rome’s outer colonies like Phoenix had served as secret recruitment centers of Mad Caesar Romulus.

  Apparently the new Caesar was shortening his leash on Romulus’ Legions of the outer worlds.

  Caesar Numa demanded the utmost loyalty from his armed forces.

  Caesar Numa’s agents were hardliners. Whatever happened to Nox would not be simple.

  Legion Persus had to make an example of Nox to show Caesar how hardline it was.

  The inquisitor said, “Do you imagine you’ll get the sword?”

  Nox’s spirits actually lifted for one futile moment. There was honor in a sword. But the inquisitor wasn’t offering.

  Nox lost his sense of detachment. He was firmly, horribly in the here and now. He said, “I would like to. I don’t expect it, no.”

  “You’re not getting it.”

  “Yes, Domni,” Nox acknowledged.

  “In Romulus’ day we knew what to do with the likes of you.”

  In Romulus’ day? That would be wha
t, two years ago? Aye, those were the days.

  “I would feed you to the animals,” said another guard.

  Nox nodded.

  “You are a faithless coward. You ran. Then you turned around and abandoned your brothers. Now you’re here lying to us to save those cowards. How low can you get?”

  I’m finding that out. It’s rather amazing, really. It was like a free fall through broken glass.

  The interrogators were still digging for others. The main inquisitor was trying to trip Nox into betraying his accomplices.

  “I’m not covering for anyone,” Nox blurted. His voice didn’t sound sincere even to his own ears. He sounded guilty as all hell.

  One of the inquisitors saw red.

  Truly. The purple-faced man popped a blood vessel in his right eye. Nox had never faced a gaze more baleful than that angry red-smeared eye.

  “There was no one else,” Nox insisted. “It wasn’t a hazing. It was murder. I was alone. I killed Cinna. I swear.” Oh, how obvious was that?

  The Eye spoke in a strange soft voice, a dare, “You swear?”

  “I do.” Nox nodded down.

  They all turned away.

  One guard gave the Eye a surreptitious gesture and a murmur, “Eye.”

  The man wiped his eye, saw the blood on his fingers. Gave a low snarling mutter, something like, “Sure. Why not?”

  In the next moment a holographic image formed in the dark shed. The floor vanished, became a windy cliff high above a sun-parched flatland. Nox was suddenly looking down on eight young men. The scene was a vulture’s eye view of the Widow’s Edge.

  Or a satellite’s view.

  Video. They had a video from orbit.

  Nox’s despair was complete. They knew. They knew. They stood him up here and let him lie his brains out.

  The holographic video played out. There was Cinna’s leap. The impact. The brothers’ scurrying retreat.

  The image vanished.

  An afterimage of brightness colored the darkness within the shed in red and green splotches.

  The bloody Eye glowered at Nox. “You are not really Roman.”

  Oh, it goes lower still. They were going to throw that at him. Nox was willing to absorb any abuse for what he’d done, but not that. Now he was angry. “I am Roman,” said Nox. His voice had gone to sandpaper.

  “It makes no difference now. Confess. You are really a U.S. mole, aren’t you?”

  Nox hadn’t thought he had any blood left in his face, but he felt it draining away now. Then it returned in a rush of heat, and he roared at the inquistor, “NO! Rome is my mother, my father, my world! I am Roman!” He rocked with his heaving breaths. Regretted his volume.

  The inquisitors ignored the outburst.

  “You have a choice, Yank. You can go home. Or you can stand judgment with your squad.”

  Shock numbed him. It was the last thing he expected.

  They were offering him his life and freedom.

  The hazing wasn’t the huge crime. Causing his brother’s death was fairly huge. But the worst, the unforgivable, was running away and leaving Cinna behind. Brother betrayal was the lowest.

  Nox had turned around to go back to his brother, but only after he’d already made the wrong decision. Rome didn’t want anyone like that in her legions. Especially not under the current scrutiny from the home world. Nox had expected his punishment to be doled out in stellar magnitudes.

  Yet they offered him an out.

  He could go back where he came from.

  Crawl back to his father.

  Not ever.

  They didn’t want him to be Roman.

  Go home.

  He felt light-headed in his wrath. He looked from the Eye to the other men and back.

  His voice shook with indignation. “Domni, I am home.”

  4

  PATRICK’S SLEEPY VOICE sounded mumbly in the dark, “Where you going, babe?”

  “Control room,” Glenn whispered, tucked her shirt into her trousers. “Go back to sleep.”

  Glenn made sure she was awake for the drop to sublight on approach to the Zoen star system.

  Spring Beauty was no Merrimack. She had minimal inertial compensators with which to sidestep Newton’s first law.

  At minimum, any faster-than-light craft’s inertial field kept the ship’s innards from bulleting out through its hull when the ship deviated from a dead-straight line.

  Stouter force fields, like Merrimack’s, could withstand antimatter warheads.

  The Beauty’s force field was adequate to deflect space clutter. It was not designed to stand against space weapons.

  Manny, the pilot, assured Glenn there weren’t going to be any warships where they were going. “We’re in the bloody Outback. Traffic is thin here, even for outer space. This is good coffee. Thanks.”

  Glenn nodded. She slid into the copilot’s seat and cradled her own cup of coffee in her hands.

  The pilot said, “It’s not as if space is choked with LGMs waiting to pounce on us traveling faster than light.”

  “Of course not,” Glenn agreed.

  The pouncing would be within the star system while they traveled at sublight speed.

  And Glenn was not worried about little green men. “Tall, bronze, and arrogant men are more my concern.”

  “Romans?” Manny said, surprised. “You don’t really think there are Romans out here?”

  Glenn tilted her head, neither yes nor no. “Ubiquitous is a Roman word.” She had to assume that Rome knew about the planet Zoe. Zoe was the most Earthlike world ever discovered.

  Always assume Rome knows.

  Glenn had a professional paranoia regarding the Empire. She still had the wartime mind-set of an officer of a space battleship recently at war with the Roman Empire. Two years was too long for a peace to last.

  She watched Manny go through the approach routine. Nothing to do really but monitor the ship’s programmed flight.

  At the star system’s edge, the Beauty’s engine whined, surged to full. Speeding up or slowing down, it took as much power to pass the light barrier either way you went.

  The ship’s engine peaked. Stars appeared in the forward viewport.

  The Beauty’s engine quickly wound back down. Momentum carried her swiftly into the star system.

  A distant yellow sun loomed ahead of them. Steadily shining bright dots that were probably planets appeared above and below it.

  The ship executed a gentle quarter roll. Beauty had entered the system on an oblique. The lazy roll brought her on plane with the local planetary orientation—-a position that made sense to humans accustomed to viewing images of laterally arrayed planetary systems.

  Through the forward view screen, the planet Zoe took center stage.

  Hanging in the star-specked blackness, the world appeared as a hazy blue-white marble, growing larger and larger. With the planet’s yellow sun in the background, Glenn could almost imagine the Spring Beauty had turned around and gone home to Earth. Until she saw the moons.

  As Spring Beauty turned, the two moons passed into view from behind the planet. The pair twisted around each other, as tight as conjoined twins. A hazy dumbbell-shaped halo surrounded both of them as they swapped atmospheres.

  Glenn had been told that the tidal effect between the lunar pair and Zoe was roughly equal to the tidal draw between the Earth and Moon.

  Expedition notes described Zoe as an Earthlike world orbiting in the Goldilocks zone of a singly formed G2V star.

  The notes didn’t do her justice. Zoe was beautiful, glowing blue and green, draped in cotton white.

  “I never get tired of that view,” Manny said.

  They were gazing out the forward view screen, sipping coffee and listening to the quiet stirrings of waking brains behind them within the ship. Then, without prelude, a loud crack! jarred everyone. Splashed coffee over Glenn’s fingers.

  Felt like something struck the ship’s hull.

  Several overlapping voices sounded from
aft, “What was that?”

  Someone—it sounded like Dr. Rose—moved forward to the control room yelling, “Hey! Manny! Fly us around the asteroids.”

  “I didn’t fly us into that,” the pilot said.

  “Then explain how we hit it.” Aaron Rose braced himself in the hatchway.

  “It,” said Manny, “hit us on the beam.”

  “How in the help me mama!” Dr. Rose dropped in a reflexive duck as another crack rang through the hull with a metallic scraping.

  Any spaceship’s forward inertial screen deflected debris from its path. You never hear the forward strikes. This noise came from farther down the fuselage, where the Beauty’s energy field was thin.

  Still another crack banged at the hull. Hard one. Sounded like there should be a dent.

  Sounded like there should be a hole.

  But cabin pressure hadn’t dropped. Not noticeably. Even if there were a slow leak, Glenn would expect a warning signal from the ship’s internal systems.

  Glenn got up from her seat, reached around the pilot, and redistributed the ship’s energy field—such as it was.

  Manny stared at small hands—not his—moving the ship’s controls. “What are you doing?”

  “We’re under attack.” Glenn hip-pushed Manny out of the pilot’s seat.

  With more sense than ego, Manny slid into the copilot’s seat without much resistance.

  Most civilian pilots never needed to redeploy inertial settings. Manny would have learned how, of course, but it was dusty knowledge.

  Manny seemed to recognize expertise when he saw it and deferred to it.

  “Can we jump to FTL?” Manny asked.

  Magical thinking, that. They both knew a jump to FTL with the ship in this condition could turn it inside out.

  Letting the vacuum in, they called it on Merrimack.

  “I think it’s too late for that,” said Glenn. “We’re hurt.”

  Glenn pushed Spring Beauty’s speed up and maneuvered one of her exterior hull cameras outward to pick up the incoming objects.

  The objects had fallen in behind the Beauty, chasing her now.

  They were not asteroids.

  The chasers were more like demon-possessed cannon balls. They looked like miniature Roman killer bots.

  The old Roman killer bots were black orbs that carried antimatter loads. A killer bot would have destroyed the Spring Beauty on impact.