The Ninth Circle

by R. M. Meluch

  “Are we really going to do that?” Pallas asked, uneasy at the thought of drawing and quartering dead bodies.

  “Shouldn’t come to that,” said Nox. In any case, Nox had made the threat. It would fall to him to carry it out. “They already know what we can do.”

  As the appointed hour approached, Leo monitored the designated vector for any sign of a courier missile. The rest of the brothers gathered round Leo’s console in the control room to wait.

  Faunus asked Nox if he was ready to start drawing and quartering.

  “You, maybe,” said Nox.

  “Thar she blows!” Leo sang, surprised. He turned from his console to face his brothers. “They did it. They launched a courier.”

  “The LEN kept their side of the deal,” said Galeo. Truly had not expected that.

  “As far as we know,” Orissus added significantly. “We don’t really know what’s in the courier.”

  “The mass is right for gold,” said Leo.

  “But it could be lead,” said Orissus. “The mass is similar.”

  “Could be fruitcake for that matter,” said Faunus.

  “We’ll never know what it is,” said Nox. “We’re not picking up the ransom. Ever. Only question now is do we park the police ship and send the LEN the coordinates to find it, or do we blow it up.”

  The question felt suddenly weighty. Faunus dodged it. Asked Nox, “You’re not going to draw and quarter?”

  “No, but you may if you want,” said Nox. “Oh, my brothers, what are we doing here? Do we give up our dead or not?”

  “We vote,” said Nicanor.

  Orissus argued for no. “We’ll look soft.”

  “We need to decide if we’re to be crazed berserkers beyond the pale, or do we want to be a strong enemy who keeps our word,” said Nicanor.

  “We’re pirates,” said Faunus. “We don’t have a word.”

  Nox left the control room. He came back lugging a very large wheel-made terra cotta jar. “Enough debate.”

  He set the jar down on the deck. The brothers formed a ragged circle around it. Some of them guessed what Nox was about.

  “It’s a yes no question,” Nox said. “Your decision and your reasons are your own. Just vote.” He passed out lots.

  The lots were the ancient kind, smooth black and white stones, which Nox had taken from the bottom of a glass flower vase in the ambassador’s bedchamber.

  “A yes vote means we give up the dead. A no vote, we do something else with them. Drop a white stone into the jar for yes, a black stone for no. I gave you each a bunch of stones, so no one will know your vote by what color stones you have left behind.”

  Nox went first. He lowered his fist into the neck of the jar. Let drop the first stone. It clinked against the ceramic base. He moved back and sat cross-legged on the deck.

  Nicanor moved forward next, dropped his stone. Fell back into the circle.

  Then Faunus.

  Leo.

  Pallas.

  Galeo.

  Orissus.

  A strange silence followed, everyone just watching the jar that held their answer.

  “That’s all of us,” said Leo, waiting for someone else to move.

  Nicanor stepped in. He hefted up the jar and spilled out the stones.

  Winged creatures rose from the trees with sharp cries.

  Monkey squirrels jumped branch to branch in screeching retreat. Glenn heard their chittering calls receding deeper and deeper into the forest.

  Spiderwings Glenn hadn’t even known were there fluttered aloft and wheeled away in a swarm. Something startling was coming this way.

  In the meadow, foxes were dancing with Patrick. The foxes didn’t mind the alarms. Foxes existed at the top of the food chain, too big for most predators, too smart for the others.

  Glenn and some young foxes—Princess, Banshee, and Cosmo—ventured toward the calls to check out what set off the treefolk.

  The foxes’ noses were going like bloodhounds but seemed to be detecting nothing at all. They were confounded by that.

  At the first sight of strange whiteness in the dense greenery the foxes hunkered down among clumps of ferns.

  Glenn stood up. Her shoulders bowed. The foxes observed her lack of fear, and they relaxed too. They stood up with her, sniffing, still smelling nothing.

  The white strangenesses were LEN scientists, kitted in full body condoms. They looked wrong and alien in their exo-suits. They’d come equipped with rebreathers and all. No wonder the foxes were confused. Foxes lived by their noses. They could see the xenos, hear them, but otherwise the xenos might not even be here.

  Two white figures advanced. They seized Glenn by her upper arms.

  Princess dropped into a bent-leg starting position, seeming unsure if this were a game. The boy foxes snarled from all fours.

  Glenn shook off her captors’ hands, indignant. “I beg your pardon.” She knew Dr. Maarstan and Dr. Szaszy from the Spring Beauty.

  The xenos let go. Probably because they had upset the foxes, not because Glenn told them to.

  Princess, Banshee, and Cosmo hummed, quizzical, their heads tilting the way they did when very confused.

  A tall figure moved forward, forceful. Director Izrael Benet. Boomed like a truant officer to a child, “What do you think you’re—” His eyes strayed up toward the meadow. He caught sight of Patrick between the trees. Izrael Benet exploded. “What is he doing!”

  Glenn turned to see what Patrick was doing. “He’s, um.” No way out of this. “Teaching the foxes to trot.”

  The older female, Mama-san, stood with one forepaw on Patrick’s shoulder, the other forepaw in Patrick’s hand as Patrick tried to get her to execute a four-count box step.

  “That is outrageous!”

  “I know,” said Glenn. “They don’t really care for it. They like the polka much better, but Patrick just couldn’t resist.”

  Director Benet bellowed to the white-suited xenos behind him, “Get her out of here.” And he stalked out onto the meadow waving and roaring at Patrick: “Get away from the natives!”

  Glenn watched Benet corral her husband.

  Good thing he hadn’t seen the bunny hop lesson.

  As the xenos marched Glenn and Patrick away, Princess and Cosmo cavorted alongside for a while, getting some clue that this was not friendly. They held their tails straight up and bristling.

  Banshee brought a rubbery green fruit in his mouth like a dog, offering it hopefully first to Glenn then to Patrick. Thought if he played by the rules, they wouldn’t leave him.

  Patrick hummed something.

  The three foxes sat down and watched them go.

  Glenn looked back over her shoulder to see bewildered faces and doleful eyes, Banshee with the ball still in his mouth.

  Stones clattered onto the pirate ship deck.

  Two black pebbles stood out. The rest were white.

  “The vote is yes,” said Nicanor. “Return the dead.”

  The result brought relieved sighs from most of them and an alarmed, “Wait!”

  The brothers looked to Nox, who had shouted.

  “There are too many stones here!” Nox sounded almost panicked. His palm shook as it moved across the stones to separate them. Eight. There were eight stones and seven brothers.

  Nicanor said, “Who voted twice?”

  Eyes met eyes around the circle.

  Galeo lifted his forefinger, a confession. “I voted both ways. It’s kind of an abstention.”

  “Damn, Galeo! You scared me,” said Nox, breathing too hard.

  “What?” Galeo shrugged. “I just cancelled myself out.”

  “I thought Cinna was here!”

  “Are you hearing telltale hearts, Nox?” Orissus said.

  Nox held his hand over his own hammering heart. “Sometimes.”

  Pallas said, “Before we give the LEN these coordinates, we should leave a mark on our kill.”

  “You want to sign our work?” said Faunus.


  “Aye.”

  “Sign it how? Who are we?”

  Pallas boarded the police ship 2186 and blotted blood in a pattern of spots on the deck.

  Faunus looked over Pallas’ shoulder as he daubed the spots. “What’s that supposed to be?”

  “Leopard spots.”

  “Looks more like jaguar,” said Leo, who knew something about cats.

  Pallas paused, his brow knotted up hard. “What?”

  “Jaguars have the dot in the middle. Leopard spots shouldn’t have a dot in the middle,” Leo said.

  “I dripped!” said Pallas.

  “Take it out,” said Leo.

  “Well here, you do it, Michelangelo,” said Pallas who was feeling nauseated anyway. It hadn’t been easy extracting enough blood from the dead to paint with, and the stuff was not easy to work with. He started to think drawing and quartering would have been easier. Pallas pushed the bloody brush at Leo, glad to be rid of it.

  Leo took over spotting the deck. The others watched. Leo daubed tight circles of five or six blots—with no dot in the middle—until the deck took on a distinctly leopardish look.

  The deck had been a buff color. The blood was turning dark.

  Faunus stood back. Puzzled. Vexed. He’d missed something. First Nox named the damned ship Bagheera, and now they’d broken out in spots. Faunus didn’t want to ask the question in case the answer was obvious, but he had to know, “How did our mascot get to be a leopard?”

  “It’s not a mascot,” said Nicanor. “It’s more like an avatar.”

  Nox said, “The leopard guards the lowest rings of the Inferno.”

  They returned to their Xerxes and sent a message to the LEN: “You may approach these coordinates to collect the remains. Do not mistake this for mercy. We have none.”

  And they let themselves be seen. For the briefest instant they took down the Xerxes’ stealth system, and flashed an image bright and deadly:

  Their colors on the hull, yellow with black spots for the leopard who guarded their domain.

  Their flag, the Jolly Roger.

  Their standard, a bastardized travesty of a Roman standard. Not an eagle. Theirs was a blood red metal circle with the Roman numeral set inside it.

  Their motto underneath it was written in blood, Lasciate ogne speranza . Abandon all hope.

  So all would know who they were.

  The Ninth Circle of Hell.

  PART TWO

  Patterns of Chaos

  15

  “YOU JUST NEED TO INTERFERE, don’t you,” Director

  Benet spoke over Glenn’s head. “It’s a compulsion with your kind, isn’t it.”

  They weren’t questions, so Glenn didn’t answer. She wasn’t feeling well.

  Benet turned on Patrick with less rancor, more disappointment. “You were not supposed to talk to the aliens.”

  “Then why did you bring a xenolinguist to study the language?” Glenn said. She sneezed.

  Patrick murmured aside to her, “I’m supposed to spy on them.”

  “The term is ‘observe,’” Benet said tightly.

  Glenn’s stomach cramped. She retched. She hadn’t eaten for a while so nothing came up.

  “Perfect. Just perfect,” Benet said. “You brought that on yourself.”

  Patrick hummed something at Director Benet. A fox word. It didn’t sound kindly.

  Glenn shut her eyes. Dizzy. She felt Patrick’s arm wrap around her back, his other arm slip behind her knees. And she was rising.

  A couple weeks among the foxes, hiking, dancing, playing ball, had made Patrick stronger than he’d ever been on board Merrimack. Patrick carried her to the physician’s hut.

  The camp physician, Dr. Cecil, was surprised to have a patient. He usually only monitored his colleagues’ blood pressure and bone density and treated the odd broken toe or insectoid sting and sunburn.

  Patrick asked the physician, “How can this happen? How could Glenn catch a bug on an alien planet?”

  “She can’t,” said Dr. Cecil. He tucked an intradermal blood analyzer into the crook of Glenn’s elbow and made her hold it there. “Alien microbes can’t infect us. If she ingested a microbe, the microbe itself is nothing. But these symptoms may be from a toxin produced by a microbe.”

  Cecil retrieved the analyzer from Glenn’s arm. Reported, “It’s not a toxin.”

  “I don’t care what it is,” said Glenn, curled up on the table. “Can you treat it? I’m inside-out here.”

  Cecil’s face appeared tight, his mouth a straight line. His eyes flickered between her and Patrick, as if reluctant to speak in front of her. Finally he directed his answer to Patrick, “I can’t treat hypochondria.”

  Patrick sounded pissed. “My wife is the farthest thing from a hypochondriac you will ever meet.”

  Dr. Cecil looked down on Glenn, “Obviously you ate something your body can’t process. You shall just need to wait it out.”

  “This is nothing we ate,” said Patrick. “She caught something.”

  “Caught?” said Cecil, his thin brows up, one corner of his mouth higher than the other.

  “A virus,” said Patrick. “You know. A germ.”

  Cecil moved his head side to side in a giant no. “Can’t. Can’t happen.”

  “Did!” said Patrick. “She’s calling Yul.”

  “She is drunk.”

  “No, she is not,” Glenn croaked.

  “Histamine reaction.” The suggestion sounded from the adjoining room. Cecil’s colleague, Dr. Wynans appeared in the doorway.

  “Smell her breath,” Patrick told Wynans.

  Just to humor him, Dr. Cecil leaned in for a sniff. His head jerked back. He had to admit, “It almost smells bacterial.”

  Dr. Wynans did not risk a whiff for himself. He told Glenn, “It’s most likely an overgrowth of your natural bodily flora.”

  Dr. Cecil had a clinical argument against that idea. He and Wynans withdrew from the examination room, debating the matter.

  Glenn thought they were going to do research or consult with someone else.

  They went to lunch.

  Glenn was waiting outside the dining hut with a data bubble when Doctors Cecil and Wynans came out, their teeth slightly darkened from blueberry cobbler.

  “Here.” Glenn slapped the data bubble into Dr. Cecil’s hand. She coughed into the crook of her arm, though she really wanted to spew in his face. “I did my own analysis.”

  Cecil looked puzzled at the thing in his palm. He held his hand out quite far for someone so certain that Glenn was not contagious. “How exactly did you ‘run your own analysis?’”

  “I hawked on a specimen slip and asked the medical diagnostic analyzer to screen for microbes. How else do you run an analysis?”

  Dr. Cecil let the data bubble drop to the ground. “When you let a monkey crank the controls of a sensitive sophisticated piece of equipment, this is what you get. SISO. You put alien genetics in there, you are going to get skat.”

  Patrick stooped, retrieved the data bubble. He activated it and expanded the report in the air before them. “This looks awfully coherent for skat. It says she has a bacterium of unknown taxonomy,” Patrick said. He looked pale.

  Dr. Cecil chose not to look at the enlarged report hanging in the air. “The analyzer doesn’t know what it’s saying. When a computer program doesn’t find a referent, it will grab the last coherent thing it had in its machine brain and give you that. Errors fall down.”

  His colleague, Dr. Wynans, examined the results with more interest. He had to take hold of Patrick’s wrist to make him hold the bubble still so he could read the image quivering in the air. “No, Cecil. This is weird.”

  “It is alien,” said Dr. Cecil. “Naturally it is ‘weird.’”

  “The report says ‘unknown taxonomy,’ not just ‘unknown,’” said Wynans. “This implies a terrestrial organism.”

  “There you are,” said Cecil. “She didn’t pick it up here.”

  Glenn had dropped in
to a crouch. Her voice was hoarse. “I don’t care where it came from! What’s the treatment?”

  Dr. Wynans beckoned her to the medical hut. Patrick helped her walk. His hands felt clammy.

  Wynans logged the new bacterium into the data bank and told Dr. Cecil that he was taking naming rights. “Unless you insist it’s yours, Cecil?”

  “No. Go ahead,” said Dr. Cecil. “Please. It probably has a Roman name already. After all, Rome created it.”

  Wynans stepped back from his console, surprised, concerned. “You don’t really think so?” said Wynans. “Germ warfare is against international convention.”

  “When has convention ever stopped Rome?” said Cecil. “Romans love to tinker with what should be left alone. Remember, Rome created patterners.”

  A patterner was a monstrous creation of Frankensteinian proportion. A patterner was a human/machine interface endowed with an inhuman ability to synthesize vast amounts of data of disparate types. The ability came at a cost. Great cost to the individual patterner. A great cost to the many failures it took to create one that survived and functioned.

  “Even Rome stopped making patterners,” said Wynans.

  “Only because patterners were loose cannons,” said Cecil. “Not because the process was unethical, unconscionable, and downright macabre.”

  Wynans dismissed the suggestion that Glenn’s sickness was a Roman invention. “More likely this microbe is actually an innocuous terrestrial bacterium that has mutated under the alien sun. The Cordillera protocol can devise a treatment in no time.”

  “That’s good,” said Patrick, just before he heaved up a bacterial colony onto Dr. Cecil’s workstation.

  The brothers had left the Phoenix system far behind them. Bagheera sped toward another star system, a Chinese colonial world, to strike terror again.

  For now they relaxed on a virtual beach. Bagheera’s antechamber had transformed itself into a deserted seashore at sunset. The ship’s walls had vanished into a wide horizon. A yellow sun sank into the sea, leaving velvet blue darkness behind it. The brothers felt as much as heard the sound of open sky and open water. Gently lapping waves ridged the sand. A slight breeze carried the smell of salt air and exotic flowers. Palm trees nodded behind them.